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People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or

People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or totally white. That's a complete dynamic range. But it's the in-between shades that require more bits to specify. It's the same with audio. It's not how soft or how loud a recording can get. It's the subtle shades of variation. 16 bits is pretty good, but not as good as 24 bits. You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. You may not experience it as "stair-stepping," but there's an added degree of realism that more bits can confer. And similarly about frequency range. Any audio system or media has more linear reproduction in the middle part of its range. So if you design a system that exceeds the range of human hearing, you'll get more linearity within the audible part of that range.

bfgoodrich 4y ago
apohn 4y ago
> You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in the headphone audiophile community and people were always using the shimmer of a cymbal as how they could tell the difference between MP3s and Lossless, Analog vs Digital, CD vs SACD or whatever. Then they'd do a blind test using Foobar2000 and start saying the whole blind testing methodology is flawed because surely they can hear the difference under normal listening conditions with their $1000 headphone connected to their $3000 amp using their $2000 DAC. My favorite quote was from somebody who said "Nobody in this community cares about music. They only care about their equipment."
- allears 4y ago
  I'm a recording engineer, and I can tell you that there definitely is such a thing as high quality audio. Certainly there are people who believe in snake oil and like to parade their ignorance as though it were knowledge. But if you bother to study the science of audio, read trade magazines, or hang out with engineers and studio owners, you will find that just quoting frequency range or dynamic range, or even noise floor, is not enough to specify an excellent audio signal. And if you think CD audio is as good as it gets, and nobody can tell the difference between that and a studio master tape, for instance, you are dismissing the expertise of the people who have studied and worked to make the recordings you love.
  - Kirby64 4y ago
    The reasons for higher quality audio (24/32-bit data, higher frequency, etc) have value in the mastering process. For recording, yes there is value in it. It gives you freedom to adjust your recording without running out of headroom. For listening, no. Find me a double-blind test where 16-bit 48 or 44.1 kHz audio compares poorly to 24-bit 192 kHz audio. You won't find it. You'll find PLENTY of people claiming they can tell a difference, but it's just unfounded claims.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      I wonder if there's some real-world "resonance" we're ignoring. I could imagine an accurate statement like "the converted signal out of the DAC never diverges more than 0.005% from the original input", but could some aspects of that .005% produce some outsized weight when fed through a real audio system? I could imagine circuits that "rang" if given something that looks a little too square-wavey or hitting non-linear spots on the speaker's response curve differently. It would be interesting to do some sort of A/B/C/D testing-- analog and digital, on two different audio systems, for example, to see if some systems are more subject to that.
      - apohn 4y ago
        So don't take this personally, but comments like yours are one of the major reasons I refuse to participate in any audiophile communities. There's always a hypothetical edge case for some audiophiles to claim that what they hear is possible. And no matter how much blind testing, research, or engineering is done, this hypothetical edge case means that something has not been proven. It's both pointless and exhausting to discuss anything with these people because the end result is always that the possibility that an edge case exists means you can't claim something is BS. Imagine somebody claimed that people can fly by flapping their arms. You say this is nonsense, but they said you have to prove it. So you ask 10 people to try to fly by flapping their hands and they cannot. This is not enough proof for them. So now you ask 1000 people to try it. Then the person claims maybe people in your country cannot fly this way, but in other countries they might be able to. So you go to 10 countries and ask 1000 people to try. Now the claim is that you did not test enough people who went to the gym every day and you should have asked the strongest people to fly. When nobody from this group can fly, maybe you should test the lightest people with light bones. This keeps going forever because there is always yet another edge case. Welcome to Audiophilia.
mav88 4y ago
16-bit 44kHz is fine for playback and stair stepping does not exist: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  That article gets handed back and forth a lot. It's complicated. Real digital transmission systems like SPDIF, real-world clocks, real-world DACs are all imperfect. For real-world situations, sometimes a higher sample rate can actually provide benefit, even if by nyquist-shannon it shouldn't.
NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
No. A CD audio recording can contain literally all the information in the audio spectrum with enough dynamic range to capture human breathing and a jet flyover simultaneously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor...
- Sporktacular 4y ago
  You are not understanding his point. Linear PCM systems encode quiet parts of music with a lower signal to noise level than louder parts. So by over-engineering the bit depth, you keep the quantisation noise further from perceptibility than without it. I think everyone gets sampling theory by now, your response was to an audio engineer.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    But with typical production flow for a CD, you don't really have any classic quantization noise because you dither (probably with noise shaping) during downsampling to 16 bit; the effect is a perceptually-weighted 120dB dynamic range. It doesn't matter that the poster is an audio engineer: there is simply no good science or objective evidence that people can hear the difference between well-recorded music played back with 24 vs. 16 bit media.
    - Sporktacular 4y ago
      It does matter in the sense you are referring to basic sampling theory that anyone with 30 minutes to spare could learn, but quoting that to someone who's job literally depends on understanding it. You can assume he gets it and is making a point with that in mind.
Kirby64 4y ago
I don't think they are. Dynamic range is easily quantifiable and vinyl has worse dynamic range, full stop, compared to CDs. Anyone claiming otherwise does not know how to measure dynamic range. Likewise for bits, there is very little evidence (and, in fact, lots of evidence to the contrary) that you can detect the difference between a 24-bit and a 16-bit recording, assuming they're mastered the same way.
WiseWeasel 4y ago
1 bit color encoding is black and white (represented by 0 or 1). 8 bits can encode 256 colors (2^8).
kalleboo 4y ago
Speakers can't move at the precision and speed required for stair-stepping to be a real thing.

