[bigshot]

The more you focus on placebo effect, the more you convince yourself that it's real. It's never a good idea to invest one's ego into such fragile and fallible things like human perception. Narcissism can fool you into thinking you're a superman able to hear all sorts of things normal mortals can't. The whole hight end audio business is based on placebo and ego and the emperor's new clothes.

 

[old tech]

Pop Music Engineers now use 24/96 rather than 16/44 because they have noticed that the playback product they get after downsampling sounds better.
If you take a piece of music recorded on an analogue tape or a vynil disc and digitize it using 16/44 and then 24/96, you should be able to hear that they don't sound the same, if you listen carefully.

Rubbish, how many engineers do you know that do proper testing? I converted some of my LPs to CDs in a studio back in the 1990s with converters that existed back then. We carefully did level matched double blind tests with a sample before proceeding with over 100 LPs and none of us, even the sessional musicians that happened to be around or the office tea lady could pick the CDs apart from the LPs played back from the same donor turntable. And this has been done by many others with the same result.

16/44 is higher resolution than LP records or analogue tape so providing the transfer is done correctly it would capture reproduce the audio signal perfectly. Catpuring a vinyl record with 24/96 makes the process a bit easier with setting levels, but done correctly if you are hearing a difference it is has either not been done correctly or, more probably, it is expectation bias on your part. It's a bit like saying if you pour 1 litre of water in a 1.5 litre bucket it would capture more of that 1 litre than pouring it into a 1.25 litre bucket.

Remember this is a sound science forum so extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

 

[71 dB]

The more you focus on placebo effect, the more you convince yourself that it's real. It's never a good idea to invest one's ego into such fragile and fallible things like human perception. Narcissism can fool you into thinking you're a superman able to hear all sorts of things normal mortals can't. The whole high end audio business is based on placebo and ego and the emperor's new clothes.

Well said bigshot. Placebo + Ego + Emperors New Clothes is such a good descriptor for High End.

 

[71 dB]

Pop Music Engineers now use 24/96 rather than 16/44 because they have noticed that the playback product they get after downsampling sounds better.

I think there are two kind of producers: Those who know what is enough and those who think more is always better.

16 bit can be used, but 24 bit makes life easier (no need to optimize dynamic range everywhere) so 24 bit is no brainer in music production.
44.1 kHz for music production. 48 kHz for video sound production. Higher sample rates only if the clients insists using it or if it is about samples that are planned to be used at lower playback speeds. So, if you record a cat and play it three octaves lower to make it sound a lion it is wise to use high sample rates so that your frequency response doesn't end suddenly at 2.5 kHz.

 

[bigshot]

I’ve never worked with an engineer who didn’t have a practical knowledge of how things work and a strategy for achieving the sound they want. They’re never pie in the sky, always very grounded in what matters and what doesn’t. Not that there aren’t crazy theoretical engineers out there- just I’ve never run into any.

 

[audiokangaroo]

Rubbish, how many engineers do you know that do proper testing? I converted some of my LPs to CDs in a studio back in the 1990s with converters that existed back then. We carefully did level matched double blind tests with a sample before proceeding with over 100 LPs and none of us, even the sessional musicians that happened to be around or the office tea lady could pick the CDs apart from the LPs played back from the same donor turntable. And this has been done by many others with the same result.

16/44 is higher resolution than LP records or analogue tape so providing the transfer is done correctly it would capture reproduce the audio signal perfectly. Catpuring a vinyl record with 24/96 makes the process a bit easier with setting levels, but done correctly if you are hearing a difference it is has either not been done correctly or, more probably, it is expectation bias on your part. It's a bit like saying if you pour 1 litre of water in a 1.5 litre bucket it would capture more of that 1 litre than pouring it into a 1.25 litre bucket.

Remember this is a sound science forum so extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I have a few LPs converted to 24/96 PCM and they do sound better than CD. The sound is more natural and instruments have more space to breath.
What proof do you have that 16/44 PCM is higher resolution than LP ?

