High Resolution Audio: Does It Matter?

[danadam]

But for much of todays modern dance and club music, metal, grunge, etc that's the way it's intended and probably should be.

Interestingly, all early Metallica albums are DR12

 

[mansr]

We do have to quit making the loudness war the whipping boy for bad sounding recordings.
There are many excellent sounding DR10 recordings and many crappy sounding DR14 ones.

It's the DR4 ones I'm whipping.

 

[kongwee]

Loudness war seem to come to the end as streaming service impose their own LUFS. I mean none of the producer will like their master to be compressed by hitting Youtube LUFS standard.

 

[danadam]

Loudness war seem to come to the end as streaming service impose their own LUFS. I mean none of the producer will like their master to be compressed by hitting Youtube LUFS standard.

A few examples from The Hit List:

• The Weeknd - Sacrifice (Official Music Video) : 4.3 dB above target
• Ed Sheeran - Shivers [Official Video] : 8.2 dB above target
• Elton John, Dua Lipa - Cold Heart (PNAU Remix) (Official Video) : 5.7 dB above target
• Adele - Oh My God (Official Video) : 7.0 dB above target
• Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever (Official Music Video) : 6.3 dB above target

Oh, and the masters are not compressed by hitting YT LUFS standard. Hitting YT LUFS standard is just reducing the volume, exactly the same as you could do with the volume slider, only that it is done automatically. No, they are already compressed before being sent to YT, and as a result of being compressed, they hit the YT LUFS standard.

 

[Sal1950]

It's the DR4 ones I'm whipping.

Is there anything there worthy of any discussion. LOL

 

[kongwee]

A few examples from The Hit List:

• The Weeknd - Sacrifice (Official Music Video) : 4.3 dB above target
• Ed Sheeran - Shivers [Official Video] : 8.2 dB above target
• Elton John, Dua Lipa - Cold Heart (PNAU Remix) (Official Video) : 5.7 dB above target
• Adele - Oh My God (Official Video) : 7.0 dB above target
• Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever (Official Music Video) : 6.3 dB above target

Oh, and the masters are not compressed by hitting YT LUFS standard. Hitting YT LUFS standard is just reducing the volume, exactly the same as you could do with the volume slider, only that it is done automatically. No, they are already compressed before being sent to YT, and as a result of being compressed, they hit the YT LUFS standard.

I quick download the Weekend -Sacrifice from Youtube. -9.8 LUFS. Above -14 LUFS. In browser is softer than my DAW. I should the word lower the volume, doing too much DAW will use the word compress when intention to squish the volume. When I do my own stuff, I do take care of LUFS. Other that, it is not my concern, someone will take over my mix anyway.

 

[Frank Dernie]

I'm glad we finally understand each other.

Unfortunately, it seems like for a good 25 years producers thought it was a great idea to embed a couple clockwise turns of the volume knob into the recording.
I wonder how bad sound quality needs to get, before the majority of people start complaining too, and not just a few purists like us, which nobody cares about..

To an extent I am lucky since I mainly listen to classical music and have thousands of CDs and LPs of music I like accumulated over the last 60 years or so.
Modern popular music is the biggest loser from this problem but new CDs of performances I want (of works I almost certainly have at least one version of...) of classical music rarely suffer so I am OK.

The biggest problem for me has been that fewer recordings are available on CD and after being an early adopter of file based music over 20 years ago I have mainly gone back to LP and CD for hardware/software and associated convenience reasons.

 

[ZolaIII]

A few examples from The Hit List:

• The Weeknd - Sacrifice (Official Music Video) : 4.3 dB above target
• Ed Sheeran - Shivers [Official Video] : 8.2 dB above target
• Elton John, Dua Lipa - Cold Heart (PNAU Remix) (Official Video) : 5.7 dB above target
• Adele - Oh My God (Official Video) : 7.0 dB above target
• Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever (Official Music Video) : 6.3 dB above target

Oh, and the masters are not compressed by hitting YT LUFS standard. Hitting YT LUFS standard is just reducing the volume, exactly the same as you could do with the volume slider, only that it is done automatically. No, they are already compressed before being sent to YT, and as a result of being compressed, they hit the YT LUFS standard.

So they are breaking things up again. EBU R128 is not just equal loudness normalization and YouTube started using it in 2020 (after experimenting with it in 2019).

EBU R 128 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Deleted member 16543]

We do have to quit making the loudness war the whipping boy for bad sounding recordings.
There are many excellent sounding DR10 recordings and many crappy sounding DR14 ones.
There's more to SQ than it's DR.
But yea, the over use of compression has to end, I think it slowly is. But for much of todays modern dance and club music, metal, grunge, etc that's the way it's intended and probably should be.

