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Posted By: INANE Snake Oil Meet Music Format? (24bit) - 02/24/11 05:34 AM
Gizmodo article (commentary) on the new 24bit audio format for consumers.

Personally I believe properly compressed audio files sound fine. I find it a bit amusing that someone thinks switching from 16bit to 24bit is worth any effort. The article mentions how compression is ruining music, in addition I'd say recording and mastering in general is sub par. My experience (since owning Axioms) is that there are more poorly mastered CDs than the opposite. So I don't believe most albums even take advantage of what the CD format can offer using 16bit much less 24bit.

Of course I'm biased against Apple and they seem to be part of the push here. But I'm curious what others think about this.
Posted By: JohnK Re: Snake Oil Meet Music Format? (24bit) - 02/24/11 06:05 AM
Ben, the extensive double-blind tests that were published in my AES Journal about three years ago established quite clearly that at the consumer level the 44.1KHz sampling rate/16 bit depth of the CD standard provides all the sound quality distinguishable by human ears when properly employed.

In these tests DVD-As and SACDs of acknowledged excellent quality were "downgraded" to the CD standard by running them through a 44.1/16 ADC/DAC process. In the blind tests the "downgraded" output sounded just as excellent as the original material and couldn't be distinguished from it. The superior sound of the DVD-As and SACDs was due to superior recording, mixing and mastering, not sampling rates or bit depth.
Posted By: fredk Re: Snake Oil Meet Music Format? (24bit) - 02/24/11 06:11 AM
Agreed. I was gonna write something more, but John pretty much covered it.
Posted By: Argon Re: Snake Oil Meet Music Format? (24bit) - 02/24/11 12:26 PM
Beware the Double Blind Police....
Agreed.

If the people doing the final mixes and mastering would get their head out of their asses and stop producing for the lowest common denominator, the standards we have now would be awesome.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't welcome some BD audio disc standard that offered higher sampling frequencies and bit depth, but right now, what's the point if they're just going to compress the hell out of THAT medium?
I think it was when I learned that the initial recording was poor, not the fact that I was listening to a 320Kbps MP3 instead of a FLAC, was the reason I wasn't satisfied with the sound. Or my mind wasn't satisfied with it because I knew I wasn't listening to a "lossless" file. With my headphone setup, I could maybe approach telling a difference, but after a while of A/Bing, it just isn't worth it to me. Double blind, like John mentioned smile

In my experience, when you "know" something is a supposably worse recording/format/cable/speaker/piece of equipment, your mind's ear will pick apart all of the "bad" sonic elements of a song -- even if it may have nothing to do with the setup change that you just made when trying to notice sound differences.

Once I got over that, I could finally just enjoy the music.

I would like to get into vinyl though...vintage analog sound laugh
Posted By: INANE Re: Snake Oil Meet Music Format? (24bit) - 02/25/11 05:43 AM
Originally Posted By: danmagicman7
I would like to get into vinyl though...vintage analog sound laugh


love that snap crackle and pop!

laugh
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