Why do all these box sets have 96khz / 24 bit audio?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Feat21, Oct 9, 2019.

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  1. Feat21

    Feat21 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    On Blu Ray, when 96 / 24 is one tier lower than the highest quality possible???
     
  2. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Why go 192 when more than likely there's only dark skies?
     
  3. Exotiki

    Exotiki The Future Ain’t What It Use To Be

    Location:
    Canada
    To be honest I would wager the person with the best hearing possible couldn’t tell the difference between a 48/24 recording of a vinyl record and the same record played on a full analog system

    And that’s saying something coming from me. My last hearing test confirmed I could hear up to 23.5k
     
  4. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Probably why I've had no issues doing transfers of my LP's/12's and 7's :laugh:
    I default to 96, for curiosity reasons. I like to see that digital in those 'analog' recordings :D
     
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  5. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    I'm editing 16/44khz files ripped from a CD upconverted in Audacity to 32bit floating point and pulling out all kinds of nuanced detail and then applying a limiter, saving and reopening to pull out even more detail and applying another limiter.

    No degradation or any artifacts in the final results. More dynamic range, fuller sound and louder than hell so I don't over crank and over drive my car's amp and subs. Never saw any benefit downloading 96/24 files from Qobuz or HDtracks and editing only that it slowed the hell out of my processor and made it get real hot. No difference in sound from the CD version I was editing.

    I really like the high quality tape hiss I pull out of these 40 year old recordings. A lot better than what I heard on the cassette back then of the same song.
     
  6. simon-wagstaff

    simon-wagstaff Forum Resident

    I only need to hear to about 5khz to hear a pop or a tick or a scratch.

    I can definitely hear the difference between a CD and 24/48. From there to 24/96? Maybe. To me it's more about bit depth than frequency response.
     
  7. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    Bit depth is the surgeon's knife and sampling rate is the meat, but that only applies to editing or altering the original waveform. If one is hearing a difference just on playback then the system is applying similar editing on the fly like what streaming services may be offering when serving up high rez audio above CD standard.
     
  8. jlf

    jlf Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    I honestly have no clue where to start here. First, you’re not getting any extra detail by upconverting a 16/44.1 source to 32-bit, you’re just getting a bloated file of an inferior source. And I can’t see how the repeated use of a limiter results in “more dynamic range” as you suggest. A limiter is so named because it limits dynamic range. After applying several layers of a limiter, you’re crushing the dynamic range so it’s perceptively louder but there can’t be any detail left (detail is perceived thanks to dynamic range). Saying that this method is better than downloading a hi-res transfer of the master tape is pretty laughable.
     
  9. jlf

    jlf Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    What?
     
  10. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    Analogies are all I'm going to offer when explaining the complex, abstract world of how digital mimics reality through electronics for both image and sound.

    Reading the room here for a little over year no one's yet proven the abstract. And really it's not worth it anyway.
     
  11. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    I never said there is extra detail upconverting. I learned that on the digital photography side of things. The detail is already captured during the recording either directly digital or analog to digital transfer conversion.

    All that editing in upconverted 32bit floating point does is precisely map any edits being applied through an EQ or other effect in a DAW so the user can hear through the sound card what the edits are revealing. You can't edit what you can't hear. Just like I can't edit a photo if I don't work in 16bit (upconverted) in Photoshop so the edits map more precisely to an 8bit video pipeline.

    That's why bit level is analogous to a surgeon's knife for editing or mapping data only.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2019
  12. art

    art Senior Member

    Location:
    520
    Thank the gods.
     
  13. hallucalation

    hallucalation Forum Resident

    Location:
    Nowhere Man
    Where did you test it? Most of hearing tests systems ends at 8kHz. Even Onlinetonegenerator site didn't go above 20kHz.
     
    Contact Lost likes this.
  14. Tim S

    Tim S Senior Member

    Location:
    East Tennessee
    Maybe because more people that can play the discs have 96k capability, and less people have 192k? Could be, I think, just a guess.
     
    fairaintfair and starduster like this.
  15. Linger63

    Linger63 Forum Resident

    Location:
    AUSTRALIA
    24/192 requires double the space.
     
  16. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    I've wondered why as well. When I've asked people who do studio recording why that is they say because some of the studio recording gear and processing gear may not be able to go above 24/96, and that recording multiple tracks and mixing multiple tracks at above 24/96 increases the risk of digital glitches and digital problems happening during the recording process. They can do 24/96 recording in the studio reliably enough. But increase that to 24/192 and the risk of digital glitches happening during the recording session increases. If a digital glitch or other 24/192 related problem happens during that perfect take of the song then that gets blamed on the audio engineers and the studio. Why take that risk of losing that perfect take just to do 24/192 when 24/96 is more reliable. Unfortunately that is also the same logic that causes so many recordings to be done in 24/44.1 instead of 24/96. Less risk of digital glitches and other digital recording issues when recording at 24/44.1 instead of 24/96.
     
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  17. oxenholme

    oxenholme Senile member

    Location:
    Knoydart
    What are digital glitches, and why would they happen?
     
  18. Tim Lookingbill

    Tim Lookingbill Alfalfa Male

    Location:
    New Braunfels, TX
    One would have to be a computer science and electronics engineer to know for sure.

