Is 16/44.1 still a decent quality in 2020?

So your saying the fact that a format goes “beyond what humans can hear” tells you everything about sound quality? Soundstage, separation, transients, everything is explained by what frequency extreme a format reaches?

 

Good. For a second there, I suspected my reading comprehension chip was faulty.

 

You don't know nor can you prove why.

 

My 18 year old uncle who was a self taught electronics technician and hired after graduating high school by Compaq computer without any training or degree told me how digital signal processing worked back in '73 and quite simply enough to understand that tells me you don't understand how digital works.

You have a light bulb that gives off 1000 lumens (brightness or amplitude in db). You go to the light switch and turn it off and on 44,000 times a second and you can bet that light bulb will remain static as if it's constantly on but at half amplitude=500 lumens (half brightness or dim looking).
That's all digital sampling does to an analog signal sourced from a mic recording a performance in the studio. Digital sampling records micro-fine amplitude changes at 44000 times a second that give the impression that you're hearing very detailed sound much like you watching 24 frames per second movie that gives the illusion of movement.

Tell me how 96000 times a second sampling is going to record more detail when you can't even distinguish 24 frames a second with your own eyes?

 

100% is, to me.

 

There IS more detail an upper treble in hi-rez files. Whether anyone can tell them apart from 16/44 on a blind A/B test..............not sure about that, or what kind of expensive rig/perfect hearing combo would you need to do so. Great analogy BTW !

 

Then why didn't you take an honest ABX test & post a successful report (i.e. 9+ successes out of 10 attempts, or better)?.. In the mean time feel free to use samples I posted awhile back (I failed the ABX test with those, BTW)

 

16/44.1 is what I have so it'll have to do.

 

you don't listen to music with your retinas. So there's that.

I am not anti 16/44.1k by any means- I listen to that format more than any other. But my home listening experience indicates that the best CD recordings just about get to a B+. And for whatever reason, CDs just lack weight and palpability compared to analog records. That may be an additive distortion, as itundeniably is with cheap tube gear. But as with cheap tube gear, the result makes the music more involving. I've tried hard for that to not be the case, because CDs are incomparably superior in terms of convenience, as well as in regard to a lot of performance parameters.

As for 24/92, I haven't had enough listening experience to say for sure. But my impression is that 16/44.1k falls just a bit short of keeping all of the recorded information intact and coherent, and that 24/96 should provide enough extra resolution to exceed the sensitivity of hair cell transmissions to the auditory nerve that account for the business end of human auditory faculties. Which are ultimately digital in their own right, undeniably, as is the on/off firing of rods and cones. The human auditory sense just happens to process information with a lot more sensitivity and immediacy than the visual faculty. (It's nothing to construct illusions that stimulate the human visual sense to produce phantom afterimages, for example. Or to trick it in all sorts of other ways.)

 

Familiar with the term ¨analogy¨, anyone ?

 

But there's tons more data flying at your eyes 24 frames a second both sound and picture watching a movie so there's that for some perspective.

 

Also, more depth in the soundstage. And a overall less digital sound than redbook.

 

I actually have an undergraduate degree in mathematics and took a course in digital to analog conversion (albeit in 1988) so I probably understand digital better than 99% of the people on this thread. And to your “analogy” our eyes can distinguish 24 fps, and it’s very easy to see the difference between that and 60 fps.

 

Not really. At the level of rod and cone processing, it's considerably simplified. And the visual sense is easily tricked. It doesn't keep up very well.

Moreover, the fact that humans with "normal" vision have around 70-80% of their perceptual faculties devoted to the visual sense doesn't help the situation. That emphasis merely makes the visual sense easier to fool.

Consider virtual reality. What's the biggest hurdle to a providing a more convincing mock-up of sensory "reality", at present? Synchronizing the auditory sense with the visual sense.

 

Returning to the OP's question, "Is 16/44.1 still a decent quality in 2020?" I would say the answer is a resounding Yes. A 16-bit digital source allows for a noise floor low enough that it's impossible to detect in the overwhelming majority of home listening environments.

16 bits gives you a -96dB noise floor. That's better than most amplifiers and as good as a surprising (or depressing) number of DACs out there. For reference, a quiet room will have residual sound in the 30dB range, and sustained peak levels above 85dB can damage your hearing. Even if you listen with noise-cancelling over-ear headphones, you're going to have a heck of a time hearing the noise floor of 16-bit unless you turn up the volume so much that you risk damaging your ears with the peaks. Throw in noise-shaping dither and the effective noise floor of 16-bit becomes about 120dB, which is demonstrably at or below the level of human hearing in any conditions.

