Joe Bloggs
Sponsor: HiByMember of the Trade: EFO Technologies Co, YanYin TechnologyHis Porta Corda walked the Green Mile
(Below please find: my personal opinion. The following commentary is in no way associated with FiiO.)
We could argue till the cows go home in the 1st thread over the audibility of the improvements that high-res can or may bring about--yet I'm of the opinion that even if high-res audio has arguable quality over standard res, it's still a no-brainer argument that it is bad for music.
To see what I mean, take a step back and look at this from a market ecology standpoint.
First, it's a given that media resolutions of over 16/48 have, at best, diminishing returns over 16/48 in terms of fidelity. Even a spokesperson for a company in the business of making high-res DAPs can admit to that much. :rolleyes:
Secondly, there is a whole class of audio processing techniques that can be applied to music in their final published form, in preparation for playing back through headphones OR loudspeakers. Room correction processing for loudspeakers, HRTF and corrective EQ processing for headphones, among other things. These effects are never subtle, you never need an ABX test to detect their presence in the playback chain, unlike hi-res formats. Hi-Fi customers for the most part have a "thing" against these effects; I don't know why. Perhaps not enough research has been put into these technologies to make them sound good more often than bad. Perhaps it's because the most visible of these effects is the ubiquitous 10-band EQ, which end users can tweak every which way they like with no feedback anywhere on how well they're doing in customizing the sound for their needs (hence results are more often than not atrocious). Or perhaps the endless pursuit for playback systems to push more "bits" through in "perfect" fashion has led the whole market into an intuitive distrust of anything that "messes" with those bits.
Whatever the cause, I consider this most unfortunate, as I've proved to select audiences many times that properly done, such processing can be very powerful indeed in improving sound quality.
Anyway, in this day and age of exponentially increasing computing power, the ability to do these improvement processes seems to be slipping further and further away from our hands. Why? Because the size and load of music formats are expanding in double-exponent fashion! 16/48, 24/96, 24/192, 32/384, DSD64, DSD128, DSD256, DSD512... for the newest of these formats, not only are you looking at a 32-fold increase in bitrate, you're also looking at a format that is violently uncooperative towards post-processing and proud of it! :mad:
Not only do state-of-the-art octa-core CPUs sputter and falter in trying to perform any real-time post-processing tasks on these hi-res formats, customers the world over show NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in having them post-processed in any way--because they're not "meant" to be processed! God forbid it should the player have to convert it to PCM in order to make it sound better!
In the home theatre market, Audyssey is being pushed out of the market in favor of that stupid "Pure Audio" button--a receiver's inability to do anything to improve the sound is becoming a "feature, not a bug!" :mad:
And if you think portable DAPs have it hard trying to process hi-res music, imagine the nightmare that music producers face--you have to record in DSD-wide or something to keep up with the Joneses now--now imagine trying to mix a multitrack recording where every track is DSD-wide!
Oh and the "feature not bug" of not being able to do any processing for the sheer size of everything has bit the recording industry too. "Good!" Says the audiophile. Those pesky EQs and stuff never had any business in an audiophile recording. Right? WRONG! Room correction is just as important in recording as in playback. I don't want to spend days treating my room, tuning my receiver to tame all those room modes, only to hear a 200Hz room mode baked into every "acoustic instrument" recorded in a boxy studio! :mad:
What about the astronomical costs of a DSD-wide mixing system? In a day and age where good standard-res mixing and recording systems can be had for peanuts, independent music producers still get no respect because their gear still gets no respect--for no good reason!
IMNSHO, it is blindingly obvious that for the reasons given above, even if we take the mostly wildly optimistic estimates of the benefits of hi-res over 16/44.1, our ears would still have been better off today, if playback music formats had never progressed beyond CD quality!
Hi-res is here today, and we're going to support it, of course, in the sense that FiiO players will play them to the best of their ability. They're the best formats out there by the specs, and in the world we're living in, you would want to play 64bit 384kHz wavs to get the best (specwise) out of our players. Our players also incorporate proper low-pass filters, so IMD from ultrasonic rubbish won't contaminate the frequencies we actually hear (which hi-res can conceivably better reproduce). But that doesn't mean I can't personally wish they'd never existed :mad:
We could argue till the cows go home in the 1st thread over the audibility of the improvements that high-res can or may bring about--yet I'm of the opinion that even if high-res audio has arguable quality over standard res, it's still a no-brainer argument that it is bad for music.