Sure. And I think we can all agree it's better to listen to King Crimson through a boom box than to Lady Gaga through a system capable to reproduce all whatever (little) dynamics were left in any of her albums.
I'm not talking about the reasons why music IS crap, compared to the 70's or even 80's.
I'm talking about the reasons why music SOUNDS LIKE crap.
In my opinion there's just a few precious great albums a year being made today too, artistically speaking. And to witness their sound quality being murdered because they have to sound just as loud as other albums that are artistically abysmal is a shame, to me.
Just imagine how much better these albums could be if instead of just BEING good music they also SOUNDED LIKE good music.

 

[Deleted member 16543]

To an extent I am lucky since I mainly listen to classical music and have thousands of CDs and LPs of music I like accumulated over the last 60 years or so.
Modern popular music is the biggest loser from this problem but new CDs of performances I want (of works I almost certainly have at least one version of...) of classical music rarely suffer so I am OK.

The biggest problem for me has been that fewer recordings are available on CD and after being an early adopter of file based music over 20 years ago I have mainly gone back to LP and CD for hardware/software and associated convenience reasons.

I ripped all my CDs about 15 years ago. The quality of CD and the convenience of computer playback.
To this day, when I buy a CD the first thing I do is I rip it.
To digitize LPs it would be another type of hassle for sure, though.
What albums can you find on LP that are not available on CD? Differences in compression/master aside, I would think that most pop music from the 60's on is available on both formats.
For classical music I take it things may be different, though?

 

[danadam]

So they are breaking things up again.

Again? I'm not sure what you mean. Introducing volume normalization on streaming services never prevented doing overly-compressed masters, it only made it pointless. And as such, AFAICT, music industry never stopped doing overly-compressed masters.

 

[ZolaIII]

Again? I'm not sure what you mean. Introducing volume normalization on streaming services never prevented doing overly-compressed masters, it only made it pointless. And as such, AFAICT, music industry never stopped doing overly-compressed masters.

I mean to wide DR mastering results in problems which we all experienced with Dolby movie mixes. If you don't reed I really can't help you. Reed what EBU R128 is.

 

[RichB]

The thread is titled "High Resolution Audio: Does It Matter?".
Yes, because it makes obvious the poor recording practices that are all too common.

- Rich

 

[Frgirard]

The thread is titled "High Resolution Audio: Does It Matter?".
Yes, because it makes obvious the poor recording practices that are all too common.

- Rich

Even with a mp3 256, a mix made with the feet is audible.

 

[Frank Dernie]

For classical music I take it things may be different, though?

The last pop CD I bought was a REM album many years ago. I wasn't particularly wowed by the music and the SQ was compressed and awful. I did rip it to my computer but deleted the files as I was never going to listen to them. The CD is still in the rack, I should give it to charity.

I buy quite a lot of CDs still and only rip them if I will listen in my car, for home I spin the CD.

My CD transport is still going strong since I bought it 25 years ago and during that time everything I have bought for streaming has become software or firmware obsolete even though it could work just as well as it did when new if there hadn't been any updates.

Eventually I bought a refurb iMac thinking the big screen would be great for album graphics and for a while it was fine feeding its digital output to my DAC using various bits of streaming software but now it can't run the latest OS and most of the software doesn't work glitch free any more. It takes 10 minutes to boot. I can't be bothered with the inconvenience and exasperation of it all. I have a big room and well laid out racks for LPs and CDs so it works out more convenient to use them, for me.

I have only bought a couple of new LPs since CDs came out. They always struggled with wide dynamic range classical music so not much point any more IMO.

 

[Deleted member 16543]

The last pop CD I bought was a REM album many years ago. I wasn't particularly wowed by the music and the SQ was compressed and awful. I did rip it to my computer but deleted the files as I was never going to listen to them. The CD is still in the rack, I should give it to charity.

I buy quite a lot of CDs still and only rip them if I will listen in my car, for home I spin the CD.

My CD transport is still going strong since I bought it 25 years ago and during that time everything I have bought for streaming has become software or firmware obsolete even though it could work just as well as it did when new if there hadn't been any updates.

Eventually I bought a refurb iMac thinking the big screen would be great for album graphics and for a while it was fine feeding its digital output to my DAC using various bits of streaming software but now it can't run the latest OS and most of the software doesn't work glitch free any more. It takes 10 minutes to boot. I can't be bothered with the inconvenience and exasperation of it all. I have a big room and well laid out racks for LPs and CDs so it works out more convenient to use them, for me.

