With all this talk about lossless and comparing bit depths and sampling rates, etc…I found
this article today that is fantastic at explaining it all, along with how playback is specifically impacted.
My takeaway is essentially…
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Sampling rates above 44 kHz (AAC) is inaudible. I.e. don’t bother improving beyond it unless you need to record higher frequencies for some purpose besides music. Recording bats maybe? Lol
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Bit depth of 16 bit allows for accurate portrayal of recorded loudness of up to 96 dB. That’s very loud, but for instantaneously louder moments in classical recordings, for example, a higher bit depth would, in theory, have more accurate playback of dynamic range. It would seem here that bit depth could be most important for us audiophiles. However, 16 bit giving us an accurate playback of 96 dB range would essentially mean that most of the time we really won’t hear the differences of aliasing or artifacts come up in our music, when trying to compare 16 bit with 24 bit or higher.
Conclusion. On paper, it would make sense to say higher bit depth could allow for more accurate playback at the ends of the dynamic range in our music, but it will hardly be an issue for most playback if it is at all to most people. In theory, neither the increased bit depth nor sampling rate of lossless should have any appreciable impact on anything in normal listening conditions over 16 bit / 44.1 kHz AAC.
I ordered an audio switch box off Amazon and will compare two iOS devices, one AAC, one lossless, to see if I can notice any differences. I should, according to the article and my naive understanding, only hear differences at quieter and louder portions of playback. Lossless should have less of a noise floor as well as more accurate extremely loud moments.
EDIT:: Many of you know more about this than me and what I read in that article. If you can help educate me on how else music may be affected beyond the article, please help correct or reach me