24 bit vs 16 bit music files

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Spaceboy, Feb 24, 2023.

  1. rexp

    rexp Forum Resident

    Location:
    SE Asia
    According to the HQ Player developer (Miska posts), there are no DACs that do 44.1 undistorted:
    TEAC UD-701N - Undiscovered gem or farce
     
    Luca and Ham Sandwich like this.
  2. enfield

    enfield Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex UK
    24 bit adds more quantization distortion that 16 bit. There is also no DAC that can replicate anywhere near the full range of hi-rez, if it did it would deafen the listener. Nearly all modern music and its full dynamic range sits easily within 10 bits and 60-70 Db... 16 bits simply adds 6 extra bits of noise. 24 bit adds 14 bits of extra noise. Nothing more or less. No matter how advanced the DAC or how hi-rez the recording is, we are all listening the the same amount of dynamic range and the same amount of bits are needed and used for that purpose. Anything else is surplus and has no effect on the sound
     
    GetHappy!! likes this.
  3. bgiliberti

    bgiliberti Will You Be My Neighbor?

    Location:
    USA
    Not sounding the same is not synonymous with “distortion.” Often the hi rez version had had a different mastering, has had the EQ tweaked, or the like. I am also not clear what people mean by “distortion.” CDs don’t sound distorted to me, they sound fine. Sometimes I like the high res better, sometimes I prefer the red book. But I don’t really think distortion would be the term I would use to describe the differences.
     
  4. Coltrane811

    Coltrane811 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigan
    Then how would we know there is distortion on the CD…

    Of course we can measure the distortion, it’s super simple.
     
    DIYmusic likes this.
  5. Luca

    Luca Wolf under sheep clothing

    Location:
    Torino, Italy
    From a purely technical point of view, I agree. A low pass filter that implements a steep slope from 22.05 Khz onwards AND that doesn't introduce phase distortion in the highest frequencies simply does not exist. Luckily, in the better implementations, the effect is (almost) inaudible.
     
  6. DIYmusic

    DIYmusic Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania

    Many claim the "High" res version is slightly more distorted in comparison to a master tape, so there is that also....

    I think it goes without saying, Either format can sound so close to identical to a master, that we are splitting hairs.

    FYI, blind testing done by guys claiming that Higher res sounds better, does not back up their claims. Not saying that is NO difference, but it is not meaningful or something that that is easily distinguished by most people into audio.
     
    VQR, bgiliberti and wgriel like this.
  7. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    I said the CD and high-res from the same source. That means the same mastering for each with the same EQ and same other things except for the CD gets resampled and dithered down to 16-bit 44.1 kHz.

    And it is not true that often the high-res has a different mastering. In my collection the vast majority of albums that I have in both CD and high-res are the same mastering for each. Especially for classical. But also true for my popular music CDs and high-res.
     
  8. bgiliberti

    bgiliberti Will You Be My Neighbor?

    Location:
    USA
    I have found obtaining reliable information about the source and mastering of hi rez files elusive. This includes some marvelous classical recordings that I really love. I was just listening to Ferenc Fricsay’s fantastic Don Giovanni originally for DG on Qobuz in 24/192. Sounded great, but there were no details that I could find about the hi rez mastering. Even though I was streaming it, I checked the Qobuz store. No luck. Unfortunately, the hi rez sites don’t always provide details about the hi rez mastering, unlike CDs, where this is often provided. Where does one find this info?
     
    Joy-of-radio and Coltrane811 like this.
  9. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    You aren't going to find the detailed information about high-res provenance for the majority of high-res releases. So you have to make some assumptions.

    If the recording is a recent digital recording and the CD and high-res are released at the same time then why would the label pay a mastering engineer twice to do two separate masterings with different EQ or different tweaks to get the high-res to sound different or better than the CD? That would be silly and a waste of money.

    You can also tell by ear and by measurements. If there are EQ differences or compressor differences between the CD and high-res that would be both easy to hear and easy to measure. Those kinds of differences between CD and high-res releases just aren't showing up. This is for regular current albums that aren't the type to get remastered releases every few years.

    DG and other UMG labels are a special case. They got caught putting audible watermarks in some of their digital download and digital streaming releases.
    See here: Universal's Audible Watermark
    They got caught because the watermarked files were audibly different and measurably different. It was inevitable that they'd eventually get caught. Cause audiophiles listen well and measure.

    The Ferenc Fricsay recording of Don Giovanni is going to be harder to know if both the CD and the high-res are from the same tape transfer and same mastering session. Cause it's a recording from around 1960 and recorded to analog tape. Finding the provenance for the CD and the high-res would require some inside knowledge and be known only by the label, the mastering engineer and maybe a few others.

