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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.'"
Go listen to Stuart Copeland tap on his hi-hats with FLAC, shn, cd-audio, or apple lossless, and then at 192.
Then get back to me.
--
BMO - One world is enough, for all of us --The Police
Indeed. One of the overlooked but highly important issues with sampling rates is that although you can represent up to Nyquist in a periodically sampled signal, that is the limit for infinite length recordings. For finite-length recordings, it isn't all or nothing, represented perfectly or not at all -- instead the uncertainty (read: representation error) increases as you approach Nyquist. The engineering rule-of-thumb is to not attempt representing anything over 1/5 the sampling rate. For 20 KHz upper limit, that would be about 100 Ksamp/sec. 192 Ksamp/sec is a convenient number sufficiently above that to ensure excellent reconstruction of the signal. Using 24 bits is also a good idea because with only 16 bits, you have to compress the audio or clip the peaks.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Your ear samples at about 20 kHz. Going to twice that has some theoretical benefit. Going above twice has no theoretical benefit. Sample as high as you want, but anything above 44 kHz will be useless waste of space (assuming you are human or are playing it on real devices).
Learn to love Alaska
You're not getting it, are you?
The average music listener in the modern age has never heard music that wasn't from a CD or an MP3 player. They've trained their ears for a lifetime to interpret that noise as real music. They CAN'T hear the difference.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What good is a double-blind test by someone who is half deaf?
After a lifetime of training your ears to listen to 44.1/16 and MP3s as music, you've trained yourself not to hear anything more.
There's a tale of an island tribe trying to make sense of a tallship on the horizon. They'd never seen anything on the horizon of the ocean before. Some tribal members even said they couldn't see anything.
I pity you. I really do. You can't even know the joy of hearing real music after all the years of listening to compression and noise artifacts, so you deny that others can tell the difference.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You are out of your mind, or partially deaf.
192 encoded samples are definitely poor audio representations of actual music. Listen to them on appropriate equipment and get back to us.
I listened to 256 encoded music in my car, and it was so bad I went lossless for what I listen to in the car. At home even 320 MP3s were hollow. Granted, it does depend upon the music you select, some are not as negatively affected, but only the most trivial music does not lose something going down to 192.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The point is, I don't care if the others can get the difference! Regardless of the data! I can and couple of blind tests (yes, using sox and some shell scripting, it is possible to test yourself blindly) on myself proved for me(!) that there is a clear difference between 16/44 and 24/96. I could not hear the difference between 24/96 and 24/192 though. But banning higher resolution sound because the majority can not appreciate quality is like closing galleries because most people don't understand Edward Munch.
xoda.org
Your data is irrelevant.
You are like someone who has red-green colour blindness presented with a full-colour picture, completely unable to perceive the difference. I could take you to a live concert, and you would not be able to hear the difference between a ringing cymbal and the compressed paper-like noise that comes out of a CD because you spent a lifetime training your ears and your neurons not to hear the difference.
Call me whatever names you like.
You are the blind one. Or in this case, deaf.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The subject performing double blind tests has a huge affect on the results.
There are now almost two entire generations who have spent their entire lives listening the compressed digital artifacts and noise of CD and MP3 media. Much of the music they've listened to is synthesized, processed, and vocoded.
They've never heard a delicate triangle ringing out over a live orchestra.
They've never heard the brassy rattle of a live saxophone.
They've never heard the sharp ringing tones of a live trumpet.
In fact, they've spent their entire life training their ears NOT to hear those sounds.
And now we've got a population that has been so deafened to the sounds of real instruments that they deny people like me can hear the difference. I've literally got some bozo on slashdot screaming away that I'm a "troll" because he can't hear the difference, so he insists I'm delusional and crazy for claiming I can.
How I pity those generations. Even given the opportunity, they'll never be able to appreciate the glory of live music.
Because they can't hear it.
Literally.
It's like trying to convince someone with red-green colour blindness that there's a number hidden in the pattern of the dots in a colour blindness test. They're completely unable to perceive it.
So of course when such people do a double-blind test, they think the 44.1/16 sounds as good as the 192/24.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There is nothing so idiotic as a deaf man telling me I'm delusional because he can't hear what I do.
You sir, are fucking MORON.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.