The case for 96 kHz (and 88.2) vs Lower Resolutions (44.1 and 48)

[J. PUPSTER]

I removed the low pass filter on my SACD player because my dogs love DSD quantization noise! They shake with joy and bounce all over the room!

My fav post of the month Mr. A.; actually, I believe I caught some footage of that just before the shaking and bouncing

 

[barfle]

I'm told it doesn't really matter with rock music.

There certainly are pieces where high resulution doesn’t help. Crap will always be crap, even in 192k/32bit/13.4.8.

 

[esimms86]

My fav post of the month Mr. A.; actually, I believe I caught some footage of that just before the shaking and bounce all over the room!

To paraphrase @J. PUPSTER, “you had me at ‘dog!’”

 

[esimms86]

I’m not going to dip my toe into the “which one is better” conversation. My concerns, however, are the following:

1)was that hi res file recording listed for sale, in fact, actually hi res or was it an up sample? Provenance anybody?
2)if the hi res(or low res, for that matter) remaster was brick walled then I would probably prefer a previous red book quality disc with the original DR intact
3)some CDs sound so incredibly good that I am happy to stand pat
4)if the master is 24/192 then why not offer the master up for sale for those who wish to buy?
5)if you take an old analog recording and preserve it as a 24/192 digital file, you haven’t actually improved upon the original sound of the recording.
6)some recordings are just so wonderful and iconic as music that I, and others, continue to enjoy them, even if they may be substantially less stellar from a “sound quality” point of view
7)what’s the point of owning a stellar, true hi res recording if you don’t like the music?
8)why release in lossy formats when you can release in lossless?
9)some companies refuse to release the hi res digital master. Case in point, the Beatles 2009 boxes in 24/48, although the masters are in 24/96(not to say that my ears would have necessarily been able to hear the difference if given the opportunity to have a listen). Actually, this is really a repeat of #4. But it does re-emphasize the point.

 

[JohnN]

Saturday says; great mastering on CD (think Steve Hoffman) is accepted by all. Right? CD is good enough to be praised by audiophiles.

Fight? Moot point?


Doesn't everyone have their own Rock Island? Their own little
Patch of sand?

 

[JohnN]

Living in the past, dog climbs and tries to get away from SACD sound. Cat enjoys sound and stands beside speaker.

 

[ssully]

"Yet people reliably report that high sample rates like 88.2 and 96 KHz sound better than 44.1 and 48 KHz. The reason for this, as the legendary mastering engineer Bob Katz explains, is in the way currently designed digital to audio converters (DACs) work. When converting from digital to analog for playback, it is very difficult and expensive to produce an undistorted signal with lower sample rates like 44.1 or 48 KHz. NOT TRUE, distortion is produced by non-linearity and excluding Sigma-Delta, you mostly find that distortion products increase with sampling frequency with ADCs & DACs.

There are at present no commercially available systems that can reproduce these sample rates without distortion. However, once you are at a high sample rate like 88.2 or 96 KHz a good converter can produce a completely undistorted analog signal with ease. So the difference people are hearing, is not the high frequency content, but the fact that lower sample rates cause the converters to distort the analog signal. For the tech minded, this is due to ripples in the bandpass filter cased by restricted high pass bandwidth in lower sample rates. NOT TRUE, this is NOT distortion, this frequency ripple would be introduced by a moron who chose the wrong filter type, like a Chebychev which has ripples in the pass-band! Using something like the common Butterworth or Bessel filters you'd find that they are flat in the pass band. Also you wouldn't use a bandpass filter you'd use a Low Pass to keep the Bass"

"It’s not that these higher rates actually contain extra musical information, the issue is to do with the filters playback systems need to use to decode digital TRUE, it eases the slope of the filtering. Higher rates allow playback systems more room to work, and many will sound better as a result. Some people even record at 192 KHz, however there is some evidence that rates this high are actually less accurate due to the maths involved. WHAT!!! its the same maths!"

"The difference between this and higher rates is small and will not make or break how good your music sounds. TRUE, bit depth is more important than sample rate, 16-bits is good enough for most"

From an Electronics point of view most of what is written is rubbish, people do perceive things differently, and we may think humans are very good at hearing differences, but we aren't. We all love vinyl (I do, Petr Kropotkin doesn't) and a good LP sounds great, but its distortion figure is many times higher than all digital systems.

Katz''s book dates from a decade or more ago (the 3rd ed dates from 2014) and furthermore, nothing in that quote addresses actual tests for audibility. Katz knows better. And as is implied from the above, he attributed any such audible difference to suboptimal filtering, not sample rates per se. And his claims about audibility have always been controversial, even among his peers.

 

[ssully]

And of course, *resolution* -- the smallest level difference a system can reproduce faithfully -- is essentially a function of *bit depth* e.g. 16 vs 24 , not sample rate. And noise level, of course.

But keep flailing away, 50+ year old audiophiles, for that magical reason you *MUST* have a 192kHz version.

 

[JohnN]

And of course, *resolution* -- the smallest level difference a system can reproduce faithfully -- is essentially a function of *bit depth* e.g. 16 vs 24 , not sample rate. And noise level, of course.

But keep flailing away, 50+ year old audiophiles, for that magical reason you *MUST* have a 192kHz version.