    But other recent digitally recorded classical albums are easier to figure out. For example the high-res and CD of the Naxos release of Ēriks Ešenvalds: The Doors of Heaven are the same other than the CD being downsampled and dithered.
     
    VQR, Thymallus, vwestlife and 2 others like this.
  10. bgiliberti

    bgiliberti Will You Be My Neighbor?

    Location:
    USA
    Excellent point about simultaneous releases of new CD and Hi-Rez to be presumably from the same source. For example, I’ve really been enjoying the Joni Mitchell archive releases on qobuz in 24/192, and it’s clearly from the same source as the new CD releases. Five years ago I would have spent a lot of money to get CDs of the entire set. Now I would do so only if it were on SACD.
     
  11. DIYmusic

    DIYmusic Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pennsylvania


    I agree with most of what you say, but, as far as having Two masters, you say silly and a waste of money, but why silly?

    And how much more would it cost to literally do a small EQ change and save it as a DSD file....not much at all. You are talking literally a few minutes of time or so, and a 2nd DSD file, not cost prohibitive.

    You can tell by ear?
    I have read about high res versions that do sound different in the pop/rock world.....I think there is a lot of confusion as to whether this does happen frequently or not. Not as obvious as you say.
     
    bgiliberti likes this.
  12. Classic Car Guy

    Classic Car Guy - Touch the Face of God -

    Location:
    Northwest, USA
    This is definitely a long and endless dilemma.

    [​IMG]
     
  13. Joe from So Cal

    Joe from So Cal Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    FWIW, I get my hearing checked annually at work. Normal.

    The absolute tippy top highest frequency I can hear runs about 13.5k HZ. A far cry from the 20-20k HZ we hear about.
     
  14. Beattles

    Beattles Senior Member

    Location:
    Florence, SC
    Has anyone compared a flat (or with the same mastering chain) digital transfer of an analog recording at 24\96 vs the same transfer at 44.1\16 (not one dithered down)? That would be apples to apples comparison.
     
    DIYmusic likes this.
  15. Spaceboy

    Spaceboy Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Near Edinburgh, UK
    I don't think that's particularly accurate. Saying a DAC that replicated full dynamic range would "deafen the listener" is silly. The DAC's output goes to an amp where the volume is adjusted and therefore peak volume is regulated. Sure, that means very low level signals will not be audible, but in no way is the DAC not capable of outputting a full dynamic range.
     
    VQR and BostonBob like this.
  16. enfield

    enfield Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex UK
    Head-fi
    Gregorio

    'So, 24bit does add more 'resolution' compared to 16bit but this added resolution doesn't mean higher quality, it just means we can encode a larger dynamic range. This is the misunderstanding made by many. There are no extra magical properties, nothing which the science does not understand or cannot measure. The only difference between 16bit and 24bit is 48dB of dynamic range (8bits x 6dB = 48dB) and nothing else. This is not a question for interpretation or opinion, it is the provable, undisputed logical mathematics which underpins the very existence of digital audio.

    So, can you actually hear any benefits of the larger (48dB) dynamic range offered by 24bit? Unfortunately, no you can't. The entire dynamic range of some types of music is sometimes less than 12dB. The recordings with the largest dynamic range tend to be symphony orchestra recordings but even these virtually never have a dynamic range greater than about 60dB. All of these are well inside the 96dB range of the humble CD. What is more, modern dithering techniques (see 3 below), perceptually enhance the dynamic range of CD by moving the quantisation noise out of the frequency band where our hearing is most sensitive. This gives a percievable dynamic range for CD up to 120dB (150dB in certain frequency bands).

    You have to realise that when playing back a CD, the amplifier is usually set so that the quietest sounds on the CD can just be heard above the noise floor of the listening environment (sitting room or cans). So if the average noise floor for a sitting room is say 50dB (or 30dB for cans) then the dynamic range of the CD starts at this point and is capable of 96dB (at least) above the room noise floor. If the full dynamic range of a CD was actually used (on top of the noise floor), the home listener (if they had the equipment) would almost certainly cause themselves severe pain and permanent hearing damage. If this is the case with CD, what about 24bit Hi-Rez. If we were to use the full dynamic range of 24bit and a listener had the equipment to reproduce it all, there is a fair chance, depending on age and general health, that the listener would die instantly. The most fit would probably just go into coma for a few weeks and wake up totally deaf. I'm not joking or exaggerating here, think about it, 144dB + say 50dB for the room's noise floor. But 180dB is the figure often quoted for sound pressure levels powerful enough to kill and some people have been killed by 160dB. However, this is unlikely to happen in the real world as no DAC on the market can output the 144dB dynamic range of 24bit (so they are not true 24bit converters), almost no one has a speaker system capable of 144dB dynamic range and as said before, around 60dB is the most dynamic range you will find on a commercial recording.

