Articles last month revealed that musician Neil Young and Apple's Steve Jobs discussed offering digital music downloads of 'uncompromised studio quality'. Much of the press and user commentary was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of uncompressed 24 bit 192kHz downloads. 24/192 featured prominently in my own conversations with Mr. Young's group several months ago.
Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.
There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.
First, the bad news
In the past few weeks, I've had conversations with intelligent, scientifically minded individuals who believe in 24/192 downloads and want to know how anyone could possibly disagree. They asked good questions that deserve detailed answers.
I was also interested in what motivated high-rate digital audio advocacy. Responses indicate that few people understand basic signal theory or the sampling theorem, which is hardly surprising. Misunderstandings of the mathematics, technology, and physiology arose in most of the conversations, often asserted by professionals who otherwise possessed significant audio expertise. Some even argued that the sampling theorem doesn't really explain how digital audio actually works [1].
Misinformation and superstition only serve charlatans. So, let's cover some of the basics of why 24/192 distribution makes no sense before suggesting some improvements that actually do.
Sampling theory is often unintuitive without a signal processing background. It's not surprising most people, even brilliant PhDs in other fields, routinely misunderstand it. It's also not surprising many people don't even realize they have it wrong.
192kHz considered harmful
192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.
Neither audio transducers nor power amplifiers are free of distortion, and distortion tends to increase rapidly at the lowest and highest frequencies. If the same transducer reproduces ultrasonics along with audible content, harmonic distortion will shift some of the ultrasonic content down into the audible range as an uncontrolled spray of intermodulation distortion products covering the entire audible spectrum. Harmonic distortion in a power amplifier will produce the same effect. The effect is very slight, but listening tests have confirmed that both effects can be audible.
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Inaudible ultrasonics contribute to intermodulation distortion in the audible range (light blue area). Systems not designed to reproduce ultrasonics typically have much higher levels of distortion above 20kHz, further contributing to intermodulation. Widening a design's frequency range to account for ultrasonics requires compromises that decrease noise and distortion performance within the audible spectrum. Either way, unneccessary reproduction of ultrasonic content diminishes performance.
There are a few ways to avoid the extra distortion:
1) A dedicated ultrasonic-only speaker, amplifier, and crossover stage to separate and independently reproduce the ultrasonics you can't hear, just so they don't mess up the sounds you can.
2) Speakers and amplifiers carefully designed not to reproduce ultrasonics anyway.
3) Not encoding such a wide frequency range to begin with. You can't and won't have ultrasonic intermodulation distortion in the audible band if there's no ultrasonic content.
They all amount to the same thing, but only 3) makes any sense.
Outro
"I never did care for music much.
It's the high fidelity!"
—Flanders & Swann, A Song of Reproduction
The point is enjoying the music, right? Modern playback fidelity is incomprehensibly better than the already excellent analog systems available a generation ago. Is the logical extreme any more than just another first world problem? Perhaps, but bad mixes and encodings do bother me; they distract me from the music, and I'm probably not alone.
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.
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
—Carl Sagan
I cannot off the top of my not-so-sober head think of any sort of reason that uncompressed audio would have any sort of issue-Renegade (March 06, 2012, 12:27 PM)
The weird thing about digital is the way distortion manifests itself. With analog, distortion generally increases and decreases with the total signal level. With digital, noise is fixed and has this weird way of sounding like it's increasing as you lower the volume. That's not something that occurs in nature, so your lower brain goes into a tailspin subconsciously trying to figure it out. The end result is that humans tend to be bothered (on a gut level) by digital distortion much more than they are by analog distortion. Probably because the way digital distortion behaves is "not of this earth." And on an instinctive level, your brain knows it - and flags it as potential danger.-40hz (March 06, 2012, 01:46 PM)
because 24/192 is superior,-Curt (March 06, 2012, 01:58 PM)
But the one piece of equipment I have recently accepted as being effective are pre-amps. And if I'm understanding it correctly, the article actually confirms this belief. For a given volume, I've noticed equipment with good or better pre-amps makes the sound more pleasing to the ear. Why? Well, apparently, for digital music, amplifying the signal reduces the effect of noise...and it's the opposite for analog.-superboyac (March 06, 2012, 04:50 PM)
I second that. I bought some keyboard equipment from them several years ago and was shocked at how good their customer service was. I remember having like 1/2 hour conversations on the phone about mind-numbingly dull audio geek topics.But the one piece of equipment I have recently accepted as being effective are pre-amps. And if I'm understanding it correctly, the article actually confirms this belief. For a given volume, I've noticed equipment with good or better pre-amps makes the sound more pleasing to the ear. Why? Well, apparently, for digital music, amplifying the signal reduces the effect of noise...and it's the opposite for analog.-superboyac (March 06, 2012, 04:50 PM)
Bingo!
Which is why one of the more expensive devices you'll find in any recording studio are the outboard preamps. It's also the main thing that separates a PA or "live" mixing board from a studio console - the quality of the preamps.
Note: Good info on preamps (along with tons of other stuff) can be found here (http://www.sweetwater.com/shop/studio/preamps/buying-guide.php). I'm a big fan of Sweetwater. One of the best info sources and suppliers of all things musical. If you're a "music creative" looking for rock solid information and advice, browse their site and/or give them a call. They're fantastic. I usually don't buy anything musical (that doesn't have strings on it) without talking to them first.
:Thmbsup:-40hz (March 06, 2012, 05:02 PM)
Thanks for this @40hz. V interesting post and links.IainB...you're using the numbers 128, 192 in reference to your mp3 files...are you sure you mean kHz? Don't those refer to the kbps of the mp3? kHz is a whole other thing. Personally, I can totally tell the difference between 128 kbps vs. the higher bitrates like 192, or even 320. I'm betting most of your mp3s are 44.1 kHz and 128 kbps.
It is in line with and updates my research from some years ago, providing some new material - so I have learned some new things.
Nowadays I usually listen to all my music via headphones on my laptop, from mp3's at 128kHz. I had always been skeptical of the need for using 192kHz and considered it to be inefficient in space terms and with no perceptible benefit in my case.
I guess the important variable in all of this is really your native hearing faculties, which tend to deteriorate with age and you tend to also gradually lose your pitch sense. That means the requirement for high fidelity that you might have had drops off with age. Fortunately, I used to use earplugs when I went to noisy places - e.g., discos or pop music concerts - so my hearing is still pretty acute, but I can't really hear bats squeaking anymore, though I can still hear around 8kHz tones quite clearly in the upper registers, and bass always gets through (can be uncomfortable).-IainB (March 07, 2012, 04:45 AM)
Nudone you do not count, your sensory perception exceeds that of humans.-mouser (March 07, 2012, 09:44 AM)
Nowadays I usually listen to all my music via headphones on my laptop, from mp3's at 128kHz. I had always been skeptical of the need for using 192kHz and considered it to be inefficient in space terms and with no perceptible benefit in my case.-IainB (March 07, 2012, 04:45 AM)
Nudone you do not count, your sensory perception exceeds that of humans.-mouser (March 07, 2012, 09:44 AM)
IainB...you're using the numbers 128, 192 in reference to your mp3 files...are you sure you mean kHz? Don't those refer to the kbps of the mp3? kHz is a whole other thing. Personally, I can totally tell the difference between 128 kbps vs. the higher bitrates like 192, or even 320. I'm betting most of your mp3s are 44.1 kHz and 128 kbps.Yes, UR quite right - I am confusing the two (kHz and bps). My apologies. I know the difference as well. Stupid of me. Ahem...something I was drinking at the time...I slept like a log last night and felt rather thick-headed on waking this morning. :-[-superboyac (March 07, 2012, 09:27 AM)
Maybe if the number 192 hadn't been used in connection with both... ;D;D ;D-40hz (March 08, 2012, 07:54 AM)
one think I am picking up from this is that I probably should re-encode all my CDs - that it is likely that the ogg encoder I used in 2000 could have been of lower quality than the one I could use now (although it was not the one in ffmpeg). And I have much better processing power now so it should be less painful.That sort of tedium would be makework akin to sharpening a mountain of pencils. :D
Who am I kidding, this would take months - there's between 300 and 500 CDs in that basement, if not more :S-iphigenie (March 09, 2012, 03:51 AM)
