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

[krabapple]

There is no point in distributing audio to consumers in a 24bit/192kHz format. The only possible convenience I see is that (AIUI) modern AVRs commonly convert incoming audio signals to 24 (32?) bits before applying DSP. Some also upconvert
sample rate to 96kHz. If the AVR does those functions poorly, providing the audio already 'upconverted' would be a way to avoid degradation. But I have no evidence that AVRs are doing it poorly. And too not everyone wants to use DSP when they play music. Often the upconversion can be turned off by setting the AVR to a 'Pure' mode.

However, there is a fascinating discussion going on on one of the pro audio lists that reminded me of one possible legitimate use of really high SR ADC for digital *capture* of taped (analog) audio: use of tape bias tones to
correct wow and flutter as is done by Plangent Processes . Such tones can be well into the hundreds of kHz depending on the tape machine originally used to make the
recording. So some of these tones are well beyond the capabilities of even 192kHz SR to capture.

It turns out, though, that what PP actually do is use a circuit to 'downshift' the ultrahigh frequency bias tones into a range that can be captured by common sample rates. It's described in a scant detail here )

This post has been edited by krabapple: Mar 14 2012, 16:50