7 ms·

When is the music industry going to actively promote (and select) a high definition music format? Like, Blu-Ray for audio-only?

cowsaysoink 14y ago
Is there a problem with the current format lacking definition? I thought the major factor for listening quality was listening equipment rather than the actual format (as the quality on cds is rather good).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jjjeffrey 14y ago
  TFA from this past submission was the thing that finally persuaded me to believe that CD quality audio is all you need for optimal stereophonic listening. //news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310
dsk2012 14y ago
Never. First, CD audio quality is good enough. Second, the market is in transition (already transitioned?) to a pure digital format, distributed either via flat files (e.g. mp3s), or via SaaS streaming services. Similarly, Blu-ray is probably the last physical format for movies.
- runjake 14y ago
  NPR mentioned this morning that digital music download sales far exceed physical media music sales already. This might explain there being virtually no record stores around anymore.
  - squarecat 14y ago
    Heard that story this morning: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-cd-at-30-is-feeling-its-age http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-... Made me consider stockpiling a supply of CD players to gouge future hipsters with...
  - razzmataz 14y ago
    It's not 'far exceed' - last year was the first that digital sales exceeded CD sales, by something less than a percentage point. Still, it's nothing to sneeze at.
- macchina 14y ago
  Well there is still an option for so called high definition digital downloads. Although MP3 audio quality is good enough, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of companies marketing "high frequency" "lossless" recordings at a premium price.
zandorg 14y ago
It already exists. It's called SACD.
- sk5t 14y ago
  The primarily advantage of SACD is that the recording has probably been remastered at the proper loudness to suit the tastes of SACD's audience--not for uniformly high levels of noise pollution on FM radio and its ilk.
stan_rogers 14y ago
There were three and a lot of noise around them at the time: HDCD; DVD-A; and SACD. A very small handful of audiophiles cared, nobody else was paying enough attention to hear the difference. (For the people who are going to bring up Nyquist, that is true of the frequency domain, but not of the time domain, and differences in timing affect spatial resolution more audibly than they do timbre.) Really, it only matters to people for whom listening to music is an activity unto itself, and we're a really small group. You can still get good players, but the catalog of available media is a few Sony-owned classics in SACD and the odd bit of audiophile porn (you know, where the recording is amazing, but the actual performance wasn't really worth the bother of recording it).
- thirdhaf 14y ago
  Assuming 44.1kHz sampling rate the smallest path length difference between the ears is approximately 6.8mm. This corresponds to 2.3 degrees (with sounds source at infinity). Humans can place sounds with about 3 degrees of resolution so unless you have some citations I am seriously skeptical about the claim that higher sampling frequencies gives you anything whatsoever.
  - stan_rogers 14y ago
    44.1KHz is not the output frequency; it's the sampling frequency from which an unambiguous 20KHz signal (of sufficient amplitude) can be reconstructed. So your calculation needs to take into account that the maximum peak resolution is 20Khz (and that 16 bits may not have sufficient amplitude sampling resolution to accurately interpolate the waveform peaks even if their frequency -- their spacing rather than their position in time -- can be reconstructed unambiguously).
    - thirdhaf 14y ago
      Completely agreed about 44.1kHz being a sampling rate. To make the rest of the numbers nicer I'm going to pretend we're talking about 40kHz sampling for the rest of this comment. It's clear that you can't distinguish between a 0-degree phase shifted 20kHz signal and a 0-degree phase shifted 60.0kHz signal (I thought we weren't going to talk about Nyquist here). However by the same token you CAN represent a 90-degree phase shifted 20kHz just fine. By way of example consider the bit stream (I'm also pretending 1-bit sampling for now) [0 1 0 1 0 1] which in this format represents a 20kHz signal. It's pretty obvious that we can represent the 90-degree phase shifted signal as [1 0 1 0 1 0] and there's nothing in the input stage that stops the original source from creating this particular type of signal. In fact we can unambiguously represent ANY phase shift in the same fashion, but as you point out then we start arguing about whether your sample has enough precision to unambiguously represent the input. With a 90-degree shift (corresponding to a ~23usec delay) we have none of the precision problems you allude to.
pasbesoin 14y ago
Well, there is/was SACD. I don't know much about it. It remains a niche market; whether sustaining or dying, I couldn't say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD Interesting to think about it in comparison with Blu-Ray, which has also had issues around uptake. P.S. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio , I see.

cowsaysoink 14y ago

Is there a problem with the current format lacking definition? I thought the major factor for listening quality was listening equipment rather than the actual format (as the quality on cds is rather good).

