[FFBookman]

Visual and audible senses are not the same. This is a discussion about the narrative, marketing, and acceptance of higher resolutions by today's consumer.
 
Only the visual and audible senses are being asked to intake digital source which draws them together for comparison.  We aren't eating digital food, smelling digital scents, and can't actually touch something digital. 
 
But images and sound have been digitized for decades and we consume them all day. Only our eyes and ears are forced to interface with a digital source.
 

---

See here for a visual of how TV's have improved over the years: Team Eye vs Team Ear

---

 
With visuals, there are 2 primary arenas: theater and living room.  The theater is served by projectors, living room served by TV. Let's focus on consumer hardware - TVs. What happens in the theaters often trickles down to the consumer, but demands are different since screen and room sizes are so different.
 
Digital TV's have been "HD" for about 15 years now, first 720p then 1080p. The current top of the line is 4k. As 4k rolls out to the gaming community with the new PS4 Pro, it's fascinating watching the differences in acceptance.
 
Gaming/visual people use the term immersion to describe the hard-to-quantify sensation of being in a virtual environment. Immersion is what music is all about... you don't need to be looking anywhere, your ears are capable of immersing you into places your eyes couldn't hope to visualize.
 

---

Referencing the Ars Technica review of PS4 Pro "You're gonna want a 4k TV - visual upgrade is clear..."
 

---

 
I read 5 pages of comments on Ars Technica's review of the PS4 Pro before coming across the argument that higher resolutions aren't needed. Their argument is that 1080p is plenty, and they should focus on other areas of the experience rather than increasing resolution.
 
I counted 3 of these arguments amongst 150 comments - 2%.   Many of the commenters already have 4K displays or are interested in buying one soon. Many claim 'you have to see it for yourself'. They used the word immersion several times, claiming it was greatly but subtlety improved with 4K and HDR color.
 
Yet any discussion of hi-res audio, flac vs mp3, lossy compression, ponoplayer, or the sony walkman shows very different results. I've been in plenty of these discussions.
 
I estimate 30% of the respondents shout that it's all audio snake oil!, another 30% claim that audio compression and loudness make resolution unimportant, with the end result being over half the people cast doubt on Hi-res audio in almost any discussion of online consumers.
 
[I say consumers b/c this is not an issue in the professional world. Production people understand the highest resolution possible is always necessary for the master copy.]
 
Here's a good article explaining how higher visual resolutions are definitely observable by the eye.

---

 
Given that we see only with our 2 eyes yet we hear with our entire bodies (inside and out¹) the pickup area for sound is much larger. It cannot be turned away from or covered up. It immerses us whether we want it to or not.
 
Given that audio enters our body with no visual element it is then the entire source of our visual imagination. 
 
Pixels are smoothed out in our mind. We anti-alias things until they make sense. This is why minecraft is still awesome in the age of HD. 
 
My #SaveTheAudio argument is that the internal anti-aliasing we do to low resolution digital media stresses us. It puts a burden on us impossible to measure. We hear the song, we see the image, but the pixels and jaggies and compression artifacts bother our subconscience.
 
I am fascinated how people accept that jaggies are bad, clarity is good for visuals, but the same rules don't apply for audio. They actually apply more for audio, since audio can hit us emotionally far harder than visuals do.
 
Why do people generally accept TV resolution upgrades but scoff at audio resolution upgrades?
 
 

---

¹ Sound is vibration and vibration is detected by our entire body. Each hair follicle has a movement sensor at it's base that reports directly to the brain. Each joint has hundreds of nerve endings tracking vibration down to very low frequencies. Our eyelashes and nose hairs pick up very high frequencies. Even our chest cavity senses the pressure changes that sound creates. Before even getting to the ear we are a huge microphone for sound.
 
Inside of the ear are countless mechanisms with seemingly infinite resolution to divide incoming frequencies, amplify/EQ/compress them, and process them for survival. Sound is our primary survival sense, hardwired into the emotional center of our brains.

 

[MindsMirror]

Current hi-res consumer audio technology already exceeds the capabilities of human hearing. Current hi-res TV technology does not. Anyone with good eyesight can see the benefit of a 4K TV over 1080p. Even most people with perfect hearing can't notice the benefits of hi-res audio formats over standard red book audio which has been around for decades.
 
Your comments about aliasing and "jaggies" aren't really valid. The stair step wave form you might imagine when you think about digital audio is really just an abstract representation of data. The audio may have originated from a digital source, but in reality what your ears (and hair follicles) hear is entirely analog. The jaggies have already been removed in your DAC by the anti-aliasing filter. And even if the jaggies were not removed, they can't be heard because their frequency is beyond that which you can hear.
 
