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

[icstm]

This article is a perfect answer to my FIRST question <-- me really happy


In the slashdot article there is a great comment that really starts to provide a robust defence to all those who don't want to beleive the science of it all

I also spent 4 years studying an EE degree, and although it was not especially focused on signal processing, I now work for a large pro audio company.

Some of the issues pointed to in this and other posts regarding oversampling and AA filters are not really relevant to the subject at hand, given the technology currently in use. A statement like 'oversampling at 192 kHz' shows a lack of knowledge regarding the kinds of audio converters that have been in use for a good while now. A Delta Sigma ADC running with an Fs of 48 kHz might often be oversampling at 3.072 MHz or 6.144 MHz. Anti aliasing filters that many people have mentioned are implemented digitally inside the converter (no need for external analog filters, which may well exhibit many of the problems mentioned), and actually have extremely good pass band ripple.

Look at datasheets for converters from manufacturers such as TI (burr brown) [ti.com], cirrus [cirrus.com] [page 36 here has detailed plots of 48, 96, and 192 kHz pass pand characterisitcs for the device, highlighting the fact that increasing the sampling rate does not improve pass band ripple for this device (also note the scale is 0.02 dB/div)], AKM [asahi-kasei.co.jp], Wolfson micro [wolfsonmicro.com] You will find pass band pass responses that are flat to within less than +/- 0.05 dB over the audible range, and stop band attenuation in excess of 100 dB, whether sampling at 48 kHz or 192 kHz. If you can find anything in actual converter datasheets that points to better converter performance from selecting a higher sampling rate, I would be interested to see it.

All in all, the basics of sampling theory don't really help people to understant the real world issues in designing a moden high end audio device. And in the end, surely the proof of the pudding is in the blind tests, that never seem to show that anybody can tell any difference when moving to higher rates? Even if there were a few people who could hear this difference in some perfect listening envirmonment, would it really make sense for everyone else to go out and buy 192 kHz equipment?