 

[bigshot]

Everything that can be contained in the grooves of an LP can be contained on a CD. If you applied more controls to your comparisons, you’d find that out. Do a proper capture of an LP to 16/44.1. Level match the capture with the original LP. Line them up and direct A/B switch blind. You won’t find any difference at all.

if you were a little more rigorous in your analysis and testing, you wouldn’t have so many misconceptions. You’re depending on “experts” and cherry picking to support the conclusions you want to support instead of thinking for yourself and testing your conclusions. That’s lazy and it leads to sloppy thinking. It’s no surprise that you run into problems in sound science just about every time you post. The kinds of things that pass outside this group don’t work here. If you don’t want to get mad, you should lurk and listen more, and ask questions instead of stating your misconceptions. You’ll actually learn something, and that’s why we’re all here, right?

 

[audiokangaroo]

Comparing an LP with a CD is very difficult, because their technology is radically different. We need to listen to both an compare their sonic signature.
My impression is that LPs sound warmer and give much more presence to the sound. So, we can expect that some audible information is lacking in CDs.
Not saying that LPs are perfect, of course, but in some way they are more faithful to the original recording.

 

[bigshot]

It isn't impossible at all. I have done it. I captured a pristine copy of the Sheffield Lab direct-to-disk LP Lincoln Mayorga and Distinguished Colleagues Vol 2 to my Mac at 16/44.1. I then lined up the original LP on one preamp and the capture playing on my Mac on another preamp, level matched, then patched the output into a switch box fed into an amp connected to both speakers and headphones. I had a friend switch back and forth for me. I couldn't discern any difference at all. This tells me that the signal contained on an LP can be completely captured digitally with no audible loss at all.

When you hear differences between LPs, CDs, MP3 downloads, SACDs and HD Audio, the differences you hear have a lot more to do with the mastering than they format itself. A single album might go through dozens and dozens of different sounding masterings for different formats and different releases. Of all of those formats I mentioned, LP records are the only ones that aren't audibly transparent. I have over 25,000 records of all kinds myself, and I love a lot of them. But I would never say that LPs in general sound better than digital. They have higher distortion, noise, timing error and response deviation than digital formats, even high data rate lossy. But some LPs are mastered better than later releases on CD.

There are good and bad masterings in all formats, so you can't ascribe the sound quality to the format.

 

[71 dB]

Comparing an LP with a CD is very difficult, because their technology is radically different. We need to listen to both an compare their sonic signature.
My impression is that LPs sound warmer and give much more presence to the sound. So, we can expect that some audible information is lacking in CDs.
Not saying that LPs are perfect, of course, but in some way they are more faithful to the original recording.

Vinyl adds distortion to sound and people find this warmer and even better, but it is only better for ears. The sound is better subjectively. Objectively/technically it is worse, less faithful to the original source. CD doesn't add audible distortion to whatever it put on it because it is audibly transparent. CD is able to reveal all the ugliness of the original sound while vinyl softens and warms them less ugly, takes the edge away. CD can have all the warmth (distortions) of vinyl sound if you transfer a LP to a CD. So, CD can be made to sound identical to any vinyl, but vinyl can't sound identical to any CD. That makes LP inferior to CD. If your 16/44.1 CD sounds bad it is not because there aren't enough bits. It is because bad sound was put on the CD and it reproduces it accurately and faithfully.

 

[bigshot]

Someone around here once broke it down and determined that the noise floor and frequency response of the typical LP came out to something like 12/30, well below 16/44.1. And in comparison there's massive levels of distortion and timing errors in LPs that just don't exist in digital.

 

[audiokangaroo]

A lot of people think that CD is transparent because we have been used to its typical sound, but I don't think it is.
When sampling at 44.1 kHz, there is a lot of information in the analogue wave shape that is not recorded and then cannot be reproduced.
All audible frequencies are reproduced but the wave shape is not reproduced properly.

 

[71 dB]

A lot of people think that CD is transparent because we have been used to its typical sound, but I don't think it is.
When sampling at 44.1 kHz, there is a lot of information in the analogue wave shape that is not recorded and then cannot be reproduced.
All audible frequencies are reproduced but the wave shape is not reproduced properly.

