Hacker News Reader

Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

FTA: "192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback."

I would expect the samples to be interpolated before the final DA conversion takes place, so no extra ultrasonics should be involved. And there would be filters for them anyway, we still have to use them for 44.1, 48, 96 etc.

View on HN

But if you're filtering out ultrasonics, then you've guaranteed that the extra samples will be wasted. There won't be any difference in the reconstructed signal at all.

As an engineer, those extra samples are never wasted, and as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space." Drive space is meaningless at this point. When I buy a piece of audio, give me the highest quality available and I will make my own decisions regarding the frequency I want to listen to it at. The reasons behind not giving the user the highest quality possible all sound like a misguided excuse to prevent piracy.

Ok... but the point stands that the signal will be the same if you low-pass filter it no matter how many samples you take. You might as well distribute the file at 44.1 kHz and then interpolate to something higher yourself, if you want to play with it later.

> as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space."

In general, bandwidth is more of a concern than disk space. Most media people consume is never stored on the local device.

So 192/1024? 1024/4M? 1G/1T? Like is there a practical limit for you when you say "highest quality possible"?

I see no issue with storing 24/192 multichannel audio like what comes on blu-ray audio discs, or DSD streams. For my current hard drive situation, I could store 5 GB per song and easily have enough space to have a very large catalog. But drive space is only getting cheaper.

The extra bits mean you can change how you filter the sound later, depending on what range your headphones/speakers are capable of reproducing without distortion, or what your ears are capable of hearing.

Who knows, maybe technology or genetic changes will allow future humans to hear in a wider range than we do now. Those people might appreciate being able to hear what our music really sounded like.

Wasn't the point that if you have a system capable of outputting a 192kHz analog signal on the DAC, essentially hitting your speakers with 96kHz audio, any non-linearity starting at the DAC and beyond could cause distortion in the actually audible range?

And if you do any downsampling, or any low pass filtering in general, then having 192kHz sampling is even more useless, in addition to only having the "benefit" of adding a frequency band to the spectrum that's completely inaudible anyway.

We need the extra frequencies to communicate over the air updates to our mind control implants, obviously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com