Similarly, you can't see the pixels of a TV from a distance, they blur together because they are at a higher spatial frequency than your eyes can detect. The difference is that the TV resolution is in the spatial domain, so you can see it more clearly if you move closer, and if you move close enough you can even see the individual pixels. Audio resolution is in the time domain, you can't exactly move closer in time. Technically you could play all of your 96KHz audio at half speed to be able to hear the higher frequencies, but no one would ever want to do that.
 
Regarding FLAC vs. MP3s, lossy compression is equally if not more common in images and video than in audio, and probably more noticeable too.

 

[FFBookman]

  Current hi-res consumer audio technology already exceeds the capabilities of human hearing. Current hi-res TV technology does not. Anyone with good eyesight can see the benefit of a 4K TV over 1080p. Even most people with perfect hearing can't notice the benefits of hi-res audio formats over standard red book audio which has been around for decades.
 
Your comments about aliasing and "jaggies" aren't really valid. The stair step wave form you might imagine when you think about digital audio is really just an abstract representation of data. The audio may have originated from a digital source, but in reality what your ears (and hair follicles) hear is entirely analog. The jaggies have already been removed in your DAC by the anti-aliasing filter. And even if the jaggies were not removed, they can't be heard because their frequency is beyond that which you can hear.
 
Similarly, you can't see the pixels of a TV from a distance, they blur together because they are at a higher spatial frequency than your eyes can detect. The difference is that the TV resolution is in the spatial domain, so you can see it more clearly if you move closer, and if you move close enough you can even see the individual pixels. Audio resolution is in the time domain, you can't exactly move closer in time. Technically you could play all of your 96KHz audio at half speed to be able to hear the higher frequencies, but no one would ever want to do that.
 
Regarding FLAC vs. MP3s, lossy compression is equally if not more common in images and video than in audio, and probably more noticeable too.

thanks for the reply and the discussion. i don't agree with your baseline premise though, that 'most people with perfect hearing can't notice the benefits of hi-res audio formats over the standard red book audio".
 
all people benefit from increased audio accuracy, whether they notice or not.   noticing is the problem here. 
 
lossiness, and dither/downsampling, is like lead in paint.  you might not notice it with your senses in real time but it harms your body.
 
if you tell me most people don't even notice the lead in their paint should we still work to remove it? if i can show you that it harms the body long term, would you agree to remove it?  what if 60% of customers with that red paint love it and don't notice the lead?
 
getting a group of people to agree on (notice) what they heard, especially when trying to trick them with different versions of the same thing, is impossible. test tones are ridiculous since no one listens like that, and listening tests that use music fail for all sorts of reasons i've well documented here.
 
this impossibility of passing leads to all sorts of false conclusions based on the false fail of the test.
 
this failing of the test format is what had people telling us that 192k mp3 is close enough in the 90's. 
 
this failing of the test format is what had people telling us that 256k mp3 is close enough in the 00's.
 
the failing of the test format is what still has people defending 16/44 almost 40 years after it was picked as a nice compromise between size and quality. they had 20/60 available to them back in 1978 but it was very expensive for the chips and motherboards, plus a CD would have held 28 minutes instead of 60 minutes.  so sony picked 16/44. [note that phillips had CD's going at 14/40 since they had poorer error correction software than sony.]
 

---

 
since i can't show a failed test format passing the test, it's assumed wrongly that it is settled science. the tests are bad, they are searching for the wrong thing.
 
most of the change to a song through lossiness and downsampling comes in the form of incorrect and thin timbre of instruments and radically reducing the size of the soundstage.
 
the air, the delays, and the room reflections are severely damaged during conversion.   if you aren't listening for that stuff in the first place you won't 'pass' the listening test.

 

[MindsMirror]

I think you are missing my point. Consider this comparison. The Blu-ray format was released around 2006 to replace DVDs, replacing the 480p resolution with 1080p. In comparison, CD audio was released in 1980, decades before blu-ray, and still hasn't been replaced by a superior format. In fact you could argue that it's been replaced by an inferior format in the form of online streaming. Ask the average consumer or do a blind test to determine which is a more significant upgrade in quality and overall experience, going from 480p to 1080p video, or going from 44.1KHz/16bit to 96KHz/24bit audio. I think the answer is clear. I'd be shocked if even 1% of people who aren't blind said that the high res audio was more noticeable.
 
That's why there is more focus on hi-res visuals. You can argue that there is subconscious benefits of hi-res audio but that's beside the point. The benefits of higher visual fidelity are clearly evident, and they have conscious and subconscious effects on you enjoyment of the media, to a greater degree than audio does. Any average Joe can look for a moment at a HD TV and say that's better than SD. Far fewer people would say the same about audio.