I'm not trying to find that perfect flat seventh chord in some song.-TaoPhoenix (March 09, 2012, 05:30 AM)
one think I am picking up from this is that I probably should re-encode all my CDs - that it is likely that the ogg encoder I used in 2000 could have been of lower quality than the one I could use now (although it was not the one in ffmpeg). And I have much better processing power now so it should be less painful.That sort of tedium would be makework akin to sharpening a mountain of pencils. :D
Who am I kidding, this would take months - there's between 300 and 500 CDs in that basement, if not more :S-iphigenie (March 09, 2012, 03:51 AM)-IainB (March 09, 2012, 05:13 AM)
one think I am picking up from this is that I probably should re-encode all my CDs - that it is likely that the ogg encoder I used in 2000 could have been of lower quality than the one I could use now (although it was not the one in ffmpeg). And I have much better processing power now so it should be less painful.-iphigenie (March 09, 2012, 03:51 AM)
Who am I kidding, this would take months - there's between 300 and 500 CDs in that basement, if not more :S
That's why a lot of people initially rip their collection to something lossless (like FLAC). Then when they want to do another lossy encode (maybe going from MP3 to OGG or advances in lossy encoding) they can just fire up a program that will automate the task overnight for them. You save a lot of time with this method, but of course the trade-off is maintaining two sets of your music & the huge amount of space the lossless set will consume.I resisted flac for years. But with the huge hard drives now, and the upcoming abilities to pool drives easily can take care of that concern. And that strategy is probably the best if you are unsure of how music formats are going to evolve. It's interesting that mp3s are STILL the most robust, bang for the buck format after all these years. I love mp3s, they changed my life starting in 1997. I hadn't touched the piano for 10 years, and in 1998 I was back playing again. And, of course, all the wonderful music I discovered since then.-Innuendo (March 09, 2012, 09:50 AM)
I swear by Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) for ripping. :-*EAC is rock solid. I used it for years. Now I use dbpoweramp because it's basically one-click...done. But it costs a little bit. I think I checked at some point if dbp was as good as EAC, and I think it was. Or else I'd still be using EAC.
And my archive files are all FLAC. I'll convert something to MP3 if I need it in a tighter format. But at least with lossless formats all the music is there to begin with. Which gives you much more running room if you ever decide to re-encode.
And with the advent of mufti-tetrabyte drives (at affordable prices) filesize isn't the issue it used to be.
I'm sold on flac. :Thmbsup:-40hz (March 09, 2012, 10:41 AM)
But at least with lossless formats all the music is there to begin with.I'm not sure whether that is true.-40hz (March 09, 2012, 10:41 AM)
@iphigenie - If you do in fact decide you absolutely must re-encode 500 CDs, I can give you the name of an excellent psychologist I know. She specializes in the treatment of OCD.
;D-40hz (March 09, 2012, 08:55 AM)
I think I recall reading somewhere that, if you ripped your music from CDs, then it was a rip of sampled music, where the loss from sampling was inaudible/undetectable by the human ear.
That is, the analogue copy is apparently the only copy that could actually contain all the music and thus be the closet approach to the original sound.-IainB (March 09, 2012, 05:01 PM)
@iphigenie - If you do in fact decide you absolutely must re-encode 500 CDs, I can give you the name of an excellent psychologist I know. She specializes in the treatment of OCD.
;D-40hz (March 09, 2012, 08:55 AM)
But does she specialize in re-encoding CD's? :D-TaoPhoenix (March 09, 2012, 05:26 PM)
That sort of tedium would be makework akin to sharpening a mountain of pencils. :D(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30209.msg281321#msg281321))-IainB (March 09, 2012, 05:13 AM)
@iphigenie - If you do in fact decide you absolutely must re-encode 500 CDs, I can give you the name of an excellent psychologist I know. She specializes in the treatment of OCD.
;D-40hz (March 09, 2012, 08:55 AM)
I use Mp3Tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to edit tags. Among other things, it lets me export and import tags to and from text files. I often find it faster to export a lot of tags and edit them in a text editor, then re-import them. That also makes it easy to re-use tags from one rip to another of the same material, or copy them from other versions of the same works (particularly useful for classical music).I use DrTag. I had tried Mp3Tag a few years back, found it wanting and so discarded it, but after what you wrote I am trialling it again. It looks like it may have been considerably improved.-xtabber (March 10, 2012, 12:58 PM)
I use DrTag. I had tried Mp3Tag a few years back, found it wanting and so discarded it, but after what you wrote I am trialling it again. It looks like it may have been considerably improved.-IainB (March 10, 2012, 02:55 PM)
I've hear records played on very expensive record players with crazy expensive needles, and if I'm being honest, they actually DO sound better. I'm specifically thinking of Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life. Now, it wasn't the greatest experiment in the world...I didn't do a double-blind test or anything, but what I heard actually confirmed that belief. The record sounded more organic and full of life. But again...it's not something I'm very convinced of.-superboyac (March 11, 2012, 12:05 AM)
If the speakers were "crazy expensive" as well they may have played a large part in the increase in music quality.-Innuendo (March 11, 2012, 12:11 PM)
I personally think LPs sound better because what you're hearing is the actual music and not a digital resynthesis of it. I think there are subliminal qualities and cues in analog music reproduction (that certain 'breathiness' or 'air' as it's been called) that make LPs sound more natural to our ears. I don't really know how to describe it other than to say when you first cue an LP, just before the music starts you can hear "the room." That empty but not totally silent "space" that the music starts playing in a second or so later. That ambient space is something digital recordings don't have. Digital is pristine. Almost too pure at times. (Which is why some noise often gets added to a digital mix just to remove some of that "too clean" quality.)Actually, I think you described it rather well!
The other thing that I think makes a big difference is the mastering. With analog multitrack tape, there was always some slight "bleed" between the tracks. Nothing can be totally isolated on an analog master tape. Digital, on the other hand, totally isolates each track. I don't know if everybody hears it this way, but to me CDs have this odd effect of making each track sound like it's in a separate "layer." Almost like there's separate "planes" that each of the tracks are on. And they're "stacked." You don't get a normal sense of 3D in the audio space. On some level you have to connect the dots and create it yourself.
If analog's soundspace can be imagined as a cube, digital (again to my ears) sounds more like stacked 2D layers.
Something like this:
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30209.msg281517#msg281517))
I don't know if it makes any sense the way I'm describing it, but to me it's almost like you're missing that continuous Z-axis with digital. I'm aware of discreet layers in the Z-axis of the sound when I pay attention to it. It doesn't "mush together" like an analog recording does. And like sound does in the real world.
And I think that on a largely subconscious level, a part of your brain detects it and thinks there's something wrong until you learn to ignore it. Much like you learn to ignore parallax when you wear glasses. You learn to look through them rather than focus on the front or back of the lens surface.
I think you teach your brain to do something similar when listening to digital music playback.