As for a 44.1kHz sample rate, digital sampling theory tells us that for a frequency to be perfectly reconstructed, it needs to be sampled twice. So 44.1kHz can sample a signal up to 22.05kHz. That's beyond the upper range of human hearing. Even with a gentle aka slow aka crappy digital reconstruction filter that allows aliasing of frequencies above 22.05kHz down into the audible range, you still get "clean," non-aliased sound up to 18kHz or beyond - and almost no one over the age of about 25 can hear beyond 18kHz. (Personally I prefer a 48kHz sample rate because it makes filtering easier and does not require a trade-off of frequency response for phase linearity in the highest audible frequencies, but I will leave that aside for the moment because in practice I don't think it really matters.)

It's important to emphasize that 44.1kHz is no less capable of sampling audible frequencies than a higher sample rate is - 44.1kHz does not actually lack "resolution" when it comes to the audible range of human hearing. Higher sample rates do not make the same frequency sound better or more detailed. Think about it: if that were true, then even with 44.1kHz material, lower frequencies would sound more "high-res" because a 44.1kHz sample rate takes 10 times as many samples of a 1kHz signal as it does of a 10kHz signal. But no one would ever claim that a 1kHz sound sampled at 44.1kHz sounded more "detailed" or "refined" than a 10kHz sound.

Now, all that said, I am not necessarily claiming that a 16/44.1k source will always sound identical to a 24/96k version of the same source. However, my reasoning has nothing to do with resolution. Most of the time when we compare a "high res" source with a CD-quality version, we're listening to a 16/44.1kHz version that's been created by downsampling the 96k original to 44.1kHz, and then dithering the 24 bits down to 16-bit.

If you take a 24/96k file and downsample and dither it to 16/44.1k, and then load both versions up in Audacity, you can invert one of them, and then mix them together to see if they cancel out - this is called a null test. If you try a null test with a 24/96 file and a 16/44.1k file that was created from that 24/96k file, you will find that they never quite null out. Most of the time the difference between them will be at a very low level (indicating that the difference is very small/minor) - but while it is at a low level, that difference sounds a lot more like music than you might expect. So the downampling and dithering processes themselves do alter the signal and they alter it in ways that are very subtle but could sometimes be audible when comparing the two sources. However, I would strongly push back against the notion that this difference is reliably correlated to a preference. In sighted comparisons, sure - very few audiophiles are going to say that the 16/44.1k version sounds better. If they hear a difference they're going to feel like the high-res one must be better. But in a true blind comparison, I would be very surprised if either version were consistently or reliably rated better than the other, even among people who could hear a difference between the two.

 

yes, I am. And my point was that it's a false analogy. In terms of processing detail, there's no relevant comparison to be made between retinal transmission to the optic nerve and hair cell transmission to the auditory nerve.

< until you really get to the machine code level, where everything is everything, y'all

 

Maybe you should share this article with your 18 year old uncle

Humans perceive flicker artifacts at 500 Hz

 

If I listen to a few cd's and then put in a SACD, there isn't a whole lotta difference ... but if I listen to a couple of SACD's and then go back to a standard CD, the drop in quality is very audible, the CD is less detailed and hasn't as much headroom as the SACD, does that makes sense? Have to say, after a few cd's, or songs even, the feeling disappears and the sound normalizes ... that's my experience, but does it bother me? no, still buy cd's (and records)

 

When you go back to CD is that the CD layer of the SACD? Otherwise mastering comes into play, mind you it may come into play on a Hybrid CD/SACD too.

 

Not the thin answer I'ld expect from someone with an undergraduate degree in mathematics. But hey, just trying to make it interesting here.

60 fps is the equivelant of a synthesizer attempting to mimic the sound of a grand piano but not close enough to where it just gives a sickening feel (i.e. motion smoothing). But synthetic tones created in a DAW are so clean that EDM artists can crank it up without the distortions that would blow their huge speakers at a Rave concert. I'm sure with that kind of decibel range high rez digital might help out in this regard. Not sure.

 

It makes sense in that you're describing human sensory adaptation. A/B'ing back and forth without delay will override the adaptive nature of sound as perceived and amplify the differences if they really exist between the two formats more so, but how does one do that. It takes too long to switch discs. Once you're in dead silence the ears quickly adapt as you switch discs.

There's also a sort of mental psych effect similar to a placebo in what you expect to hear knowing that one is suppose to be better than the other so you focus only on seeking that out.

 

Yours is a bad example/analogy. Yes, you don't get to see individual 24 frames on film or video, but our eyes DO SEE jerky motion at 24 fps, it's call judder.
Just to prove your analogy is wrong, take the Gemini Man UHD BD that's at 60 fps and compare it to its 4K digital download that's at 24 fps. Motion is muchmuch smoother on the 60 fps UHD BD while judder (jerky motion) is clearly noticiable on the 4K 24 fps download or the included BD, and yes, on this case it's a day and night difference.

 

These long threads about CD limitations would be much shorter if more people would get to know Fourier and Nyquist.

 

That would be an interesting conversation over a cup of English tea (crumpet optional)

 

Too short an answer.