 

[seoman]

I think that the LCD screens are so bad that any upgrade is needed and therefore sold.
That's why we talk about 4K, HDR, nits, smart, size, thickness.
We all are not satisfied. most of us will not notice but still they are not satisfied.
Another reason we need better visuals might be the lack of something worth looking at. 

With audio there is something more worse going on.
Nobody invests time into music. It's a social thing. They don't listen, they don't care. They will never notice that a song is badly recorded or poorly streamed.
I think that 99% of the time music is a secondary landscape. It is an excuse to go somewhere and meet, it's something to keep your mind from hearing inner voices, something to distract or something to state your social status/type.
Maybe the people on this forum DO listen, but we cannot drive the market.

With TV almost anybody gets sucked into this and spends hours watching it.
Bad programs, bad stories, it al needs to be compensated by visuals.
Don't forget what MTV did to music!

WE think music is about sound, but it is clearly not

 

[FFBookman]

  I think you are missing my point. Consider this comparison. The Blu-ray format was released around 2006 to replace DVDs, replacing the 480p resolution with 1080p. In comparison, CD audio was released in 1980, decades before blu-ray, and still hasn't been replaced by a superior format. In fact you could argue that it's been replaced by an inferior format in the form of online streaming. Ask the average consumer or do a blind test to determine which is a more significant upgrade in quality and overall experience, going from 480p to 1080p video, or going from 44.1KHz/16bit to 96KHz/24bit audio. I think the answer is clear. I'd be shocked if even 1% of people who aren't blind said that the high res audio was more noticeable.
 
That's why there is more focus on hi-res visuals. You can argue that there is subconscious benefits of hi-res audio but that's beside the point. The benefits of higher visual fidelity are clearly evident, and they have conscious and subconscious effects on you enjoyment of the media, to a greater degree than audio does. Any average Joe can look for a moment at a HD TV and say that's better than SD. Far fewer people would say the same about audio.

You'd be shocked that 1% could hear hi-res?   Damn I couldn't disagree more!  Assuming it's played on a decent rig (good DAC and amp) with non-**** speakers and it's a piece of music they know and love, I bet 80-90% hear it.  Like immediately.
 
Do you ever listen to the 'room' in a song?  The overall size/shape of the room it is presenting to you as it's rendered?    The quality, depth, and length of the instruments and their delays and decays?  I know you do, we all do, but if you focus on that and then listen to various resolutions you hear it step right down.
 
It's simple bandwidth.... moving the speakers, moving the air, vibrating your body and inner ears.  256k is much less than the average 800k/sec a CD streams from the media to the DAC. 
 
A decent hi-res recording is going to be pushing 3000-5000k/sec to the DAC, which gets translated into more analog signal to engage you.

 

[FFBookman]

  I think you are missing my point. Consider this comparison. The Blu-ray format was released around 2006 to replace DVDs, replacing the 480p resolution with 1080p. In comparison, CD audio was released in 1980, decades before blu-ray, and still hasn't been replaced by a superior format. In fact you could argue that it's been replaced by an inferior format in the form of online streaming. Ask the average consumer or do a blind test to determine which is a more significant upgrade in quality and overall experience, going from 480p to 1080p video, or going from 44.1KHz/16bit to 96KHz/24bit audio. I think the answer is clear. I'd be shocked if even 1% of people who aren't blind said that the high res audio was more noticeable.
 
That's why there is more focus on hi-res visuals. You can argue that there is subconscious benefits of hi-res audio but that's beside the point. The benefits of higher visual fidelity are clearly evident, and they have conscious and subconscious effects on you enjoyment of the media, to a greater degree than audio does. Any average Joe can look for a moment at a HD TV and say that's better than SD. Far fewer people would say the same about audio.

To directly address your 2nd paragraph -- I think "any average joe" can watch TV just like any average joe can hear music.  You don't need hi-res to do either, you can accept a badly degraded version as the best you can get/afford and get your enjoyment from it.
 
But if you had a big movie night you wouldn't expect people these days to crowd around a 25" tube TV with a mono speaker. They want HD, they want inches, they want surround sound. Consumer video has advanced.
 
Why if you play music for people these days you are expected to do it from a phone through a lossy wireless compression scheme playing lossy files through a plastic cheap speaker that can't even maintain a stable stereo field?  I mean, that's like 4 levels of suckage that weren't even there 20 years ago.  Consumer audio is going backwards. 
 
I guess that's my point .... now that hi-res DAP's are available and get awesome reviews at places like head-fi, why does the average joe (and the know it all joe) still think an iPod from 2003 is the same thing?