ok im in ireland and i want to know what sites you guys download ur music from is itunes good quality or are other sites better also what media player do you use, i a complete newbie so sorry if this is a stupid question i just want to get the best out of my gear thanks
Not really. If you want to go over the top with more sample rate and bit depth than is needed there are places like HDtracks. The only problem is that their selection is quite limited.
Not really. If you want to go over the top with more sample rate and bit depth than is needed there are places like HDtracks. The only problem is that their selection is quite limited.
HDtracks is probably the most popular source, but sadly the existing crop of HD music available online for download is pretty limited.
People keep talking about the day when we abolish the Redbook standard and all music is released in a high-def format and available for download, unfortunately that doesn't look to be happening any time soon. :/
People keep talking about the day when we abolish the Redbook standard and all music is released in a high-def format and available for download, unfortunately that doesn't look to be happening any time soon. :/
I sure hope doesn't go away. Redbook is already near perfect within the bounds of human hearing and there's no reason to spend more than double the space on something you can't actually hear. Some of us aren't interested in having to build a data center in the basement just to serve (and more importantly BACK UP) all our music.
I sure hope doesn't go away. Redbook is already near perfect within the bounds of human hearing and there's no reason to spend more than double the space on something you can't actually hear. Some of us aren't interested in having to build a data center in the basement just to serve (and more importantly BACK UP) all our music.
With hard drive space getting cheaper, smaller and more efficient all the time, it's not that far off we'll reach a point where 24/96 or 24/192 FLACs aren't going to be that much more trouble to store than 16/44.1 FLACs. or 320kbps MP3s. I'm already there truthfully. Then its more a question of, why wouldn't you want high-resolution music? If hard drive space is taken out of the equation, I'm assuming since most of us here are audiophiles (including the OP or he wouldn't have asked about HD music) we would choose hi-def music over Redbook any day of the week. I'm not going to get into a debate over whether you can hear the difference or not. That's topic for another thread.
16/44.1 will never go away as a bit depth/sampling frequency, but I'm quite certain at some point physical media of CDs and DVDs will go away. then you'll just have to decide what resolution you want the music on your hard drive to be in.
Yeah, I like Beatport and buy A LOT of wav files from there (which are all 16/44.1 btw), but sometimes I swear some of the wavs are just MP3s that they reincoded. Either that or the songs are just mastered badly. The quality can vary quite a bit from song to song.
With hard drive space getting cheaper, smaller and more efficient all the time, it's not that far off we'll reach a point where 24/96 or 24/192 FLACs aren't going to be that much more trouble to store than 16/44.1 FLACs. or 320kbps MP3s. I'm already there truthfully. Then its more a question of, why wouldn't you want high-resolution music? If hard drive space is taken out of the equation, I'm assuming since most of us here are audiophiles (including the OP or he wouldn't have asked about HD music) we would choose hi-def music over Redbook any day of the week. I'm not going to get into a debate over whether you can hear the difference or not. That's topic for another thread.
16/44.1 will never go away as a bit depth/sampling frequency, but I'm quite certain at some point physical media of CDs and DVDs will go away. then you'll just have to decide what resolution you want the music on your hard drive to be in.
I'm with this guy. Lossy formats surfaced over the need of a space efficient format, not a quality preserving format, as with all lossy formats available, information is lost, no matter from which angle you look at it.
Space is indeed costing significantly less than it used to a decade ago, for instance. The slow shift of mechanical to flash based drives is a setback when it comes of price per GB, but those drives aren't meant for archiving purposes at all, leading us back to mechanical drives which have continuous price drops.
If looking strictly from a file size perspective, uncompressed audio has the biggest file sizes, while lossless formats can have almost 50% reduction in size while maintaining the exact same quality. The place for lossy formats is on portable setups that are used on noisy enough environments where true sound quality can't be appreciated in its entirety, music that was made from the original lossless music kept at the stationary setup.
About the last paragraph, while there is still a lot of interest from movie and record companies about physical mediums, mainly due to a retrograde philosophy, there will be a shift on content distribution, and youtube ripping people will then be faced with content quality higher than they've ever seen or heard, and that time does have the possibility to be amazing for audiophiles.
I'm not even saying to go for lossy. That can actually be ABXed from lossless and it will keep you from losing any quality if you need to transcode to a new lossy format for something like a DAP where space is at much more of a premium but even on a desktop setup 24/96 takes up an insane about of space at present. The "storage is getting cheaper" argument is also a red herring. Storage will of course always get cheaper, but is that an excuse to increase sample rates and bitdepths indefinitely?
The important question is what's good enough to exceed the capabilities of human hearing. Depending on what studies you read and what you make of their methodologies redbook is worst case scenario, very close to that edge. Nobody need the extra 40 or so dB of dynamic range from 24 bit because most of it is hardly ever used, even in good classical recordings. A few extra bits would be good for some headroom but given the way standards go, there aren't many DACs that would elegantly accept say, 20 bit words, so we'll probably be stuck with 24 even though 18 or 20 is already overkill. We could also benefit from a higher sample rate than redbook for better headroom in filter design. Once again though, 88.2 and 96 are complete overkill and just waste space. 24/88.2 or 24/96 are only defensible in the sense that they're already a standard. They're already overkill and adding any more on top of that just wastes space and bandwidth to no effect.
I'm not even saying to go for lossy. That can actually be ABXed from lossless and it will keep you from losing any quality if you need to transcode to a new lossy format for something like a DAP where space is at much more of a premium but even on a desktop setup 24/96 takes up an insane about of space at present. The "storage is getting cheaper" argument is also a red herring. Storage will of course always get cheaper, but is that an excuse to increase sample rates and bitdepths indefinitely?
The important question is what's good enough to exceed the capabilities of human hearing. Depending on what studies you read and what you make of their methodologies redbook is worst case scenario, very close to that edge. Nobody need the extra 40 or so dB of dynamic range from 24 bit because most of it is hardly ever used, even in good classical recordings. A few extra bits would be good for some headroom but given the way standards go, there aren't many DACs that would elegantly accept say, 20 bit words, so we'll probably be stuck with 24 even though 18 or 20 is already overkill. We could also benefit from a higher sample rate than redbook for better headroom in filter design. Once again though, 88.2 and 96 are complete overkill and just waste space. 24/88.2 or 24/96 are only defensible in the sense that they're already a standard. They're already overkill and adding any more on top of that just wastes space and bandwidth to no effect.
I'm buying into all you've said, in fact, my own observations, comparing HDTracks material at 24/96 to the same material on SACD, CD, and iTunes downloads, indicate that I cannot discern one from another. I'm content with CD; and, therefore, with plenty of hard drive space left on my Dell Inspiron, I rip CD's to 16/44.1 .wav files for convenience plays from my iTunes library. My time, which is precious, allows for little luxury, like listening to music for pleasure, so, spending any of it on wild goose chases for better sound is a thing of the past for me now. I'm a happy camper with what I've got.
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