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Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless
An anonymous reader writes "A recent post at Xiph.org provides a long and incredibly detailed explanation of why 24-bit/192kHz music downloads — touted as being of 'uncompromised studio quality' — don't make any sense. The post walks us through some of the basics of ear anatomy, sampling rates, and listening tests, finally concluding that lossless formats and a decent pair of headphones will do a lot more for your audio enjoyment than 24/192 recordings. 'Why push back against 24/192? Because it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people. The more that pseudoscience goes unchecked in the world at large, the harder it is for truth to overcome truthiness... even if this is a small and relatively insignificant example.'"
lossless formats and a decent pair of headphones and a set of really expensive MONSTER CABLES will do a lot more for your audio enjoyment than 24/192 recordings.
There, ftfy.
I find your well-reasoned and respectfully written response to be full of helpful counterpoints and useful references. I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation from the University of Florida. I have to stress that the phenomenon known as "digital dust" is the real problem regarding conservation of music, and any other type of digital file. Digital files are stored in digital filing cabinets called "directories" which are prone to "digital dust" - slight bit alterations that happen now or then. Now, admittedly, in its ideal, pristine condition, a piece of musical work encoded in FLAC format contains more information than the same piece encoded in MP3, however, as the FLAC file is bigger, it accumulates, in fact, MORE digital dust than the MP3 file. Now you might say that the density of dust is the same. That would be a naive view. Since MP3 files are smaller, they can be much more easily stacked together and held in "drawers" called archive files (Zip, Rar, Lha, etc.) ; in such a configuration, their surface-to-volume ratio is minimized. Thus, they accumulate LESS digital dust and thus decay at a much slower rate than FLACs. All this is well-known in academia, alas the ignorant hordes just think that because it's bigger, it must be better.
So over the past months there's been some discussion about the merits of lossy compression and the rotational velocidensity issue. I'm an audiophile myself and posses a vast collection of uncompressed audio files, but I do want to assure the casual low-bitrate users that their music library is quite safe.
Being an audio engineer for over 21 years, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. While rotational velocidensity is indeed responsible for some deterioration of an unanchored file, there's a simple way of preventing this. Better still, there have been some reported cases of damaged files repairing themselves, although marginally so (about 1.7 percent for the .ogg format).
The procedure is, although effective, rather unorthodox. Rotational velocidensity, as known only affects compressed files, i.e. files who's anchoring has been damaged during compression procedures. Simply mounting your hard disk upside down enables centripetal forces to cancel out the rotational ruptures in the disk. As I said, unorthodox, and mainstream manufactures will not approve as it hurts sales (less rotational velocidensity damage means a slighter chance of disk failure.)
I'd still go with uncompressed .wav myself, but there's nothing wrong with compressed formats like flac or mp3 when you treat your hardware right
--
BMO
"Because it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people."
which happens to be a business model that works, unfortunately
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Your cat is not "listening", it is simply tolerating that annoying racket that you call "music" in exchange for food, body heat, clean kitty litter, etc.
You mean like, honkies, spics, niggers, dune coons, prairie niggers, kykes, faggots, chinks, canucks, wops, guineas, krauts, and polocks? I think that's everybody anyway, my apologies if I left out any group, I try to be an equal opportunity offender, challenging people to be adults and get over their group identitied. Criticism welcome. Cowardly disapproval spurned.
I know, Stephen Colbert is Reddit's hero and they're starting to infiltrate this site as well, but seriously. Call them lies. That's what they are, that's what they -deserve- to be called. Are people really that passive-aggressive and afraid of expressing themselves that they won't call someone who lies a liar any more?
Okay, everybody, listen up: Anonymous Coward is having a rough day so let's all be extra nice to him!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Not if you don't know any better. ;-)
Seriously, its been so long since I've seen a live band I don't know what a drum is supposed to sound like.
At my age my ears are not so hot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I used to think like you. Spent thousands on audio equipment.
Now that I'm deaf in one ear I listen to MP3s through $24 headphones.
Being deaf saves a lot of money.
This space available.
If George Carlin were still alive, he would mod you up right now.
yarbles*
I'm not deaf, but I've never spent more than $10 on headphones.
You'll be in for one heck of a shock the day you hear what music actually sounds like.
$24 earphones?! You lucky devil.
When I was a wee lad, we had to listen to music through paper cones pressed to our ears. And they weren't real paper, mind you, but a great bloody lot of wasps nests glued together with our own spit.
Youngsters just have no idea.
Yeah, what would a guy named xiphmont know about signal processing?!
On warm summer nights I enjoy sitting on my front porch, with a dry gin made from hand-picked juniper berries, some artisan cheese and bread made out of flour that has been milled before sunrise. And if I am in the mood for it, I also enjoy 192kHz music with my bat friends. For us discerning people this is just a standard of living.
I could maybe save you an additional 50%. I have a friend who is also deaf in one ear. You could go halfsies and spend only $12 on a headphone. Which one of your ears works?
Only if your definition of "perfectly good" is "so convoluted that nobody EVER uses it". ;)
Let's be honest here, verisimilitude exhibits a superlative and ostentatious preponderance of syllables.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
You willfully leave out nerds, geeks, dorks, and spazzes? Obvious /. bias! ;)
I8-D