    So, if you accept the facts, why does 24bit audio even exist, what's the point of it? There are some useful application for 24bit when recording and mixing music. In fact, when mixing it's pretty much the norm now to use 48bit resolution. The reason it's useful is due to summing artefacts, multiple processing in series and mainly headroom. In other words, 24bit is very useful when recording and mixing but pointless for playback. Remember, even a recording with 60dB dynamic range is only using 10bits of data, the other 6bits on a CD are just noise. So, the difference in the real world between 16bit and 24bit is an extra 8bits of noise.

    I know that some people are going to say this is all rubbish, and that “I can easily hear the difference between a 16bit commercial recording and a 24bit Hi-Rez version”. Unfortunately, you can't, it's not that you don't have the equipment or the ears, it is not humanly possible in theory or in practice under any conditions!! Not unless you can tell the difference between white noise and white noise that is well below the noise floor of your listening environment!! If you play a 24bit recording and then the same recording in 16bit and notice a difference, it is either because something has been 'done' to the 16bit recording, some inappropriate processing used or you are hearing a difference because you expect a difference.'
     
    crispi, Robert C, Jimi Floyd and 6 others like this.
  17. Takehaniyasubiko

    Takehaniyasubiko Forum Resident

    Location:
    Void
    A well-mastered CD is all the human ear needs, even a bit beyond it. However, there's little money in that model, is there?

    They need to add technical mumbo jumbo all the time, to make people spend More and More™ for Better and Better™.
     
  18. rexp

    rexp Forum Resident

    Location:
    SE Asia
    I can accept 16bit is all you need to record and playback music. What I cannot accept is down converting 24bit files to 16bit doesn't sometimes degrade the sound.
     
  19. Spaceboy

    Spaceboy Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Near Edinburgh, UK
    Others in this thread have disagreed and say 24 bit uses smaller voltage steps.
     
  20. harby

    harby Forum Resident

    Location:
    Portland, OR, USA
    Dithering is an essential part of reducing word length, so I don't know what you are proposing here. If you used 24 bit hardware, and then swapped in 16 bit hardware, the equipment would make a difference. If you use 24 bit hardware and then choose 16 bit output, then there is conversion from its internal high quality format to a lower CD bit depth using the best algorithm.

    There are then some who might think they are playing 24 bit, but some setup error has caused playback stage to be limited to 16 and done no dithering, so they unknowingly do this test anyway.

    And of course countless comparisons between different resolutions have been done. How about the difference between 16 bit and 6 bit? Can you hear the timbre difference between the two samples in this FLAC clip?
     
    Robert C likes this.
  21. matrix-6

    matrix-6 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    You can check for yourself with Audacity. Open both, reverse the polarity of one, add them together and look at the results. If there are any differences you will see them.
     
    Luca likes this.
  22. enfield

    enfield Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex UK
    Science accepts that it doesn't and can't degrade the sound. Controlled blind listening tests of the same file also accept that it doesn't degrade the sound.
     
    Last edited: Mar 18, 2023
  23. enfield

    enfield Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex UK
    With respect it seems that hi-res devotees do tend to clutch at straws a bit. They seem to have backed off from arguing that unused 'bits' could have has any affect of sound quality. They are now trying to find other things that must be influencing their ears (brain). To be fair there are just as many arguments for 16 bit as for 24 bit. To take your example 24 bit may theoretically use smaller voltage steps whereas 16 bit may have less quantization distortion than 24 bit..etc. It doesn't really matter as none of these things would affect sound quality. Just as unused 'bits/noise' would not affect sound quality.
     
    VQR, crispi and Giobacco like this.
  24. Giobacco

    Giobacco Forum Resident

    Location:
    Italy
    THIS! and NOTHING else.
     
    crispi, Jimi Floyd, bever70 and 2 others like this.
  25. Classic Car Guy

    Classic Car Guy - Touch the Face of God -

    Location:
    Northwest, USA
    I'm in the wrong business. I may have to open up a new company making DAC starting with the new line up "This is it ver. 1" for $7,999. I'll get the best talker in the internet and in no time be rich beyond the dreams of avarice... :wave:
     
    VQR likes this.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine