24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

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• Hacker News
• The more the bits the better the music, easy as one two three

  Don't forget to buy the new low oxygen platinum plated HDMI cables for the better experience!

  /s

  by haunter
• 24 bits is now ubiquitous and 32 bit is becoming the norm in recording studios.
  by trashcluster
• That use case is literally addressed in the first sentence.
  by lysace
• 32-bit float has become popular in filmmaking/field recording equipment lately because, with a microphone preamp that supports it, you can capture the entire dynamic range of the microphone--there's no accidental clipping if you drive the gain stage too hard.

  It's a bit redundant for a skilled technician, they're already used to setting the gain staging, inbound compression, and feathering the mics to avoid this in 24-bit, but if you're handing a boom mic to a novice and have a scene where e.g. someone's whispering and another person's screaming, it can be nice to not have to worry about it.

  by evo
• Obligatory mention of https://xiph.org/video/ which clears up a lot of misconceptions.
  by 0l
• For typical listening (though humans can perceive bone-conducted vibrations up to 100 kHz or even 120 kHz) 16-bit-fixed/44.1kHz is a high-fidelity transport format. As a DSP researcher, I prefer 32-bit-float/44.1kHz as a transport format. I often upsample to 32-bit-float/188.2kHz or even 32-bit-float/192kHz for signal processing applications such as high-fidelity reverberation via direct and FFT convolution. While the author advocates for the transport to ear use case, I would argue that 24-bit/192kHz provides greater fidelity and resolution for sound processing. I found the pedantic arrogance of the author to be annoying. But yes, the sampling theory is an important consideration -- but so is the quality of the actual digital filters used in the DAC->ADC pipeline. They are much more forgiving and less lossy at 192kHz.
  by waffletower
• I wonder how many people think that 24 bit audio encodes 50% “more”
  by lokar
• It is 50% more headroom above the noise floor in logarithmic decibels.
  by recursive
• sheeesh , measly 24-bit/192kHz of course it makes no sense, unless it is downloaded through low oxyegen wire, which somehow and unfathomably, must have been omited or forgotten.
  by metalman
• If it has been transmitted via hollow-core fibres it will obviously sound hollow.
  by b3orn
• (2012)
  by teach
• the make sense for DJs and producers. preferably WAV full quality.

  in DSP it matters a lot, so if mixing digitally or producting remixes etc. its useful to have more and larger samples to work with

  by saidnooneever
• I still insist on the higher bitrate stuff. I don't expect to notice the difference, I just think that music where the artists have bothered to prepare those files is probably recorded with more care than otherwise. I'm not generally listening to big artists where this can just be expected, and while I don't have any evidence to support my belief, I choose to continue believing it.

  I'm not interested in finetuning everything in my life for efficiency.

  by hgoel
• The main benefit for me is that digital watermarking becomes completely inaudible with high-res audio, but I can sometimes clearly hear it in standard resolution.
  by LarsAlereon
• huh...

  So I guess the programmer equivalent is distributing .pdb's (or, symbols)

  by dijit
• Pretty good analogy. Thing is though, the person who receives the 16-bit, 44.1khz music file can always upsample it to 192khz and not lose anything in the process (heck, lots of audio stuff oversamples internally to this level or beyond, for extra aliasing headroom!). I'm not sure about expansion from 16bit to 24bit though, downward expansion isn't necessarily perfect.
  by Blackthorn
• The only real advantage it has is being able to re-encode it into any lossy format you want. With modern storage capacity the size isn't much of an issue.
  by UltraSane
• At a minimum, anything above 16/44.1 requires far more than just files: monitors, a treated room, listening position, DAC, etc... but most importantly - a trained ear. That last one is the most uncomfortable truth.
  by speak_on
• A treated room would be the most impactful, DACs the least.
  by scns
• If you want to hear the difference between an audio file recorded at 44.1 and 88.2kHZ, then you need slow the audio playback down. Otherwise, a trained ear cannot physically hear the difference.
  by UtopiaPunk
• Are you, per chance, a dog posting on the internet? Since 44.1khz sample rate is already past the range of the human ear, regardless of training.
  by Blackthorn
• 192 kHz vs 48 kHz can make a difference if you slow down the audio. If you pitch shift down 2 octaves, the ultrasonic range 20-80 kHz turns into 5-20 kHz and there will be large difference between 192 kHz and 48 kHz sources. However, I do not know if it would sound good because the mixing engineer cannot hear those frequencies and mix them properly, or the microphone might not catch it or some of the material could be recorded with lower quality.

  Also, sadly consumers are getting used to low quality audio nowadays - they often listen to lossly compressed audio on social media (sometimes decompressed and re-compressed several times) which is then re-compressed to send to bluetooth headphones, or played back on an awful smartphone speakers. Streaming services also use compressed audio.

  by codedokode
• My good enough amplifier and DAC combo claims up to 24bit/192kHz, I use a cheap optical interface from my computer that claims up to 32bit/192kHz, and the streaming service I use serves most albums at 24bit/44.1kHz.

  It would have cost the same for the entire stack to be 16bit/44.1kHz at every step, but with excessive resolution I can control the volume anywhere. The bits right before the analog conversion at the end are essentially the same whether I turn down the volume in the software player, the operating system, or the DAC/amplifier.

  by rz2k
• you might want to see if your DAC re-clocks incoming optical, if not then it's relying on the cheap clock generator from your computer
  by PcChip
• I'm curious if the audio was being sent bit-perfect to the DAC for all of these tests (ALSA direct), or if it was being run through the audio mixer and being resampled

  I can always tell if my 44.1 songs are being resampled to 48 because they're being run through the OS mixer

  by PcChip
• Proper audio resampling should not be identifiable. Of course, the OS mixer probably doesn't do proper (CPU expensive) resampling.

  But a quality audio player should account for this and do it's own.

  by dist-epoch
• There is a good reason to distribute it though, and compressed it doesn't really change the file size.

  There's multiple YouTube channels that I listen to as podcasts, that are professionally created and the creators presume that exported audio works like studio audio, so what you end up with is really quiet audio that can't be turned up without pre-processing.

  If we distributed audio the same way we work with it in a studio, we could forgo a lot of problems.

  Also, the human ear does have enough dynamic range to make 24 bits worthwhile, though that much dynamic range is rarely used in recordings, and that high of a bit depth provides no benefits within a small dynamic range. A 192 kHz sample rate, on the other hand, is always useless.

  by dlcarrier
• No mention of Toole? Obligatory considering the subject, even if it's about acoustics and not digital audio:

  https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Reproduction-The-Acoustics-a...

  And a talk by the author covering some of the material for those who prefer that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM

  by BoingBoomTschak
• Nobody downloads music these days and everybody just streams. Audio at 24 bit still takes a small fraction of the bandwidth that 1080p video takes, so I don’t understand the hate for it.

  I use a DAC by focusrite which can do 24-bit, and if I want to listen to higher fidelity audio on my planer headphones then I should be able to. Why should I limit myself to 16-bit

  by me551ah
• Wait, what? I do download everything I listen. And Roon is quite popular in the music communities. How else you can make sure you have that correct mastering of your favorite album?
  by pimeys