bfgoodrich 4y ago

apohn 4y ago

> You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in the headphone audiophile community and people were always using the shimmer of a cymbal as how they could tell the difference between MP3s and Lossless, Analog vs Digital, CD vs SACD or whatever. Then they'd do a blind test using Foobar2000 and start saying the whole blind testing methodology is flawed because surely they can hear the difference under normal listening conditions with their $1000 headphone connected to their $3000 amp using their $2000 DAC. My favorite quote was from somebody who said "Nobody in this community cares about music. They only care about their equipment."

allears 4y ago
I'm a recording engineer, and I can tell you that there definitely is such a thing as high quality audio. Certainly there are people who believe in snake oil and like to parade their ignorance as though it were knowledge. But if you bother to study the science of audio, read trade magazines, or hang out with engineers and studio owners, you will find that just quoting frequency range or dynamic range, or even noise floor, is not enough to specify an excellent audio signal. And if you think CD audio is as good as it gets, and nobody can tell the difference between that and a studio master tape, for instance, you are dismissing the expertise of the people who have studied and worked to make the recordings you love.
- Kirby64 4y ago
  The reasons for higher quality audio (24/32-bit data, higher frequency, etc) have value in the mastering process. For recording, yes there is value in it. It gives you freedom to adjust your recording without running out of headroom. For listening, no. Find me a double-blind test where 16-bit 48 or 44.1 kHz audio compares poorly to 24-bit 192 kHz audio. You won't find it. You'll find PLENTY of people claiming they can tell a difference, but it's just unfounded claims.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I wonder if there's some real-world "resonance" we're ignoring. I could imagine an accurate statement like "the converted signal out of the DAC never diverges more than 0.005% from the original input", but could some aspects of that .005% produce some outsized weight when fed through a real audio system? I could imagine circuits that "rang" if given something that looks a little too square-wavey or hitting non-linear spots on the speaker's response curve differently. It would be interesting to do some sort of A/B/C/D testing-- analog and digital, on two different audio systems, for example, to see if some systems are more subject to that.
    - apohn 4y ago
      So don't take this personally, but comments like yours are one of the major reasons I refuse to participate in any audiophile communities. There's always a hypothetical edge case for some audiophiles to claim that what they hear is possible. And no matter how much blind testing, research, or engineering is done, this hypothetical edge case means that something has not been proven. It's both pointless and exhausting to discuss anything with these people because the end result is always that the possibility that an edge case exists means you can't claim something is BS. Imagine somebody claimed that people can fly by flapping their arms. You say this is nonsense, but they said you have to prove it. So you ask 10 people to try to fly by flapping their hands and they cannot. This is not enough proof for them. So now you ask 1000 people to try it. Then the person claims maybe people in your country cannot fly this way, but in other countries they might be able to. So you go to 10 countries and ask 1000 people to try. Now the claim is that you did not test enough people who went to the gym every day and you should have asked the strongest people to fly. When nobody from this group can fly, maybe you should test the lightest people with light bones. This keeps going forever because there is always yet another edge case. Welcome to Audiophilia.

mav88 4y ago

16-bit 44kHz is fine for playback and stair stepping does not exist: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Night_Thastus 4y ago
That article gets handed back and forth a lot. It's complicated. Real digital transmission systems like SPDIF, real-world clocks, real-world DACs are all imperfect. For real-world situations, sometimes a higher sample rate can actually provide benefit, even if by nyquist-shannon it shouldn't.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago

No. A CD audio recording can contain literally all the information in the audio spectrum with enough dynamic range to capture human breathing and a jet flyover simultaneously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor...

Sporktacular 4y ago
You are not understanding his point. Linear PCM systems encode quiet parts of music with a lower signal to noise level than louder parts. So by over-engineering the bit depth, you keep the quantisation noise further from perceptibility than without it. I think everyone gets sampling theory by now, your response was to an audio engineer.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  But with typical production flow for a CD, you don't really have any classic quantization noise because you dither (probably with noise shaping) during downsampling to 16 bit; the effect is a perceptually-weighted 120dB dynamic range. It doesn't matter that the poster is an audio engineer: there is simply no good science or objective evidence that people can hear the difference between well-recorded music played back with 24 vs. 16 bit media.
  - Sporktacular 4y ago
    It does matter in the sense you are referring to basic sampling theory that anyone with 30 minutes to spare could learn, but quoting that to someone who's job literally depends on understanding it. You can assume he gets it and is making a point with that in mind.

Kirby64 4y ago

I don't think they are. Dynamic range is easily quantifiable and vinyl has worse dynamic range, full stop, compared to CDs. Anyone claiming otherwise does not know how to measure dynamic range. Likewise for bits, there is very little evidence (and, in fact, lots of evidence to the contrary) that you can detect the difference between a 24-bit and a 16-bit recording, assuming they're mastered the same way.

WiseWeasel 4y ago

1 bit color encoding is black and white (represented by 0 or 1). 8 bits can encode 256 colors (2^8).

kalleboo 4y ago

Speakers can't move at the precision and speed required for stair-stepping to be a real thing.