[1] There is no "scamming" on equipment. I have $120 DACs that play DSD64.
[2] What we should all be bothered by is what your industry is delivering to us in that larger container. So far it looks like a ton of garbage in a number of instances. I sure as heck don't expect to pay more for high-res and then get handed tones from computer monitors as such inside it.
[3] Why not start a campaign in your industry to perform QC on what is produced?
[4] But yes, if I had any confidence that the people creating music understood noise shaping and utilized it correctly, you would kind of, sort of, have an argument. But I don't.
[5] Give me the 24 bits, and I can convert it to 16 bits with noise shaping if I want.
[5a] You see the message here? We want less finger in the soup that are not washed.
1. Let's say your $120 DAC plays audibly perfectly, noise and artefacts below -120dB. What about another DAC which also performs audibly perfectly, with artefacts below -120dB but costs $2k instead of $120? It's pretty much guaranteed that $2k DAC is being sold as having audibly superior performance but unless you're happy to pay an extra $1,880 just for a prettier case, how is that not an equipment scam?
2. Of course it's a ton of garbage, what did you expect? You wanted better fidelity, you're getting it, all of it; computer monitors, other electrical interference, mechanical noise from the musical instruments, a ton of garbage plus some small amount of probably the twentieth and higher harmonics of actual musical notes. I stated all this on this very thread more than 5 years ago! None of us engineers can hear anything up there, so how on earth can we process it? With 96/24, at least three quarters of the data we've recorded we can't hear. Heck, even with 16/44 we probably can't hear at least a quarter of it! There's little we can do about it, recording sessions have a flow, they are run around the talent, to encourage the best performance. Making the talent wait because of some serious technical issue can cause the talent to loose the vibe and if the talent happens to be a 100 piece orch, then it's disastrous but making them wait for a technical issue which isn't even remotely audible would be absolutely ridiculous!
3. Because I can't QC what I can't hear. There's more than enough to be concerned about in the audible range, I don't have time to worry about what's way, way outside of human hearing. If you don't like or want a ton of garbage, my advice is to try a low pass filter, if you set it at around 20kHz you'll get rid of most of the garbage and cause little/no damage to audible freqs!
4. Well, you've kind of/sort of answered one of my questions, yea! Now what about the next one, where noise-shaped dither is not used, why do you think it has not been used?
5. Fine, what about 32bit, you obviously want that because you quoted that you've got some? What about 64bit, that's what most commercial music is created in these days, don't you want that too? ...
5a. You see the message here? When does it end? Answer: It will never end! As long as audiophile manufacturers and content distributors can come up with marketing which audiophiles will believe, sample rates and bit depths will continue to increase, regardless of the fact that the music performance they think they're buying will occupy a smaller and smaller percentage of what they're buying and more and more of it will just be garbage, which fortunately they won't be able to hear anyway, unless it causes IMD of course but then that could be marketed as analogue sounding, yea!
G