Hope some of this makes sense. I have a hard time trying to communicate something as subjective as this. :)-40hz (March 11, 2012, 01:18 AM)
There is a discreteness in digital music that removes whatever it is that I call the soulfulness of real life. It's really not noticeable unless you A/B really high end stuff...but I sometimes wonder what the conditioning has done to my ears. I do enjoy listening to a record once in a while, but it's probably just the nostalgia more so than anything technical.-superboyac (March 11, 2012, 07:57 PM)
It's a weird thing. The discrete-ness of digital...it does remove some gray area stuff. Like pulse width modulator...it can approximate functionally well enough, but it's not true continuity. And while we may not be aware of whatever is "missing", I can't shake the feeling that I can "feel" it.I think the term for this is "ambience":-superboyac (March 11, 2012, 08:59 PM)
1. the mood, character, quality, tone, atmosphere, etc., particularly of an environment or milieu: The restaurant had a delightful ambiance.
2. that which surrounds or encompasses; environment.
I think the term for this is "ambience":
1. the mood, character, quality, tone, atmosphere, etc., particularly of an environment or milieu: The restaurant had a delightful ambiance.
2. that which surrounds or encompasses; environment.-IainB (March 12, 2012, 04:58 AM)
I don't really know how to describe it other than to say when you first cue an LP, just before the music starts you can hear "the room." That empty but not totally silent "space" that the music starts playing in a second or so later. That ambient space is something digital recordings don't have.
...I don't really know how to describe it other than to say when you first cue an LP, just before the music starts you can hear "the room." That empty but not totally silent "space" that the music starts playing in a second or so later. That ambient space is something digital recordings don't have.-40hz (March 11, 2012, 01:18 AM)
author=40hz link=topic=30209.msg281600#msg281600 date=1331549956]
Sad when general memory loss also starts affecting your ability to recall vocabulary. ;D
the inability to remember a word or put your finger on the right word;D
By the way, "lethologica" is a handy word. It is defined as:the inability to remember a word or put your finger on the right word;D-IainB (March 12, 2012, 10:38 PM)
"...It's on the tip of my tongue..."
Neil Young's music service Pono, which will provide listeners with downloads of high-resolution songs made to sound like their initial recordings, is almost ready to roll. It's set to launch in early 2014, according to a Facebook post written by Young.
"The simplest way to describe what we've accomplished is that we've liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio," wrote Young. "So it has primal power."
The ear hears via hair cells that sit on the resonant basilar membrane in the cochlea. Each hair cell is effectively tuned to a narrow frequency band determined by its position on the membrane. Sensitivity peaks in the middle of the band and falls off to either side in a lopsided cone shape overlapping the bands of other nearby hair cells. A sound is inaudible if there are no hair cells tuned to hear it.
...And as for discerning listeners claiming to hear a difference where science says there is none, we have a mic preamp in the studio that has an "air" switch, which activates frequency filters above what any human ear can hear. But those frequencies interact with frequencies that are audible, and it is interesting to hear how that switch opens up the top end of say a voice or guitar being tracked - even if "air" isn't right for that particular track...-Joe Hone (September 23, 2013, 03:16 PM)
Frequencies that home speakers/headphones cannot reproduce are irrelevant without massive improvements in sound reproduction capability in the home....