If the analog sound contains frequencies above ~20 kHz, those frequencies MUST BE filtered away before convertion into digital form. Otherwise those frequencies will be mirrored into lower frequencies causing distortion. The wave shape will change due to this band limiting filtering, but it doesn't matter for human ear, because we can't hear the difference in the waveform. Most of the stuff that must be filtered away is noise and distortion rather than musical information anyway so it is only good to get rid of it. Everything in the original analog sound that is within the allowed bandwidth (~20 kHz) will be captured, because CD has wider dynamic range than LP.

CD doesn't really have a distinctive sound. It is transparent. Whatever you put on it dictates the sound. CD is like transparent glass window. It doesn't change what you see outside. Blue sky is blue etc. Vinyl on the other hand has got a distinctive sound due to the distortions. It is like yellow glass window. It makes everything yellowish. The blue sky looks green etc.

 

[bigshot]

I'm sorry kangaroo, but you are wrong. Nyquist states that 44.1 is capable of perfectly recreating the waveform throughout the audible range... not pretty close, not close enough for government work, not close as dammit... PERFECTLY. Inaudible frequencies are inaudible. Tests have shown that super audible frequencies add nothing to the perceived sound quality of music. That shouldn't be surprising because aside from gamelan gongs, musical instruments don't produce much in the way of super audible frequencies.

I supervise sound mixes on occasion as part of my job. We generally record and mix at 24/96 to allow headroom for processing. When the mix is finalized and approved, the last step is to bounce the track down to 16/44.1 (or 16/48 depending on how the file will be used) and rack up the bounce down against the original mix playing out of the board. The two playbacks are carefully compared by the engineers, artists, and producers to make sure they are absolutely identical. You never want to deliver a file that you haven't checked. In the couple of decades that I've done this, I have never found a single mix that sounded different in 24/96 than it did in 16/44.1. If there were differences, the caution flags would be thrown up and we would go back and find the mistake.

You're getting your information from faulty sources. Again, I suggest that you listen more and argue less. You have the potential to learn useful things, but you don't learn without being open to learning from people who might know things you don't. I know that if you have facts to present to support your opinions, I'm all ears. But you haven't provided much in the way of facts.

 

[audiokangaroo]

I'm sorry kangaroo, but you are wrong. Nyquist states that 44.1 is capable of perfectly recreating the waveform throughout the audible range... not pretty close, not close enough for government work, not close as dammit... PERFECTLY. Inaudible frequencies are inaudible. Tests have shown that super audible frequencies add nothing to the perceived sound quality of music. That shouldn't be surprising because aside from gamelan gongs, musical instruments don't produce much in the way of super audible frequencies.

I supervise sound mixes on occasion as part of my job. We generally record and mix at 24/96 to allow headroom for processing. When the mix is finalized and approved, the last step is to bounce the track down to 16/44.1 (or 16/48 depending on how the file will be used) and rack up the bounce down against the original mix playing out of the board. The two playbacks are carefully compared by the engineers, artists, and producers to make sure they are absolutely identical. You never want to deliver a file that you haven't checked. In the couple of decades that I've done this, I have never found a single mix that sounded different in 24/96 than it did in 16/44.1. If there were differences, the caution flags would be thrown up and we would go back and find the mistake.

You're getting your information from faulty sources. Again, I suggest that you listen more and argue less. You have the potential to learn useful things, but you don't learn without being open to learning from people who might know things you don't. I know that if you have facts to present to support your opinions, I'm all ears. But you haven't provided much in the way of facts.

I have read about the Nyquist theorem and I wonder if it was really a good idea to use it for high fidelity audio applications.
This theorem is based on the idea that what we can hear is band limited. It only cares for frequencies and not for the way frequential elements are placed in the time domain.
This is not simple from a mathematical point of view, but it seems to conflate audible frequencies and the structure of the waveshape. We hear time domain information through the wave shape and thus it has to be reproduced very carefully to avoid introducing distortion through the sampling process.