Inside High-res Music: Live from Minster from The Lake Poets

[Nathan Raymond]

There is a fallacy in the idea:
If the recording process uses a high rez format that there is information captured that is useful in the consumer product.
The reason to use a deeper fit depth and faster sample rate is to avoid numerical nasties in the processing steps causing problems. It isn’t viable to edit and process the signal in 16 bits. You get truncation and round off errors everywhere. These cascade and you may end up with a result with much less than 16 bits of valid information and lots of distortion creating artefacts. This is true even if your ADCs are all 16 bit.
Same is true about sample rate. You can’t change the pitch or otherwise resample unless there is wiggle room in the sample rate. Also you want some room to avoid the effects of various convolutions ringing. More taps at higher sample rates for you FIR and IIR filters and so on.
The core fallacy is that the recording process ever had real human perceivable information in the higher resolution format over that that could be held in a 16/44.1 format. In the end, do the microphones, preamps, venue and instruments all exceed these bounds. The answer is that they don’t.
Properly produced and mastered audio derived from the internal high res format can and does capture everything it is possible to hear in a 16/44.1 format.
Lack of cleanliness in the production chain of the various high res formats for consumers seems to be actually delivering a result where proper care has not been taken and where, if anything, second order issues in the chain may actually result in a worse outcome. Certainly it is never any better.

For those of us who have already bought and downloaded hundreds of albums, would it be a good idea to downsample "Hi-Res" music in a personal library with something like XLD so files are either 44.1 or 48Khz (depending on whether the source is 88Khz or 96Khz, etc.)? That way useless audio information is discarded and the file footprint is smaller, and re-processing the files locally could be faster and more convenient than individually re-downloading all the albums from multiple sources.

 

[amirm]

You can down sample but I would keep the bit depth at 24.

 

[phoenixsong]

You can down sample but I would keep the bit depth at 24.

Will changing the sample rate of the DAC (but not reformatting the music file) help as well?

 

[amirm]

Will changing the sample rate of the DAC (but not reformatting the music file) help as well?

You can't do that. The player will instruct the DAC to play at the source sample rate. Some players like Roon however will resample files on the fly if you put a cap on the sample rate.

 

[Nathan Raymond]

You can't do that. The player will instruct the DAC to play at the source sample rate. Some players like Roon however will resample files on the fly if you put a cap on the sample rate.

What about USB DACs? On my Mac I run all my audio through my Emotiva Big Ego hooked up via USB, and when I got it I set the output format in "Audio MIDI Setup" to the highest, which is 2 channel 24-bit Integer 384.0 kHz. Analog output from the Big Ego goes to my headphone amp and from there to my desktop speakers. I don't think the Mac automatically switches the output format on the fly if you play back Hi-Res audio, so this way at worst I'd be upsampling the audio (which I figured at the time was better than downsampling, but maybe not...)