24 bit music question


Contact your local mastering engineer for more information about why 96/24 is better than 44/16.

I'm tired to hear the same "scientific arguments" over and over since the CD debuts. 
Well, if you did read the link, it explains why 96/24 is better. For mastering engineers. It is right there in the text, no need to argue about that. It makes no sense for the end user, though :)

It is also funny to discuss with someone who dismisses "scientific" arguments, with those scarequotes. Putting "scientific" in quotes makes little sense if you really are trying to get to the truth of the matter. It does make a lot of sense, though, if you are selling snake oil...I mean, if you're tring to con people into buying extra expensive recordings or extra expensive audiophile gear. In that case, it makes a lot of sense to make them think that it should be written like "scientific" :)

I still conclude that you're a believer in the religion of audiophilia :D
 
regardless of belief and fact, the fact is they sell and I own 24bit music and would like to play it on the Pandora / Pyra , I would like to get the most out of this device and don't want to carry around multiple devices.. Bud
 
I'm sure the Pyra will be able to play your recordings - but it might re-sample them down from completely inaudible levels of extra detail or only-just-inaudible levels of extra detail.

Either way, you will benefit from the beautifully low levels of distortion on the analogue output side of things that can be achieved with carefully designed modern electronics.
 
Your orders of magnitude comparison is off by orders of magnitude.
Yes, you're right: in the supermarket analogy I was introducing 5-6 additional decimal digits (8 instead of 2-3), while in the case of audio we are talking about doubling the sampling frequency and 8 more bits per sample, so what used to be one 16 bit sample become two 24 bit samples, so the accuracy improves by 32 bits or about 10-11 decimal digits. So it would be a more accurate analogy if the supermarket would express its prices with 13 decimal digits, e.g. on the Google playstore you would probably pay $0.9999999999999 instead of just $0.99.

If you're talking about 192kHz sampling frequency with 24 bit samples, you go from one 16 bit sample to four 24 bit samples, so 80 extra bits of accuracy or about 24 extra decimal digits. So on the Google playstore you would get prices like $0.99999999999999999999999999.
No amount of sufficiently high spectral  information is going to make any curmulative impact in lower registers (harmonic noise), whereas whole numbers with the same entity will.

The ear isnt a float vector. It interprets a fixed A-weighed range. 24bit is 8 extra bit.

While most of it is outside of the auditory range for humans, its not useless. Also, sub 20Hz information travels in the physical realm, which is a point to make if you arent daft.

Following the obvious rebuttal there, I think having different sound-files for different purposes is a way of the old "lossy for mobile" type ordeal, which got old fast. Being able to do dumb things isnt a reason to do them.

Similar ability in jpegs is just as bad a reason to encode files for other purposes and forget about intent.

Outright bad encoding is very much present within the 16/44.1khz domain of CDs and the like.

To an extent i would rather listen to digitally mastered vinyl, or even casette (!) with what goes on there. The hires _files_ are most often good and done right in comparison.

Wherever you consider the flaw, be it capability, practice, cost or design, its not like there is a lot to lose. CD music is worsening and price of storage is going down.

Design right and pay the price and let the others do as they will, wont change a thing anyhow, unless the power of pyra-sales orders of magnitudes its way to becoming a factor in the market.

With 24bit you can do resampled softvolum and still retain enough dynamics for the auditory range to be saturated, that isnt useless.

In any event, no amount of bad math and ill understood science is going to disdain people from paying the extra dollars it takes to be able to play all files without transcoding first. Its even a quite significant extra value added. (in sales)
 
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Also, sub 20Hz information travels in the physical realm, which is a point to make if you arent daft.
What do you mean by that ? That vibrations lower than 20 Hz will impact the way you "feel" music ? The use case is always devoid of purpose, because below 20Hz you will only feel it if the amplitude is really big, which is anyway not the case unless you try to recreate the feeling of a shaking ground or something.
 
The ear isnt a float vector. It interprets a fixed A-weighed range. 24bit is 8 extra bit.
The ear has clear limits in terms of resolution, at anything above 16 bits of information cannot be picked up by the ear. Again, no super-human has been identified to pick up 24 bits music better than 16 bits music in blind test comparisons. So, this is useless information, no matter how you try to justify it. And of course there are limits, if not I could tell you that 24 bits is not enough and you 1024 bits quality to get even better sound - the gain you gain as you go higher in resolution is extremely limited, and after a certain point it's imperceptible.
 
The ear isnt a float vector. It interprets a fixed A-weighed range. 24bit is 8 extra bit.
The ear has clear limits in terms of resolution, at anything above 16 bits of information cannot be picked up by the ear. Again, no super-human has been identified to pick up 24 bits music better than 16 bits music in blind test comparisons. So, this is useless information, no matter how you try to justify it. And of course there are limits, if not I could tell you that 24 bits is not enough and you 1024 bits quality to get even better sound - the gain you gain as you go higher in resolution is extremely limited, and after a certain point it's imperceptible.
Not the limits you operate with, but what the ear is capable of, or other reasons i mentioned. Notice how it wasnt based on nothing. Either its extremely limited or it cannot be picked up, i know which one it is, but you seem to imply both.

Also, sub 20Hz information travels in the physical realm, which is a point to make if you arent daft.
What do you mean by that ? That vibrations lower than 20 Hz will impact the way you "feel" music ? The use case is always devoid of purpose, because below 20Hz you will only feel it if the amplitude is really big, which is anyway not the case unless you try to recreate the feeling of a shaking ground or something.
For example, yes.

>will feel

>devoid of purpose

pick one.

All music is vibration and physical variations thereof certainly are not arbritrary to music. But implying music is the only purpose of a DAC is.
 
FWIW with latest firmawre update pandora can now output 24bit audio to it's DAC, but player needs to be configured to output directly to sound device, and not virtual dmix one that mixes to 16bit 44kHz.

With mplayer it's done like this:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 somefile.flac
 
So finally the 24 bit audioguys can leave us be for a while, and enjoy their ultrasounds. 
The extra bit depth does not help for ultrasound. It adds more resolution than necessary, but not higher frequencies. It does not hurt, it just allows you to fill your SD card faster.
 
Actually that could be fun. You could then make a picture of the sun and get a sunburn and skin cancer by looking at it B) .
Digital sensors, and I assume film too does capture infra red, due to the red filters/chemicals not being precisely tuned to the same limit as our red cones. You just need to filter out all the visible light so the sensor gets activated/chemical gets converted only due to the IR. I assume they pick up UV too by a similar process. Looking at an IR picture doesn't actually feel hot though, just as the silver from an old silver oxide positive doesn't reflect the original light that formed it.

OT in the extreme - I suspect a camera sensor would work better as an IR sensor if it didn't have the RGB filter in front of it. And it wasn't your point, though I suspect this thread has gone to seed anyway, so I may as well.
DSLR's can take IR shots HOWEVER they need to be modified to do this as IR being a longer wavelength focuses on a different plain. you also need a special IR filter that blocks all visible light from entering the lens . and a corresponding longer shutter speed. its easier to fake it in Photoshop..lol
 
but player needs to be configured to output directly to sound device, and not virtual dmix one that mixes to 16bit 44kHz.
One could still configure ALSA to use 24bit for dmix, though, it'll automatically expand incoming 16bit data.
 
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