    Just a guess, but since some here claim they can hear a more opened up stereo imaging stage presence simply playing back high rez audio when others don't with or without high rez data, suggests that stage presence could be considered a glitch caused by data overload on the processors and buffering caches that can slow down and speed up data in milliseconds time shifting left and right channels (an effect that can be create in Audacity quite easily) which sounds like a slight and subtle tape delay or reverb effect.

    I've heard some weird stuff on CD files that had severe DC offset and after I applied a reverb effect the first half of the song sounded OK but toward the end there was a micro echo or doppler effect. After I backed out of the effect, I first corrected DC Offset and then re-applied the reverb effect which corrected it. This doesn't happen on all songs that have a slight bit amount of DC offset, though.
     
  19. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    Even just playing back high-res stereo the computer can cause glitches where the computer kinda pauses for a few samples and causes an audible click in the digital signal. Essentially the computer having a high processing latency in a different thread that causes the thread running the audio recording to get delayed and miss a few samples. When the computer is recording multiple channels at 24/192 the risk of a little bit of random processing latency to cause a glitch in the recording increases.
     
    Tim Lookingbill likes this.
  20. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    You don't need to hear to 20kHz to be able to hear and appreciate the benefits of high-res recordings. You can hear the benefits in the midrange and bass. Better layering and space around the midrange and bass. Better separation. Better imaging. You don't need to hear up to 14k or 20k to be able to hear those differences. I'm over 50 with poor hearing for my age and I can still hear the benefit of high-res over CD. My secret is using good gear of the right type and knowing how and what to listen for and knowing the right type of recordings to do it.

    One example is "The Doors Of Heaven" performed by the Portland State University Chamber Choir and recorded by John Atkinson of Stereophile. The recording is available in 24/88.2 download and on CD. Links to the recording and downloads are in this post. Buy the high-res download and the CD and compare. Listen to the bass drum in the first track. There is more space and ambiance around the bass drum in the high-res version. The high-res version also sounds much more real. It's uncanny.

    Steve Hoffman has a post describing a midrange purity listening test using a Bing Crosby CD track. There is a point in that Bing Crosby track where the vocal jumps out and has extra space and ambiance around it. The bass drum hits in the "The Doors Of Heaven" recording do something like that in the high-res version and don't do that in the CD version. You don't need to be able to hear to 20kHz to hear a bass drum and the room ambiance around a bass drum that is recorded in a church hall. All of that is present in the bass and midrange. All of the difference between the bass drum in the high-res and the CD is in the bass region and midrange region and upper midrange region and the better impulse response of the high-res vs CD playback.

    And that's why it is better to record in high-res. 24/88.2 or 24/96 is good high-res. 24/176.4 or 24/192 is a little bit better.
     
  21. aphexj

    aphexj Sound mind & body

    24/96 stereo is backwards compatible with older home audio receivers from the DVD era, that is the real answer to the original post's question posed by @Feat21

    This is also why they encode with formats like Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD for Blu-ray surround mixes... those decode as lossless for compatible converters, but also come with a lossy core for transmission over S/PDIF digital connections to older converters. I have seen Blu-rays with stereo tracks encoded DTS-HD as well so they can get 24/192 lossless packed in but still be somewhat backwards compatible — S/PDIF won't carry the full resolution of that either, it doesn't have the bandwidth, so you get something like CD quality instead if you play it that way
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2019
  22. jlf

    jlf Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    Or, and bear with me here... each person is different and no one’s perception of sound is exactly the same?


    Let me try an analogy from the digital photography world. Let’s say you want to look at the Mona Lisa. Obviously, that painting has been scanned and reprinted in books and posted online in all matter of resolutions. You can Google image search and find that there are scans and photos of wildly different quality.

    Now, the way to see the Mona Lisa with the most clarity and depth of color would be in person. Next closest thing in terms of accuracy would be a very high resolution scan that preserves all the details of the colors, depth, contrast, etc.

    Of course, most people don’t need a super high resolution scan of a painting — any other good-enough scan tells the story in a way that can be perceived. Just as many say that those extra bits sand samples are unnecessary. I’m not here to push hi-res, but just as a super hi-res scan reveals more details of a painting and gets us closer to a totally accurate depiction of what you’d see in person, a hi-res, well-mastered transfer of a recording can do the same for sound. Whether particular ears can perceive the extra bits is another debate, just as I’m sure there are different scanning methods for digital photography that render slightly different results that are still pretty much spot-on.

    The method you’re describing above with your Audacity editing is like taking a low-res scan of a photo and mangling with it in photoshop until it’s a blurry, colorless mess — like a black-and-white thumbnail picture out of an old encyclopedia — then printing that out and scanning several times, and finally saying, “wow now I can really see the greys!”

    Sorry if my terminology is off or my understanding of photo scanning isn’t 100%.
     
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  23. If you're getting DC offset, don't you think you would first start with checking out your sound card to make sure it's in spec before going to all the trouble of correcting it in the manner you are?
     
  24. Herman Schultz

    Herman Schultz Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York City
    Thanks. When I read his post I thought it was some sort of audiophile humor. :shrug:
     
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  25. tootull

    tootull Looking through a glass onion

    Location:
    Canada
    ...and is considered by some as overkill for rock music.
     
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