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What does any of this have to do with 192khz vs 48 and 24 bit vs 16 bit mastering and reproduction? You completely ignore everything relevant stated about the

What does any of this have to do with 192khz vs 48 and 24 bit vs 16 bit mastering and reproduction? You completely ignore everything relevant stated about the psychoacoustic performance of adults. > high-frequency hints Unless you’re 10 years old I’ll assume the upper frequency range of your hearing is no more than 22 kHz and that is pushing it. Hearing above 16 kHz becomes heavily attenuated in adulthood. When people talk high frequency they really mean stuff in the 2 to 6 kHz range. In any event 48 kHz sampling for reproduction/storage is beyond plenty. > Just a good amp, a pair of good speakers, and a well mastered album. That's all. And ignore room acoustics.. sure that doesn’t sell speakers and amps. It’s much easier to say use this expensive power cord which has no effect on anything then make people have to think about engineering.

bayindirh 4y ago
The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject, but it’s same for every sense. Both eyes and ears have practical limits on what it hears, but even with that limits, brain can distinguish details so small, we have no ways to describe them. Some people will describe higher bitrate, higher sampling rate sound to be smoother, even if they can’t tell what is the difference. Similarly, some people will describe same higher bandwidth signal to be more airy or open. Hearing tests do not quantify these details. A solid example is Foo Fighters’ album, Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, and doesn’t fatigue the ears. Maybe you can point a difference with a spectrogram, but the difference can be highlighted by your ears and brain in much more detailed manner. Another example is how people listen to higher bandwidth music. People are more engaged with higher quality, higher bandwidth sound. They concentrate for longer periods and listen more intently. Again, the brain can notice something or hearing tests can’t quantify. Lastly, people find images taken by cameras with Foveon sensors more appealing from color perspective, because the color resolution is much higher. While Bayer sensors’ color reproduction is both true and high resolution, brain can detect higher color resolution with ease. All senses are trained on real world over the decades, and know how to distinguish between real and fake. So, it’s no surprise that brain can detect things which we can’t put our finger on squarely. My rooms are not acoustically special. They are pretty standard, if not mundane. The equipment I use is high end, vintage stuff; but they are not exotics. Cabling is done per manuals of components. The only power conditioning I have is a surge protector which claims to have line noise filtering, but this is not why I got it. However, all the qualities I discussed here is audible on that set. The interesting part is, I’m using the same set for 30 years, and I know its sound character like my name. I can hear the same details and get the same atmosphere when I listen to the same albums (mostly CDs), so brain can reconstruct something we can’t describe from how sound interacts with both air and our ears. Lastly, I can still easily hear switch mode power supply noise, without even trying.
- riceart 4y ago
  > The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject, Non sequitur. These harmonics of interest are still all below 24 kHz. > Hearing tests do not quantify these details. A-B testing doesn’t have to quantify anything to prove that these differences are imperceptible and you are mainly cueing off suggestion. 24/192 might make you feel better and that is fine, but someone could switch it surreptitiously and you would quite likely never know the difference. I’ve heard all the dumb bullshit why A-B testing doesn’t work (ironically often from idiots that will also proclaim to “trust the science” on popular topics including everything from COVID vaccines, medicine and global warming - but they will reject straightforward scientific experimentation). Somehow when their sacred ox of golden ears is gored, science is useless. > Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, Nobody claimed there’s no differences in recording and mastering - but that these differences exist well within the typical limits of human hearing - far below 24 kHz and far far above the noise floor. This is especially the case if you can hear it on vinyl since the SNR of vinyl is a joke compared to 16 bit reproduction - it’s more like 10-11 bits - this is a fundamental limitation of the medium. Maybe someone else can take that information and learn something, but I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll sway you from your woo of course.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    Recording and mastering on analog equipment can have a HUGE impact on the recording - and it has nothing to do with quality, bitrate, frequency and all that stuff. It's much simpler than that - it's not likely to be "on-grid." Modern music is tracked and mixed in a DAW (digital audio workstation). In that DAW you specify the BPM. Artists and producers work hard to keep the music exactly in that BPM. The result is the music sounds dead and lifeless - it can't "breathe." They even have tools that can take performances that were tracked and align them to the beat (they do this for guitars, drums, pretty much everything). Rick Beato did a video on this subject and chose Led Zeppelin and remastered some tracks to align to the grid and played the result. It went from sounding good to sounding awful. Here's a link - https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU. Note - there's nothing wrong with digital recording and playback. They're great, in fact they're better than anything we've ever had. The problem is computers make it tempting to make everything "perfect" and it's the pursuit of this perfection that's destroying the soul of music.

