xiphmont’s ‘There is no point to distributing music in 24 bit/192 kHz’, Article: “24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed” Options

[NullC]

Of interest, but certainly not news to anyone here is Monty's educational piece regarding the lack of value of 24/192 as a distribution format:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Some of the commentary on the internet has been not especially well informed, for example there are some crazy claims at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310. If you're in a "someone is wrong on the internet!" correcting mood, you might want to go leave some comments in furtherance of the collective intelligence of mankind.

Cheers

[wakibaki]

I'm happy to see a truly coherent argument against the necessity for higher bit depths and sample rates.

Waste of storage space is a small margin of disadvantage however. The advocates of 24/96 and higher were happy to pay the cost of increased storage space to achieve a perceived advantage, and storage space (or transmission bandwidth) is an increasingly cheap commodity.

This leaves us with degradation of fidelity as a result of processing unnecessary ultrasonics. Unfortunately the very same tests (Meyer and Moran) we used to make our case previously now mitigate against us. If a 16/44k1 bottleneck is inaudible in a system avowedly processing ultrasonics, then the ultrasonics cannot reasonably be said to have (audibly) degraded the sound.

w

This post has been edited by wakibaki: Mar 7 2012, 01:01

[NullC]

This leaves us with degradation of fidelity as a result of processing unnecessary ultrasonics. Unfortunately the very same tests (Meyer and Moran) we used to make our case previously now mitigate against us. If a 16/44k1 bottleneck is inaudible in a system avowedly processing ultrasonics, then the ultrasonics cannot reasonably be said to have (audibly) degraded the sound.

There have been plenty of results that show 'audibility' of ultrasonics that result from failing to prevent the distortion (and a number of the presentation on the subject that have negative results spend a lot of time walking over all the external distortion sources they had to control for). You can probably easily generate such a result for yourself at home (at least the audio output of my laptop produces pretty impressive distortion when a 21khz signal that I can't hear is present).

Perhaps its ultimately not that big a deal— but that space is still space that could be better put to use providing surround, useful multitrack, or redundancy for error correction to make the files resistant to damage even if you do think that the space (and bandwidth) is cheap enough that it's not worth worrying about. Of course, if you're already track separated surround corruption protected files and still think the space is cheap— then by all means, give me 24/192— I can filter out the ultrasonics that would make my amp distort on my end.