To see what I mean, take a step back and look at this from a market ecology standpoint.
First, it's a given that media resolutions of over 16/48 have, at best, diminishing returns over 16/48 in terms of fidelity. Even a spokesperson for a company in the business of making high-res DAPs can admit to that much. :rolleyes:
Secondly, there is a whole class of audio processing techniques that can be applied to music in their final published form, in preparation for playing back through headphones OR loudspeakers. Room correction processing for loudspeakers, HRTF and corrective EQ processing for headphones, among other things. These effects are never subtle, you never need an ABX test to detect their presence in the playback chain, unlike hi-res formats. Hi-Fi customers for the most part have a "thing" against these effects; I don't know why. Perhaps not enough research has been put into these technologies to make them sound good more often than bad. Perhaps it's because the most visible of these effects is the ubiquitous 10-band EQ, which end users can tweak every which way they like with no feedback anywhere on how well they're doing in customizing the sound for their needs (hence results are more often than not atrocious). Or perhaps the endless pursuit for playback systems to push more "bits" through in "perfect" fashion has led the whole market into an intuitive distrust of anything that "messes" with those bits.
Whatever the cause, I consider this most unfortunate, as I've proved to select audiences many times that properly done, such processing can be very powerful indeed in improving sound quality.
Anyway, in this day and age of exponentially increasing computing power, the ability to do these improvement processes seems to be slipping further and further away from our hands. Why? Because the size and load of music formats are expanding in double-exponent fashion! 16/48, 24/96, 24/192, 32/384, DSD64, DSD128, DSD256, DSD512... for the newest of these formats, not only are you looking at a 32-fold increase in bitrate, you're also looking at a format that is violently uncooperative towards post-processing and proud of it! :mad:
Not only do state-of-the-art octa-core CPUs sputter and falter in trying to perform any real-time post-processing tasks on these hi-res formats, customers the world over show NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER in having them post-processed in any way--because they're not "meant" to be processed! God forbid it should the player have to convert it to PCM in order to make it sound better!
In the home theatre market, Audyssey is being pushed out of the market in favor of that stupid "Pure Audio" button--a receiver's inability to do anything to improve the sound is becoming a "feature, not a bug!" :mad:
And if you think portable DAPs have it hard trying to process hi-res music, imagine the nightmare that music producers face--you have to record in DSD-wide or something to keep up with the Joneses now--now imagine trying to mix a multitrack recording where every track is DSD-wide!
Oh and the "feature not bug" of not being able to do any processing for the sheer size of everything has bit the recording industry too. "Good!" Says the audiophile. Those pesky EQs and stuff never had any business in an audiophile recording. Right? WRONG! Room correction is just as important in recording as in playback. I don't want to spend days treating my room, tuning my receiver to tame all those room modes, only to hear a 200Hz room mode baked into every "acoustic instrument" recorded in a boxy studio! :mad:
What about the astronomical costs of a DSD-wide mixing system? In a day and age where good standard-res mixing and recording systems can be had for peanuts, independent music producers still get no respect because their gear still gets no respect--for no good reason!
IMNSHO, it is blindingly obvious that for the reasons given above, even if we take the mostly wildly optimistic estimates of the benefits of hi-res over 16/44.1, our ears would still have been better off today, if playback music formats had never progressed beyond CD quality!
Hi-res is here today, and we're going to support it, of course, in the sense that FiiO players will play them to the best of their ability. They're the best formats out there by the specs, and in the world we're living in, you would want to play 64bit 384kHz wavs to get the best (specwise) out of our players. Our players also incorporate proper low-pass filters, so IMD from ultrasonic rubbish won't contaminate the frequencies we actually hear (which hi-res can conceivably better reproduce). But that doesn't mean I can't personally wish they'd never existed :mad:
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