edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.
Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time.
People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean.
>pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations.
A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters.
Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...
Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool.
I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario.
edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases.
Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough!
Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000.
This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough.
If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic.
If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later.
That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.
I bought some half decent speakers by my standards around a year ago (Creative T40s for what its worth).
As a test I tried some MP3 tracks at various bitrates sitting on my hard drive to see if I could guess the difference. Most of the time I thought the 192kbps sounded better than the 320kbps.
Not to sound condescending but those speakers you mention don't seem very decent at and probably don't warrant any conclusion towards the benefits of various compression settings or audiophile configurations in.
However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain):
https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut...
I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength.
Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly:
1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process.
2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline.
3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats.
4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages.
5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable!
6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.
The dust/scratch factor of vinyl has a much bigger impact than 16 vs 24bit or much of the signal processing issues.
To me, it would seem that in order to compare the two, you would basically need to resample the 24/192 recording, with dither, and then resample it back to 24/192; and you would need to choose a high quality resampling filter. Anything other than that I wouldn't really consider a comparison.
Furthermore, given that the measured sensitivity is more likely on the frequency front than on the dynamic range front, did they establish a distinction between 44.1kHz and 48kHz?
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134...
It's not just a matter of reproduction. Humans make the products different.
Look at the bottom of this page:
If you were listening to music at that volume, it would generally be considered unsafe, and you would potentially have hearing loss beyond 37 minutes [1]
16 bits is plenty.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth [1] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/noise/default.html
And 96 to 119 is huge improvement.
dB expresses the ratio of one value to another. So without knowing what the other value is, it's rather meaningless. But it is unfortunately an often-made mistake: how many times haven't you heard or read just dB as such? Anyway, this means you cannot simply compare dB dynamic range with dB used to express sound pressure level of which 'A-Weighted' is just one standard which gets used. Those are completely different things. Simply said, you can play 96dB dynamic range music at sound pressure levels which you won't even hear. Or at sound pressure levels which damage your ears nearly instantly.
First: Bits per sample just describe how many discrete amplitude values (2^bits) are possible at each sample of a recording. The waveform is quantized to these values.
To understand quantization in the context of dynamic range, imagine how many bits per sample are needed to recreate a very quiet sound without loss, and then check how many bits you need to extend that to reach very loud sounds in the same recording file.
For example: How much precision would you need to accurately record the sound of a pin dropping (10db)? 4 bits? 8 bits? 10 bits? 12 bits?
Let’s be really absurd and say we can use 4 bits — just 16 discrete values — to represent a pin dropping sound (10db) cleanly and indistinguishable from the real thing. This is so obviously impossible, given how terribly quantized the waveform would be, but let’s be generous and assume it works.
Now, for the same audio file to reach all the way up to 110db (not uncommon for bass drum hits in an orchestra for example) is an extra 100db of dynamic range, which is 100,000x the amplitude, which is a little over 16 bits in addition to the original 4. So, rounding down, we’d need 20 bits to represent 10db sounds (with quantization down to only 16 discrete amplitudes) and 110db sounds in the same recording.
I think it’s extremely obvious that even 20 bits in this example is far from sufficient. In fact, even 24 bits would be insufficient if 8 bits per sample are not good enough to record a pin dropping at 10db!
In my experience CD’s are anything but durable.
If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine:
None of the CDs I’ve ever bought still works. I’m probably not as careful with my things as you are, so there’s that.
Unfortunately, due to manufacturing defects there are discs that will or have oxidized, so the durability of CDs (or other optical media) is not always as reliable as advertised. But as the sibling post to yours points out, CDs provide error correction and along with oversampling provides means of creating effectively bit perfect copies that can be as durable as the current state of the art (redundant, solid state, geographically diverse, etc.)
There are some quasi-plausible arguments for vinyl, but arguing that durability is one of them is hilariously myopic.
E: Specifically I'm talking about the P & Q channels, but this can also include R through W which while technically unused, still contain data in some form.
more information here
Most audio CD extractors do not provide all of this channel data, as only the digital audio is extracted. When a CD is re-burned, the subchannel data is regenerated, but not a bit-for-bit copy of the original. Sounds the same (usually), but sometimes there is metadata, easter-eggs, and what-not that is omitted. Additionally, some copy protection relied on adding corrupted subchannel data which low end CD players would skip, but high end extractors would not. Having the original subchannel data can be key and necessary to determine whether a sector was infact incorrectly extracted or not.
Gracenote had 3 598 785 CDs in their database in 2005 [1], so I'll take that as a lower bound on the number of CDs ever made.
I don't know what the largest flash drive that will fit in a jeans pocket is, but the largest I was able to find is 2 TB, but SanDisk showed a 4 TB prototype at CES 2019, so I'll go with that.
Assuming lossless compression that averages reducing the size of a song by 75%, a 4 TB flash drive could hold 1 662 149.1 minutes of music.
Unless the average CD is under 27.7 seconds long, that's not even enough to hold all the CDs known to Gracenote in 2005.
Anyone want to do the math if we allow lossy compression to squeeze more in (although I wouldn't consider it a backup of the CDs if lossy)?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=177.5+cm%5E3%2F%28%28%...
That'll fit in my pocket, so that's 240 million megabit, 160 million seconds, or 2.7 million minutes, about 1 million songs. OK not every song ever, but a good portion, and possibly every song that's been in the charts.
I did see one claim that there had been as many as 100 million songs ever recorded, which would mean the density won't be there fore another 15 years or so.
An average person can expect to live upto about 2.5 billion seconds, which requires (for stereo 44.1khz 16 bit), about 220TB - 2.7TB a year. Given the growth of storage, you could record everything you hear from now to forever, keeping it in your pocket.