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.'"

Comments

Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot

[msobkow]

Sigh. Why is it that if people haven't heard something before, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the speaker is a lying bullshit artist?

Here's a Wikipedia article that discusses just one of the sound differences between English and other languages, a difference of inflection which English and Chinese speakers literally cannot hear when the other speaks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreleased_stop

This difference was explained in my sociology classes in first year university as an example of how learned behaviours can prevent the ability to even perceive alternatives later in life, much less learn them.

As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name. But it wasn't intentional -- I literally could not hear the difference when he tried to compare his pronunciation with mine. It sound like he was saying the same thing twice. To this day, I've never been able to hear the difference between the "correct" pronunciation and what I used to say.