CD audio (44.1/16) Club

[LeftCoastTim]

I'm in my 40s, and I got curious how my hearing was these days. I can't hear the mosquito tone anymore (17+kHz), and I can't hear below -70db, according to https://www.audiocheck.net. I can hear a 14khz tone, but not pass the 14kHz low-pass filter test.

So, CD resolution is definitely good enough for me.

Comment below if you would like to join my little club.

Cheers,

 

[Joe Smith]

64 here, I can hear to about 13.5kHz, and have that normal older ear sensitivity dip at about 4kHz. Happy with my hearing, just don't listen at loud volumes to protect what I have. Go to the occasional concert but usually wear earplugs when I do (or bring them with me)...

 

[Mart68]

I've always thought that the idea that 16/44.1 is not sufficient for practical use (for anyone of any age or hearing ability) to be totally absurd.

 

[Yuhasz01]

I'm in my 40s, and I got curious how my hearing was these days. I can't hear the mosquito tone anymore (17+kHz), and I can't hear below -70db, according to https://www.audiocheck.net. I can hear a 14khz tone, but not pass the 14kHz low-pass filter test.

So, CD resolution is definitely good enough for me.

Comment below if you would like to join my little club.

Cheers,

Cd sound quality fine for me.

 

[Keith_W]

I've always thought that the idea that 16/44.1 is not sufficient for practical use (for anyone of any age or hearing ability) to be totally absurd.

I might point you towards this article which I read with interest on the Madrona Digital website. Specifically, this: "There is nothing magical about 16/44.1 specification of the CD. It is not like extensive listening tests and research were performed to pick these values. They were selected by Sony and Philips in the creation of CD to balance the recording capacity and fidelity. So at some level the one camp is defending an arbitrary set of numbers."

It's a great article. He goes on to cite published evidence in the JAES and offer criticism of the scientific methods. He then concludes that high resolution audio makes a difference.

I think you might know the author, or at least come across his name before?

I personally can not hear above 18kHz and that's great for my age (51), but I have unlimited internet, a tonne of storage space, and equipment capable of playing 192kHz PCM. There is enough audiophilia nervosa in me to want the best quality I can get, especially since it won't cost me anything.

 

[Mart68]

I might point you towards this article which I read with interest on the Madrona Digital website. Specifically, this: "There is nothing magical about 16/44.1 specification of the CD. It is not like extensive listening tests and research were performed to pick these values. They were selected by Sony and Philips in the creation of CD to balance the recording capacity and fidelity. So at some level the one camp is defending an arbitrary set of numbers."

It's a great article. He goes on to cite published evidence in the JAES and offer criticism of the scientific methods. He then concludes that high resolution audio makes a difference.

I think you might know the author, or at least come across his name before?

I personally can not hear above 18kHz and that's great for my age (51), but I have unlimited internet, a tonne of storage space, and equipment capable of playing 192kHz PCM. There is enough audiophilia nervosa in me to want the best quality I can get, especially since it won't cost me anything.

I read that some years ago. I don't think anything in it makes me think I should alter my position.

If you have to be trained to hear the artifacts - and even then you can't do it on every recording - can it possibly be worth worrying about? I mean, many people are happy with vinyl!

His main conclusion is that you may be able to get a 'hi-res' master with less compression and limiting than the CD version. But that's nothing to do with bit rate or sampling frequency.

 

[Joe Smith]

Yeah, my only remaining gripe is not equipment, but Spotify's bitrate. I wish they would finally cook the damn lunch and get something better than 320kbps going out...at a competitive price...

Given the storage space that high res files demand, I have chosen not to go that route, since most of my listening now is CD, LPs or streaming...very little anymore from my saved/ripped music files...I used those mostly during the iPod era...

 

[fatoldgit]

My use of exclusively CD quality music is based on three simple facts:

- CD is of sufficient bandwidth to capture what we need to hear
- Mastering trumps encoding resolution by a long margin (i.e. a crap recording is still a crap recording at 192/24)
- The benefit of being exclusively CD quality is I can optimize my playback chain for a single format.

It must become increasingly difficult to support a music collection that has 44.1k ratio recordings, 48k ratio recordings, DSD based stuff at multiple ratios (and lets not go down the MQA path) etc. I read horror stories of people (generally Windows or MAC) where they get bit perfect playback at X resolution but not at Y and Z so the OS introduces its own poor resampling to rate match.

Thus I can upsample in my PC from a single resolution to the native rate in my DAC, I can configure my PC's Linux OS to support a single, bit perfect resolution, my chosen DAC can be laser focused on handling PCM only, I aint paying for features I will never use etc.

Peter

PS. I do stream from Qobuz but still use the CD quality stream to remain in my optimized, end to end config.

 

[amicusterrae]

Peter Aczel (The Audio Critic) wrote this in 2015, as one key thing he had learned after 60 years in audio:
“7) We should all be grateful to the founding fathers of CD at Sony and Philips for their fight some 35 years ago on behalf of 16-bit, instead of 14-bit, word depth on CDs and 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Losing that fight would have retarded digital media by several decades. As it turned out, the 16-bit/44.1-kHz standard has stood the test of time; after all these years it still sounds subjectively equal to today’s HD techniques—if executed with the utmost precision. I am not saying that 24-bit/192-kHz technology is not a good thing, since it provides considerably more options, flexibility, and ease; I am saying that a SNR of 98.08 dB and a frequency response up to 22.05 kHz, if both are actually achieved, will be audibly equal to 146.24 dB and 96 kHz, which in the real world are never achieved, in any case. The same goes for 1-bit/2.8224 MHz DSD. If your ear is so sensitive, so fine, that you can hear the difference, go ahead and prove it with an ABX test, don’t just say it.”

