24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

I agree that it's certainly overkill for listening sake, and that decent mp3/aac/opus encodes are generally indistinguishable in quality to a proper "lossless" format.

That said, I still really do like having high bitdepth/sample rate audio available for download.

Storage space is cheap and as physical CDs are getting phased out I don't want to be in a world where the best you can acquire is the minimal viable quality. If space is at a premium lossless audio with overkill quality can be transcoded to a smaller compressed format at 10s to 100s times realtime. Additionally it means should better compression schemes come out in the future you can reap the benefits of them. I had a lot of old CD rips from the early 2000s in 96kbps WMA and that was regrettable.

As a scifi speculation for fun if in the future there were augmentations that improved human's hearing ability or effective brain links which could transmit audio more effectively than our ever deteriorating ears we'd want the best possible audio signal to feed into that.

One past thread:

24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898 - March 2019 (314 comments)

While I can hear the difference between 128 kbit mp3 and flac, I sometimes can't between 320kbit mp3 and flac. But that being said, on principle, I want as much information there as possible, no not as much as "makes sense", because common sense is debatable. Since sound is analogue, there's a new data-point every Planck time, at a resolution of how many Planck lengths I don't know.. Obviously, that's idiocracy.. But I'll take "this is provable many times more precise than you're physiologically able to hear" any day.

As an end product, I would have doubts that anyone could hear a difference past 24/48. Honestly 16/44.1 is just fine for most people. Especially when you run it through a lossy container.

That said. A lot of people in the audio production space see stuff like this, and apply it to recording, where the loss of definition compounds. Also, aliasing is a major thing.

So just because you don't need to be downloading 24/192 audio from spotify, don't say audio interfaces supporting it is pointless

Distilling this down to a technical arguement, and going back to basics, this level of resolution is pretty not relevant to 99.5+% of music listeners.

If listening in the car, over Bluetooth, or on headphones, you are going to need tens of thousands of dollars to preserve that signal and not destroy it. RFI, EMI, and current leakage on the power line is going to render anything above Redbook (standard cd quality) useless.

Speakers have a bad frequency response, but can be very detailed, so they aren't going to be an obstacle to hearing high-res audio.

But the room is. The room is the undisputed kicked to this arguement.

The room acts as a "wire" from the speakers to your ears, and there are fundamental problems with overcoming this "wire".

Most people don't even try, and just ignore it altogether.

For example, there is the ASRD, attack sustain release decay. Without sucking up the bass energy which is omnidirectional, you will only ever hear the attack well, and even that is sketchy. The sustain, release, decay will be drown out.

Then there is the timing aspect. Any sounds that reach the ear within approx. 20ms will obscure the detail retrieval from the original source. That's a 20 foot bounce. So you need a LARGE room. Most people have small rooms, and ALL their "first reflections" are within that 20ms range, and even lots of "early reflections"

So yeah, room geometry and physics render high Res audio irrelevant for everyone but the highly obsessed audiophile.

The normies that aren't into audio have no clue, none at all, so they argue about high Res music when it's the LAST thing that is going to improve their musical experience.

Current main stream isn't worth listening in 16/44 either.

I would be a critical listener with high expectations. Not trained professionally. I don't hear a difference going from 16/44 to 24/96. But I hear a tremendous difference listening to a good sound engineer and producer and a well performing artist. That's where my money goes.

What’s considered the top end for headphones right now for under 500-600$? Used to be hd650s we’re the best has anything dethroned them?

Lousy production and loudness wars can ruin any audio codec.