For now and the foreseeable future, much as sub-audible frequencies may be *perceivable* and have an effect *in person*, they are not relevant for recorded music...-JavaJones (September 23, 2013, 04:01 PM)
Nor, in fact, are they relevant for *any* amplified music since there are multiple limits in place there, not least of which are the speakers, but also any live processing being done (reverb, compression, etc.). Even if your entire amplification system is analog, the speakers are still a limiting factor. As are mics that recorded it in the first place, for that matter! There is *so much compromise* throughout any music production process, whether analog or digital, that I think it's a bit silly to cling so tightly to the "purity" of reproducing the finished results with 100% accuracy. Hell, the placement of speakers in a person's room, or how old their headphones are (and thus how much wear they have been subject to, how clean and undamaged their drivers are) will likely impact the sound they perceive far more than the difference between 16 and 24 bit or 192kHz vs. 44.1kHz.-JavaJones (September 23, 2013, 04:01 PM)
I think you're really just making an appeal to ignorance and elevating the value of the theoretical here, which could be the beginning of science perhaps (if it inspires investigation), but is really just speculation.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
It is in fact fairly easy to test the limits of what our sound reproduction equipment can produce, and that is ultimately all that actually matters in this consideration because in the end all the recording, mixing, and mastering has to get squeezed through those limited speakers/headphones on the listener's end.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
But even if you somehow believe the measuring capabilities we have now can't account for every possible effect, as I said above there is really a simple way to find out if any of those "woo-woo" audio stuff is *practically detectable by humans* (whether directly or otherwise!), and yet so far such tests have failed to show a difference even between existing high quality (but lossy) audio formats and their lossless sources, much less a difference between two ultra high quality lossless sources.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
That being said I will say that to my knowledge no one has done such a blind test with 16/44.1 vs. 24/192 audio, so if indeed these inaudible frequencies are somehow reproduced by audio equipment, even though they're well outside their rated range, and if somehow humans are able to detect them, then there may be value in Pono and other ultra high quality audio storage approaches.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
But I think the problem I have with your argument is that it essentially relies on the supposed limitations in our knowledge of audio science, when in fact, as I've pointed out, we don't need to know everything about audio to test *the effects* (to *understand* the effects we perhaps do, but not to *test whether they exist*).-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
I don't think we need to wait until some possible future breakthrough in audio science to determine whether Pono is worthwhile.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
This is like someone saying "Homeopathic medicine works but our existing science has no way to measure it", to which I say do some controlled studies and we'll soon see. We can measure effects even if we cannot directly measure methods of action.-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
So who wants to run a blind test with Pono? I can guarantee you Neil Young won't be doing any fair comparisons (i.e. blind, same audio source, multiple subjects) any time soon. :D-JavaJones (September 24, 2013, 01:03 PM)
Several years earlier, Tandy was working late in the "haunted" Warwick laboratory when he saw a gray thing coming for him. "I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck," he said. "It seemed to be between me and the door, so the only thing I could do was turn and face it."* But the thing disappeared. However, it reappeared in a different form the next day when Tandy was doing some work on his fencing foil. "The handle was clamped in a vice on a workbench, yet the blade started vibrating like mad," he said. He wondered why the blade vibrated in one part of room but not in another. The explanation, he discovered, was that infrasound was coming from an extractor fan. "When we finally switched it off, it was as if a huge weight was lifted," he said. "It makes me think that one of the applications of this ongoing research could be a link between infrasound and sick-building syndrome." When he measured the infrasound in the laboratory, the showing was 18.98 hertz--the exact frequency at which a human eyeball starts resonating. The sound waves made his eyeballs resonate and produced an optical illusion: He saw a figure that didn't exist.*
Actually, it's usually the professional/producer side that drives *media-based* tech innovation. This has been true of HD video, advances in audio, etc.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
I have no problem with 24/192 being used in the studio, or at least being available for those who want to use it. The natural progression is then for the speakers that can reproduce it to be developed for high-end studio purposes, then be bought/available for rich people who can afford it, then it ultimately becomes mass market and cheap enough for the average person to buy.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
That's *if* the technology actually catches on, and *if* it can be produced in a form that is not so delicate or subject to home environment variables that it doesn't work out.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
So basically I'm just saying that making Pono available now as a home listening technology is pointless and wasteful. By all means keep using it in studios, but let's wait until we can actually hear the difference, at which time great, a format is waiting in the wings.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
So, no, the conclusions in the Xiph article are right on.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
It seems like we're actually in general agreement in terms of *right here and now* and *for the home user*.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
You just have a different idea of how the progression of technology works.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
I see little value in making content available without devices that can reproduce it.-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
This is akin to selling 3D video *content* before you have even *invented* 3D TVs! The way it actually went was 3D TVs came out and there was very, very limited content, but their growing adoption drove content production. Think about it in the context of this debate...-JavaJones (September 26, 2013, 01:53 AM)
It's like selling 3D content that plays in a regular TV, but is way better in a 3D TV, that may never be produced.-Renegade (September 26, 2013, 09:58 AM)