I learned a lot from him and still enjoy his writing. And, as far as I am concerned, his closing point still stands!

 

[Keith_W]

I am certain that if we had 14 bit audio instead of 16 bit, there would be some who would argue that 16 bit is a waste of time because it is inaudible.

 

[amicusterrae]

Peter Aczel (The Audio Critic) wrote this in 2015, as one key thing he had learned after 60 years in audio:
“7) We should all be grateful to the founding fathers of CD at Sony and Philips for their fight some 35 years ago on behalf of 16-bit, instead of 14-bit, word depth on CDs and 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Losing that fight would have retarded digital media by several decades. As it turned out, the 16-bit/44.1-kHz standard has stood the test of time; after all these years it still sounds subjectively equal to today’s HD techniques—if executed with the utmost precision. I am not saying that 24-bit/192-kHz technology is not a good thing, since it provides considerably more options, flexibility, and ease; I am saying that a SNR of 98.08 dB and a frequency response up to 22.05 kHz, if both are actually achieved, will be audibly equal to 146.24 dB and 96 kHz, which in the real world are never achieved, in any case. The same goes for 1-bit/2.8224 MHz DSD. If your ear is so sensitive, so fine, that you can hear the difference, go ahead and prove it with an ABX test, don’t just say it.”

I learned a lot from him and still enjoy rereading his writing.

Peter Aczel (The Audio Critic) wrote this in 2015, as one key thing he had learned after 60 years in audio:
“7) We should all be grateful to the founding fathers of CD at Sony and Philips for their fight some 35 years ago on behalf of 16-bit, instead of 14-bit, word depth on CDs and 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Losing that fight would have retarded digital media by several decades. As it turned out, the 16-bit/44.1-kHz standard has stood the test of time; after all these years it still sounds subjectively equal to today’s HD techniques—if executed with the utmost precision. I am not saying that 24-bit/192-kHz technology is not a good thing, since it provides considerably more options, flexibility, and ease; I am saying that a SNR of 98.08 dB and a frequency response up to 22.05 kHz, if both are actually achieved, will be audibly equal to 146.24 dB and 96 kHz, which in the real world are never achieved, in any case. The same goes for 1-bit/2.8224 MHz DSD. If your ear is so sensitive, so fine, that you can hear the difference, go ahead and prove it with an ABX test, don’t just say it.”

I learned a lot from him and still enjoy his writing. And, as far as I am concerned, his closing point still stands!

And from the linked Madronna
Digital article:
“Lost in that is one tester who managed to get 8 out of 10 right meaning there was 94.5% probability that he was identifying the proper source and not guessing. This is so close to 95% threshold that it should have been noted as significant and countering the larger conclusion but was not. Two other testers managed 7 out of 10 correct selections. These were all dismissed as exceptions and the total number of trials/listeners incorrectly relied upon.”

I don’t have the energy to engage all the points made, but this one seems especially unpersuasive. Guessing can and will beat the average. A couple lucky gamblers merely confirms that house wins. That’s why all tested listeners count. We’ve heard the argument before that special, trained golden ears can do it, but how many times? Repeatability is essential.

 

[levimax]

If anyone is worried they are missing out on hi-res audio it is easy to test for yourself. Just find some known real hi-res files you are familiar with and dither them down to16/41 and see if you can ABX them against the original in foobar2000 ABX or similar. I can't tell any difference but it may be possible to cheat by listening @ full volume to the noise before the music starts. After doing a lot of testing like this I am confident 16/44 is good enough for me

 

[DWPress]

My rig is about as transparent as it gets and I've done ABX with 16/41 against 24/96 "hi-res" of the same recordings and couldn't reliably hear any differences. Even MP3s are ok about 90% of the time.

 

[restorer-john]

My rig is about as transparent as it gets and I've done ABX with 16/41 against 24/96 "hi-res" of the same recordings...

I'm done with ABX high res vs 16/44 CD 'challenges'.

The simple fact of the matter is the original CDs will always be the reference, especially the early ones in the 1980s as there was no 'hi-res'. No digital recorders existed to do more than 12/14/16 bit at maybe up to ~50kHz) The original masters if they were digital, were 16/44 (or SRCd 14/16 bit 50k+) and they weren't messed with or otherwise remastered/upsampled or generally f#$ked with.

No so-called 'high res' version can be definitively determined to be more 'original' or accurate than a CD version of the same. I feel sorry for all these gullible idiots lining up to buy somebody's re-mastering of a previous remastering, sourced from a third or fourth release of a commercial CD pressed in the 1980s. I mean how many versions of Thriller are there now?

 

[DWPress]

@restorer-john - I agree with you completely. The idea of spending money or even bandwidth for "hi-res" is ludicrous to me.

My focus now is just finding music I like that was well recorded and engineered to begin with.

 

[restorer-john]

My focus now is just finding music I like that was well recorded and engineered to begin with.

Exactly. That's the best plan IMO.

 

[Chrispy]

CD works fine for me. I do have some higher res on bluray (and multich sacd? not sure that's particularly hi res). I don't seek hi res to download or stream, tho, don't see any point to it for me, can't tell the difference of that alone.

 

[Sal1950]

The real end of the line for me were the Mark Waldrip - AIX Records HiRez Challenges.
He put a bit of his own company at stake but in the end told the honest truth that 24-44.1 was
fine for our human hearing..

 

[Keith_W]

or in more common terms, the more more you fuck around, the more you find out.

And also the more STD's you have.

 

[Sal1950]

Believe it or not the most enjoyment I've had is through vinyl. Although I am sure good quality tape smokes it

You may like playing with vinyl and tapes, but 16/44.1 smokes them both..
Neither of the former can come close to reproducing the sound hitting the mike like Redbook.
BTW, I'm 72 son.