Comment by 5zBFyURxgY | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 5zBFyURxgY | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Still very silly IMAO. Very, very few recordings are done in 24/192 because of the many implications this has on your entire studio setup.

You'll need an exceptional good clock to start with, and all other equipment needs to align to that clock. Then all plugins/processing you use needs to be in the same 24/192 domain, otherwise your signal is reduced to the limit of that plugin/processing and all previous efforts are lost.

Most music producers use samples, most are 16/44, so what's the point to try to get that to 24/192, filling the signal with zero's..

If a piece of music is in very rare occasion truly 24/192 then the listener who downloaded the track still needs a exceptional good clock (that are both expensive and hard to find) to playback without signal reduction.

IMAO 24/192 is just a marketing thing for audiophiles that don't really understand the implications. 24/96 should be a reasonable limit for now, although personally I think 24/48 is enough for very high quality audio.

You ought to have read the rest of this thread before leaving this comment. I’d be very happy with 24/96 or 24/48 if I could get recordings at that bitrate that aren't given a loudness wars treatment. Since I often can't, I have to go for 24/192 or SACD even if all that extra room is completely superfluous, just because that format was decently mastered.

> Most music producers use samples...

Most people interested in better-quality sound in this particular context aren't listening to contemporary electronic music with samples. 24/192 or SACD is so desirable for reissues of older recordings in pop or jazz genres where those formats were mastered with higher dynamic range, while the available CD versions or lower-bitrate downloads were mastered with loudness-wars compression. The format is also attractive to classical music listeners, because SACD gives you multichannel audio; and some classical labels are now giving loudness-wars treatment to the non-SACD or non-24/192 formats of a particular new release.

"some classical labels are now giving loudness-wars treatment"

That's depressing.

Haha, at least classical IS usually recorded well, being an audiophile metal-head these days is depressing. If I use my normal setup almost everything clips badly.

This depends on whether you are in the studio or are just playing back things.

In the studio, I would say that 24 bit at least should be the norm for recording purposes.

24 bit recording gives you very noticeable increased headroom (about 20dB). This gives you quite a bit more flexibility recording lower levels without concerning yourself about the noise floor. The difference isn't huge for most prosumer setups in practice, but given that the processing power and storage power of computers makes recording in 24 bit trivial to do, there really is no reason not to record 24 bit these days IMHO.

Sample rate also comes into play, mainly if you have older plugins that do not oversample. Some of the mathematical calculations involved, particularly if they are quickly responding to audio changes (eg limiting / compression, distortion), or are using "naive" aliasing-prone algorithms (eg naive sawtooth wave vs. something like BLEP / PolyBLEP etc.), can introduce frequencies beyond the Nyquist that may translate into aliasing. These days, I would say most plugins do oversample internally or at the very least give you the option to do so. There's also a VST wrapper to over-sample older plugins as well (http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/antialias/). So I do not think recording over 44.1kHz is very necessary these days. I don't discount opinions from people that recording at 192kHz "sounds better", though, given the possibility that they are using plugins that are prone to aliasing at 44.1kHz rates.

I personally do not see any benefit of 16/44.1kHz for playback most recordings. Maybe 24 bit would be useful for heavily dynamic music (one of the few categories where you generally find this is orchestral music), but I'm thinking even for here the 96dB range of 16 bit audio should be enough for most cases.

> This gives you quite a bit more flexibility recording lower levels without concerning yourself about the noise floor.

To be fair, that only applies to the digital part of your signal chain. The analog portion is going to have nowhere near 24 bits of room above the noise floor.

The article is pretty clear that 24/192 can be reasonable for production-- it's just not reasonable for playback.

First of, I agree that 24/192 is not very useful for most circumstances (also for the dynamics thing, you still need a 24/192 master done without all the compressions).

But your arguments aren't quite right, IMO. If you have a 16/44 sample, and you don't play it at full volume, you get some use out of those extra bits. Especially if you have a volume envelope.

Also many modern samples are actually saved as 24 (or 32 bit even). Especially if they're my own creation from noodling around with softsynths, but they're shared like that as well, obviously.

Then, if you apply a plugin or effect that supports 192/24 output, on a 16/44 sample, you still get useful information in those additional bits, even if the sample did not. Think of the very quiet end of a reverb tail, for instance.

But that's for producers. It's always good to have your working stuff in high quality, you never know how far you'll end up amplifying those low order bits.

So I can see the use for 24 bit audio (in certain contexts), but I'm really not so sure at all what the 192kHz is good for. Since it's waaaayyy above the human hearing range, all I can think of is dithering. You can hide a lot of your dithering noise in the ultrasonic range (which almost seems like free lunch IMHO) and then ... you obtained even more (virtual) bits of fidelity! Which you didn't really need cause you were using 24 bit audio in the first place.

I agree it's mostly a marketing gimmick, otherwise.

Studios work in 32bit-Float all the time...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com