The ageless one would like you to know that I am not an audiophile. For your info file.

Oh, for sure I'm crazy

I am a human being
And I don't believe all the things I'm seeing

 

[par4ken]

And of course, *resolution* -- the smallest level difference a system can reproduce faithfully -- is essentially a function of *bit depth* e.g. 16 vs 24 , not sample rate. And noise level, of course.

But keep flailing away, 50+ year old audiophiles, for that magical reason you *MUST* have a 192kHz version.

Not a must but if available why not? I agree with you that bit depth is more important than sample frequency!

 

[Sonik Wiz]

The ageless one would like you to know that I am not an audiophile. For your info file.

Oh, for sure I'm crazy

I am a human being
And I don't believe all the things I'm seeing

All Hail Rodriquez!
I am quite happy with my 12bit/14KHz ears thank you. Is tinnitus the same as dithering?

 

[par4ken]

All Hail Rodriquez!
I am quite happy with my 12bit/14KHz ears thank you. Is tinnitus the same as dithering?

Scott, You had to mention tinnitus now my ears are ringing. Funny how I either don't notice it most of the time or else it comes and goes.

 

[4-earredwonder]

IMO, there was NOTHING more egregious than trying to turn the lowly cassette into a High Fidelity medium by literally lavishing millions of Research and Development dollars on perhaps one of the biggest hoaxes in hi fi history. Imagine trying to cram 2" masters recorded at 30 ips onto a thin strip of magnetic oxide tape travelling @ 1 7/8 ips?

I for one welcome 96/24 and 192/24 and thoroughly lament the fact that I did fall for that hoax by spending considerable amounts of [hard earned] money on a Nakamichi cassette recorder/player and oodles of Chromium dioxide tape and even pre~recorded cassette trash....which has sadly joined my 'graveyard' piles of VHS/BETA/HI 8 video tapes!

The future IS here, folks and rejoice in the advances we've made to ensure our hobby, most especially SURROUND SOUND is somewhat thriving and trashes all those ancient low grade tape based technologies.

May they rest in pieces and VIVA those 5" audio/video digital discs!

 

[jefe1]

Human ingenuity Mr 4ears.
Don't you appreciate a challenge? It is remarkable what was accomplished with the cassette

 

[4-earredwonder]

Human ingenuity Mr 4ears.
Don't you appreciate a challenge? It is remarkable what was accomplished with the cassette

But hindsight is 50/50, Jeff ...... it was a challenge but think if ALL that Research/Development mullah was spent on making the future Compact Disc at least 20 bit with a higher oversampling rate out of the gate?

Food for thought?

 

[JohnN]

I have a Pioneer cassette deck that applies 20bit digital processing.

Not an audiophile.

 

[esimms86]

IMO, there was NOTHING more egregious than trying to turn the lowly cassette into a High Fidelity medium by literally lavishing millions of Research and Development dollars on perhaps one of the biggest hoaxes in hi fi history. Imagine trying to cram 2" masters recorded at 30 ips onto a thin strip of magnetic oxide tape travelling @ 1 7/8 ips?

I for one welcome 96/24 and 192/24 and thoroughly lament the fact that I did fall for that hoax by spending considerable amounts of [hard earned] money on a Nakamichi cassette recorder/player and oodles of Chromium dioxide tape and even pre~recorded cassette trash....which has sadly joined my 'graveyard' piles of VHS/BETA/HI 8 video tapes!

The future IS here, folks and rejoice in the advances we've made to ensure our hobby, most especially SURROUND SOUND is somewhat thriving and trashes all those ancient low grade tape based technologies.

May they rest in pieces and VIVA those 5" audio/video digital discs!

Yes Ralphie, but cassette tapes gave birth to the ubiquitous adoption of Dolby Noise Reduction(remember the revolutionary Advent cassette player?). PLUS the Sony Walkman, which allowed us to take our chosen music along with us, even outside of the car! And then the company that gave us DNR eventually evolved to give us the development of Dolby Atmos.

May your Nakamichi Dragon cassette machine rest in peace!

 

[esimms86]

But hindsight is 50/50, Jeff ...... it was a challenge but think if ALL that Research/Development mullah was spent on making the future Compact Disc at least 20 bit with a higher oversampling rate out of the gate?

Food for thought?

Reminds me of my pre-blu ray days 20 bit DVD copy of The Fifth Element. Sadly, I am also immediately reminded of the sorry state of health that Bruce Willis finds himself in today.

 

[4-earredwonder]

Yes Ralphie, but cassette tapes gave birth to the ubiquitous adoption of Dolby Noise Reduction(remember the revolutionary Advent cassette player?). PLUS the Sony Walkman, which allowed us to take our chosen music along with us, even outside of the car! And then the company that gave us DNR eventually evolved to give us the development of Dolby Atmos.

May your Nakamichi Dragon cassette machine rest in peace!

And I also fondly remember DBX and CX encoding......in those early days I was indeed a reckless consumer of ALL those outboard devices living on a miniscule budget and avidly supporting the audio/video industry by naively buying in to all their hype!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CX_(noise_reduction)

 

[cbmmm3]

no pops and skips and warps. just hiss. And I love it. Ricky CR7A Nak. The 1980s master of the cassette mix tape