Aiff 1920 khz or 960 khz

Yeah,this just has me wondering.
I went to pro studio smasters and was noticing that the downloads are mostly either aiff 1920 or flac 960 khz at 24bit.
Really just wondering what,if any is the dif?.Is there any sound differances?
Maybe someone can explain in simple language without the algebra.
I did some reading and it only confused me more,so here I am.
Thanks

 

I think you're missing a decimal point. The sampling rate of the HD audio files are available in 96kHz or 192kHz. Normal CD audio has a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, so these either double or quadruple that.

The potential gains in audio quality from sampling rate above CD quickly diminish (and CD is 16 bit), so the lower of the two will be more than adequate at half the file size and will be more compatible with digital audio decoders you may employ.

Unless you like Apple and iTunes, I'd pick the FLAC version of the file instead of AIFF. AIFF is not losslessly compressed (unnecessarily larger) and is like a WAV file. FLAC is like Apple's lossless encoder ALAC, but it is open source and useable on many more platforms.

 

I have got a few at 192 and I didn't find they are notably better than recordings at 96 with any of my setups. I think the main difference is the amount of money charged.

 

I have just recently tried to understand what all of this means so here's my 2 cents (if I'm wrong someone will correct me).

There's two things you're mentioning: sampling rate and bit rate. To understand what they are remember you're trying to reproduce a sound wave with a bunch of zeros and ones. Two things are very important in this process:
The bitrate tells you how much "detail" you can represent your wave with. 16 bits is sort of saying you are using a total of 16 different values to replicate the details of the wave.
The sampling rate tells you how often you are going to replace your wave with a bit for each second. That is, in one second of music if you have sampled at 192kHz you are going to have twice as many "points" as if you had recorded it at 96kHz.
Once you have all these points your file is ready to be reproduced but you're going to need something (a DAC) to transform the points back to a wave (basically connect the dots).

Another important thing about the sampling rate is that there is a theorem that tells you that with a file recorded at any rate (say 44kHz) you're not going to be able to reproduce frequencies above half that rate (22kHz in the example at hand). This is why many people believe going above CD quality is pointless, because the human hear can only hear up to 20kHz at its best. At the same time other people mention that being able to record higher frequencies improves the quality of lower frequencies as well (mostly because of the "connect the dots" business, I believe).

Hope things are clearer now, there is a nice page explaining all of this in the audacity wiki page, but I couldn't find it again.

 

So a 24 bit cd has more details? better sound? Than a 16 bit

 

Bad information. You're confusing bit rate with bit depth. And I don't even want to try to understand what "replace your wave with a bit for each second" could possibly mean.

There's a fairly simple explanation of terminology here: 16 Bit vs. 24 Bit Audio

 

There are only 16bit CDs. There ARE 24 bit DVD-A's however.

 

Why not download one track of each type, compare, and report back?

 

No, 16 bits give you 2 to the power of 16 levels, i.e. 65,536 levels. The problems is that not all levels are equal. Because the signal from the microphone is measured linearly, there will be a large difference (several dB) between levels close to zero level, whereas the levels close to maximum level have only fractions of a dB between them. Now, the filtering in the DA process *should* take care of this so that it doesn't matter, and my experience is indeed that with a good DAC, the bit depth has only very little influence, if any. I can't reliably tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit material. How good the recording is from the start makes a much, much, much larger influence.

The situation is different during the recording process. Here, 24 bit are necessary in order to be able to edit the recorded signal. This is my understanding, and I say this very humbly, given the profession and superior knowledge of our host on this site :-D

It's a parallel to digital photography. The shadows of an image have rather crude steps between the different levels, so you want to shoot in the RAW format with 12, 14 or more bits, and do all your editing with the full bit depth. Then when you have finished your editing, you can downsample to 8 bits, which is sufficient for a delivery file. And again as a parallel, if the image is well-exposed to begin with, even a JPEG file (which is lossily compressed) is a perfectly acceptable delivery format. I sort of find the same to be the case for audio--while I find a full file to sound slightly better, a 320 kps compressed file of a very good recording still sounds very good, and much better than a s0-s0 hires recording.

 

True, I said bitrate while I was talking about bit depth, which is what he was asking about. For the rest of it I was just trying to make it short and easy but I guess some really feel the need to fit the stereotype.

This I didn't know

 

What you also might not know is that bit depth only affects the amount of quantization noise, the absolute noise floor. Quantization can be overcome with noise-shaped dithering. For example, here's an audio file (8bit.flac) that I downsampled to 8 bit 44.1kHz - even at 8 bit, the audio is quite acceptable, and each additional bit adds 6dB more noise floor, which by the time you get to CD audio's 16 bits is beyond good if rendered properly.

 

1. ALAC is open source and has been for 5 years or more.
2. AIFF is not compressed, neither is a WAV file. ALAC and FLAC are compressed.

 

I think a higher proportion of the 24-bit files I own sound natural than the 16-bit files I own. That may be because of better resolution or because they are newer. But I don't find that one format is always better than the other. As many have said here numerous times, quality is more determined by recording and mastering practices than by the format.

 

I've noticed cds remastered that advertise 24 bit.So I was thnking it may be better.

Why not download one track of each type, compare, and report back?
They only allow a full album download,and they are costly.
Pro masters studio advertises
Audio Uncompromised™
24-bit AIFF, FLAC and DSD / DSF High-Resolution Audio

I have did 1 download and I'm very impressed

 

This may be of interest.

 

A piece written by someone that acts as editor of "Trust Me, I'm A Scientist"! Wow...then why the inaccuracies?

You could tell it was going wrong when early on it refers to the bit-rate reduction specialist. No reasonable result can come with that being the expert analysis.

All you have to do is take a high quality 24 bit high data rate recording and down sample yourself. This eliminates the usual fallback, "oh...it must be different mastering you're comparing". Compare the difference in your own home and you can tell for yourself that these "scientist" are simply performing in the realm of internet science! Spinning their yarn on and on and on wasting soooo much time! After you hear the difference, you know with certainty that these kinds of "beliefs", that you can't hear the difference with higher data rate formats, are just plain pure bunk!

CJ

 

I like my bunk pure. No adulterants for me!