bayindirh 4y ago

The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject, but it’s same for every sense. Both eyes and ears have practical limits on what it hears, but even with that limits, brain can distinguish details so small, we have no ways to describe them. Some people will describe higher bitrate, higher sampling rate sound to be smoother, even if they can’t tell what is the difference. Similarly, some people will describe same higher bandwidth signal to be more airy or open. Hearing tests do not quantify these details. A solid example is Foo Fighters’ album, Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, and doesn’t fatigue the ears. Maybe you can point a difference with a spectrogram, but the difference can be highlighted by your ears and brain in much more detailed manner. Another example is how people listen to higher bandwidth music. People are more engaged with higher quality, higher bandwidth sound. They concentrate for longer periods and listen more intently. Again, the brain can notice something or hearing tests can’t quantify. Lastly, people find images taken by cameras with Foveon sensors more appealing from color perspective, because the color resolution is much higher. While Bayer sensors’ color reproduction is both true and high resolution, brain can detect higher color resolution with ease. All senses are trained on real world over the decades, and know how to distinguish between real and fake. So, it’s no surprise that brain can detect things which we can’t put our finger on squarely. My rooms are not acoustically special. They are pretty standard, if not mundane. The equipment I use is high end, vintage stuff; but they are not exotics. Cabling is done per manuals of components. The only power conditioning I have is a surge protector which claims to have line noise filtering, but this is not why I got it. However, all the qualities I discussed here is audible on that set. The interesting part is, I’m using the same set for 30 years, and I know its sound character like my name. I can hear the same details and get the same atmosphere when I listen to the same albums (mostly CDs), so brain can reconstruct something we can’t describe from how sound interacts with both air and our ears. Lastly, I can still easily hear switch mode power supply noise, without even trying.

riceart 4y ago
> The interaction of harmonics and how it affects sound perception is a highly debated subject, Non sequitur. These harmonics of interest are still all below 24 kHz. > Hearing tests do not quantify these details. A-B testing doesn’t have to quantify anything to prove that these differences are imperceptible and you are mainly cueing off suggestion. 24/192 might make you feel better and that is fine, but someone could switch it surreptitiously and you would quite likely never know the difference. I’ve heard all the dumb bullshit why A-B testing doesn’t work (ironically often from idiots that will also proclaim to “trust the science” on popular topics including everything from COVID vaccines, medicine and global warming - but they will reject straightforward scientific experimentation). Somehow when their sacred ox of golden ears is gored, science is useless. > Wasting Light. Recorded and mastered on analog equipment, the album has sound qualities hard to describe. Yet it feels full, satisfying to listen, Nobody claimed there’s no differences in recording and mastering - but that these differences exist well within the typical limits of human hearing - far below 24 kHz and far far above the noise floor. This is especially the case if you can hear it on vinyl since the SNR of vinyl is a joke compared to 16 bit reproduction - it’s more like 10-11 bits - this is a fundamental limitation of the medium. Maybe someone else can take that information and learn something, but I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll sway you from your woo of course.
- taylodl 4y ago
  Recording and mastering on analog equipment can have a HUGE impact on the recording - and it has nothing to do with quality, bitrate, frequency and all that stuff. It's much simpler than that - it's not likely to be "on-grid." Modern music is tracked and mixed in a DAW (digital audio workstation). In that DAW you specify the BPM. Artists and producers work hard to keep the music exactly in that BPM. The result is the music sounds dead and lifeless - it can't "breathe." They even have tools that can take performances that were tracked and align them to the beat (they do this for guitars, drums, pretty much everything). Rick Beato did a video on this subject and chose Led Zeppelin and remastered some tracks to align to the grid and played the result. It went from sounding good to sounding awful. Here's a link - https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU https://youtu.be/hT4fFolyZYU. Note - there's nothing wrong with digital recording and playback. They're great, in fact they're better than anything we've ever had. The problem is computers make it tempting to make everything "perfect" and it's the pursuit of this perfection that's destroying the soul of music.