I have only bought a couple of new LPs since CDs came out. They always struggled with wide dynamic range classical music so not much point any more IMO.

I have a Mac Mini I use in my listening room that is not connected to the internet. Planned obsolescence on computers is slowed down a lot just by disabling wi-fi.

 

[Frank Dernie]

I have a Mac Mini I use in my listening room that is not connected to the internet. Planned obsolescence on computers is slowed down a lot just by disabling wi-fi.

Ah but my main library is on my main computer, and has been for 20 years so to listen to all my ripped files has to be connected to the iMac for music in the music room.

It is also used if I want to use my Qobuz subscription (once it eventually comes up).

So I don't stream much either since I usually can't be bothered to start the computer and now I am worried I am not able to remember the login password...
Time for recycling perhaps

 

[Bathrone]

This is a subject close to my heart. I have significant research and time into this field. High Res is necessary because

* The claim Sony Phillips got the best golden ears across the industry they could find at the time in developing red book CD, and the outcome was 44.1khz was settled on because a)None of the golden ears could hear a difference to LPs b) Nyquist Shannon processing law re-assured them all that they were ok is a nebulous myth. Human beings havent changed in psychoacoustics since the 70s and 80s. The standard wasnt biblically blessed and it is not transparent.
* A 16bit depth is not perfectly suitable because the human human hearing has around 120db of dynamic range and the act of quantization in 16bits doesnt meet this. I would tend to reject noise floor arguments which try to suggest yeah well add the noise floor in and its around the ball park too because arguing like 40db is lost to the listening location doesnt account to a quiet listening room with closed back headphones.
* A 16bit depth is a poor quantization approach for use cases where folk or hardware makers want to process digital audio further themselves for specific reasons
* With the sampling rate, no one educated would try to say that Nyquist Shannon is somehow wrong. The maths are clear and its proven time and again. Everyone rational agrees that 44.1khz is more than sufficient for reproducing the highest frequency that humans can hear, and its certainly way more than sufficient for the majority of the population who cant even hear beyond 15khz much.
* But, its "wrong" because were measuring the wrong things. We need as an industry to focus way more on psychoacoustics. Good start to explore the maximum frequency a human could ever hear. Dumb ass of the decade move though for Sony Phillips to try to declare that was it and now their "golden ears" cant even tell. Its BS. The real question beyond pre-school, the most basic next question, should have always been ok so high frequencies are covered, how do we deal with transients and directionality in human hearing?
* To answer that.................44.1 khz is 22.676 nanoseconds in time. Epic fail. Science knows that human beings have directionality sense in audio below 10 nano seconds. To properly be transparent, and indeed, even to a casual listener and anything but a "golden ear", a human being is very very good at figuring out directionality and anything less than what our brain processes every day from countless evolutionary pressures killing off half deaf cannon fodder to predators, what has remained through evolution is a human being that has clear perception of directionality to properly respond to threats of harm. And as well, cause harm to other animals on what we want as food lol
* Yes yes, its a horror show of countless data sets and all this pesky cardinality of it all in discrete maths......but we are humans and we have capabilities beyond hearing to understand and influence all this phenomenon. So if a human needs a few nanoseconds to not loose the sense of directionality, then, 768khz sample rate has a time interval of 1.302 nanoseconds which for all is known of science, exceeds what we determine for directionality
* I am not an expert on pyschoacoustics and I dare say, no one on this planet is either. There is massive parts of how the brain does all this which are entirely unknown. We dont actually know the full "specification" but our attempt at doing so with the CD standard was a laughable and childish attempt for sure. There is no way any "golden ear" ever declared CD to be transparent to LP, and the fact is, the most casual human knows its a digital recording to because the sample rate is way way less than what humans need for directionality

 

[dc655321]

Science knows that human beings have directionality sense in audio below 10 nano seconds.

So much incorrect with your post, but let’s start with the above snippet - you’re about 3 orders of magnitude off. Not sure where you found that figure.

We can ignore your incorrect notions on the relationship between sampling rate and time resolution for now.

Oh and welcome to ASR.

 

[Bathrone]

Yes and hi, thanks for the welcome mate

I'll find a paper to reference it. I think your trying to reference an old standard, which was about microseconds. There is research showing its about nanoseconds. What attracts me to this board is the rationalism and science - so I do freely welcome debate and criticism. I care about this subject allot.