Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless 841
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.'"
Can we stop using the word "truthiness," please? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:1, Interesting)
Not nearly as much, no, but then that applies to very little of the music I buy. (And when it is true of it, it's usually for effect -- e.g., Daft Punk). Mass market music may be mixed for shit, but then I don't think 24-bit/192kHz is being aimed at the group of people.
Really, though, the article is pretty convincing bunk. I love his argument that sampling over 48kHz makes the audio more distorted and worse; it's a stroke of genius to turn reality on its head, like something you would find in a political campaign.
(Disclaimer: I write digital audio software for a living and have kept limited the sampling rates to 44.1 kHz and below, because it's appropriate for the type of use it sees. It also uses 32-bit audio where appropriate.)
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
No loss from the original sampling, i.e. they didn't loose any information in the compression. Most music is sampled at (correct me if I'm wrong someone?) 44kHz, I forget how many bits, I think 16. The thing being touted is sampling it at 192kHz with 24bit resolution, which is much higher on both counts, and therefore, in theory, should produce better quality reproduction of the sound based on oversampling and reduction of the signal to quantization noise rate. The point the TFA makes is that human ears can't hear the difference, although I think that some audiophiles may beg to differ.
FWIW, I have quite bad ears, a recording needs to be quite bad before I notice it. I'm an electronic engineer though, so I know all the theory...
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
I own (legally, even) somewhere on the order of 2500 CDs.
I have ripped all of them to FLAC (lossless).
Total size, under 600GB. I could easily fit my entire collection on a single HDD five years ago. Today, they don't even count as the biggest single directory on my home file server (hell, not even third place - Though in fairness, I do collect historically-significant Linux distro ISOs).
FWIW, even ripped raw rather than compressed as FLAC, they would still fit on a single 2TB drive. Audio really doesn't present all that much of a problem these days.
Re:44KHz (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a profound misrepresentation of how hearing works.
Here's an oversimplified and inaccurate explanation. The ear's mechanism relies on different frequencies providing the highest level of excitation at different places. Your trained nervous system recognizes each different place as a different tone.
For most people, there is no place where sounds above 20 kHz will irritate a nerve ending enough to send an impulse to your brain. Thus, no sound higher than 20 kHz is audible, and 20 kHz corresponds to a 40 kHz sampling rate. (One sample at the low point on the wave, the next sample at the next high point, etc.
Re:The bit depth does matter (Score:3, Interesting)
and your ears definitely can't vibrate that quickly
Your ear drums top out at 20KHz, but some of the small bones in your ear will vibrate up into the 60s' and that passes on auditory information. This can help provide clues for positioning, at least.
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:4, Interesting)
the trick is getting noise from the real world to sit quietly below the 7 dB loudness that a 16 bit noise floor gives us with an ideal listening environment (ie 83 dB SPL when presented with pink noise at -20dBFS in digital land).
i really hope EBU R-128 gains more momentum. it's been adopted in the broadcast industry very fast, but that's preaching to the choir. i don't think it'll ever make headway in the music industry unless apple rename it "iLevel" and insist on it - rejecting any music submitted to their store that doesn't meet the spec that they totally invented.
Re:"Truthiness" is a dumb word (Score:5, Interesting)
no it isn't. verisimilitude is, roughly, the quality of being believably realistic. truthiness is like "verisimilitudinous lying," i.e. the apparent realism is misleading, often toward the exact opposite of the truth.
Re:The article writer is a deaf idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
training doesn't make one's senses better. it trains the observer's brain to relay the appropriate signals, rather than ignoring them.
i can spot a boom mic in shot almost subliminally. i can spot jitter of all kinds, motion-compensation artifacts, compression artefacts, spots on film (white and black), and can even tell if a cameraman was running out of film, and when the roll was likely to end by looking at the subtle increase in spottiness. other people can't spot these things.
that said, my eyes are pretty poor. my ears are pretty poor, but i can spot when a (perceptibly) lossy source has been used in a master well before i whip out the spectral view. other people can't.
that said, decent mp3 (lame preset standard, or even medium) flies by undetected. ditto the equivalent transparent settings in all audio encoders. ditto a decent h.264 compared to the film scans it came off, when viewed with the same chroma sampling (otherwise it'd be cheating to compare 4:4:4 with 4:2:0).
my wife can tell you every ingredient that goes into a tiny sample of food. i need twice as large a sample to correctly identify only half as many ingredients. my senses are trained (though not as well), but not as sensitive. good thing considering i work in media production, not food.
my point - you're fooling yourself if you think you have better senses than an average joe - you've just trained you brain to pick different things. they probably enjoy the movie more than you...
Re:Can we stop using the word "truthiness," please (Score:1, Interesting)
Damn, I hate getting to these threads late, especially when it's a subject that interest me so much. Always some clown with an offtopic first post (modded up of course) followed by an answer to the offtopic post that's modded offtopic when it isn't. I'd have to wade through hundreds of responses to find any real insight or information.
TFA is exactly right and exactly wrong.
If you're listening to modern, popular music, a 16 bit sample is more than sufficient, because popular music has no dynamics. Even when they digitize the old analog music that was engineered to give the best dynamics physics would allow the medium to have (think Boston's first album) they compress the dynamics to make it "loud." I mention Boston because the band's leader was really pissed off at how bad the CD sounded.
But if you're listening to classical, with its very soft passages, loud passages, and especially when there are cannons in the recording, you want as large a dynamic range as you can get -- and with digital sampling, that means as high a bit rate as you can get. The very soft (compared to the loudest) sounds will have the same as an eight bit rate or lower -- the highest crest of these waves will take fewer than eight bits to render.
As to sampling rate, that depends on your output transducers, whether speakers or headphones. If you have a boom-box type setup with a four inch midrange and a subwoofer (most common these days), the sampling rate doesn't matter much because your speakers aren't going to be able to accurately reproduce the 15+kHz tones accurately anyway. However, if you have good (read: expensive) speakers, with each one having say an eighteen inch woofer, two midrange drivers (squawkers) of different sizes, a good tweeeter that will go up to nearly 20 kHz and what they used to call a "supertweeter" with a range of 17-30kHz, those expensive speakers are wasted on a 44k sample rate.
At that sample rate a 15kHz tone has only three samples. With only three samples there's no way to accurately draw the waveform. With three samples there's no way to discern between a sine wave, a square wave, or a sawtooth wave.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled offtopic jokefest.
Re:No smooth (Score:5, Interesting)