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

[bill_mcgonigle]

Did you listen to it double blinded? No?

Just because I'm lazy about organizing my files I have some music tracks in both mp3 and FLAC. If I'm listening with good speakers and something with good sound comes on (e.g. Miles Davis - In a Silent Way) half the time I'll think, "oh, the cymbals are dead, I need to skip to the FLAC track."

Since the music player is randomly selecting the file I hear and I don't know which one is coming up, I think that satisfies double-blind criteria.

It doesn't eliminate a poor quality encoding algorithm, though.