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jjjeffrey 14y ago
TFA from this past submission was the thing that finally persuaded me to believe that CD quality audio is all you need for optimal stereophonic listening. //news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310

dsk2012 14y ago

Never. First, CD audio quality is good enough. Second, the market is in transition (already transitioned?) to a pure digital format, distributed either via flat files (e.g. mp3s), or via SaaS streaming services. Similarly, Blu-ray is probably the last physical format for movies.

runjake 14y ago
NPR mentioned this morning that digital music download sales far exceed physical media music sales already. This might explain there being virtually no record stores around anymore.
- squarecat 14y ago
  Heard that story this morning: http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-cd-at-30-is-feeling-its-age http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/10/01/162062347/the-... Made me consider stockpiling a supply of CD players to gouge future hipsters with...
- razzmataz 14y ago
  It's not 'far exceed' - last year was the first that digital sales exceeded CD sales, by something less than a percentage point. Still, it's nothing to sneeze at.
macchina 14y ago
Well there is still an option for so called high definition digital downloads. Although MP3 audio quality is good enough, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of companies marketing "high frequency" "lossless" recordings at a premium price.

zandorg 14y ago

It already exists. It's called SACD.

sk5t 14y ago
The primarily advantage of SACD is that the recording has probably been remastered at the proper loudness to suit the tastes of SACD's audience--not for uniformly high levels of noise pollution on FM radio and its ilk.

stan_rogers 14y ago

There were three and a lot of noise around them at the time: HDCD; DVD-A; and SACD. A very small handful of audiophiles cared, nobody else was paying enough attention to hear the difference. (For the people who are going to bring up Nyquist, that is true of the frequency domain, but not of the time domain, and differences in timing affect spatial resolution more audibly than they do timbre.) Really, it only matters to people for whom listening to music is an activity unto itself, and we're a really small group. You can still get good players, but the catalog of available media is a few Sony-owned classics in SACD and the odd bit of audiophile porn (you know, where the recording is amazing, but the actual performance wasn't really worth the bother of recording it).

thirdhaf 14y ago
Assuming 44.1kHz sampling rate the smallest path length difference between the ears is approximately 6.8mm. This corresponds to 2.3 degrees (with sounds source at infinity). Humans can place sounds with about 3 degrees of resolution so unless you have some citations I am seriously skeptical about the claim that higher sampling frequencies gives you anything whatsoever.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  44.1KHz is not the output frequency; it's the sampling frequency from which an unambiguous 20KHz signal (of sufficient amplitude) can be reconstructed. So your calculation needs to take into account that the maximum peak resolution is 20Khz (and that 16 bits may not have sufficient amplitude sampling resolution to accurately interpolate the waveform peaks even if their frequency -- their spacing rather than their position in time -- can be reconstructed unambiguously).
  - thirdhaf 14y ago
    Completely agreed about 44.1kHz being a sampling rate. To make the rest of the numbers nicer I'm going to pretend we're talking about 40kHz sampling for the rest of this comment. It's clear that you can't distinguish between a 0-degree phase shifted 20kHz signal and a 0-degree phase shifted 60.0kHz signal (I thought we weren't going to talk about Nyquist here). However by the same token you CAN represent a 90-degree phase shifted 20kHz just fine. By way of example consider the bit stream (I'm also pretending 1-bit sampling for now) [0 1 0 1 0 1] which in this format represents a 20kHz signal. It's pretty obvious that we can represent the 90-degree phase shifted signal as [1 0 1 0 1 0] and there's nothing in the input stage that stops the original source from creating this particular type of signal. In fact we can unambiguously represent ANY phase shift in the same fashion, but as you point out then we start arguing about whether your sample has enough precision to unambiguously represent the input. With a 90-degree shift (corresponding to a ~23usec delay) we have none of the precision problems you allude to.

pasbesoin 14y ago

Well, there is/was SACD. I don't know much about it. It remains a niche market; whether sustaining or dying, I couldn't say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD Interesting to think about it in comparison with Blu-Ray, which has also had issues around uptake. P.S. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Audio , I see.