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Comment by lynx23 | Hacker News Reader

192kHz/24 bit, what a wonderful piece of snakeoil... What do they actually record with this frequency, bats talking to each other about classical music?

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That number is common in professional contexts, Apple is just publishing the highest “quality” available. Whether this is useful is up to the listener, who can just as well decide to listen to 192kbps AAC instead.

In a world where videos and photos are still shared at laughable resolutions, let’s not scorn decisions to preserve media in the highest possible quality.

> 192kHz/24 bit, what a wonderful piece of snakeoil…

I agree, it really hertz to see Apple pandering to non-technical audiophiles like this. I blame Neil Young. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)

> What do they actually record with this frequency, bats talking to each other about classical music?

I lol'd.

You’re mixing up sampling rate/depth and sound frequency.

Am I? They say 192kHz/24 bit, followed by the word lossless... Trust me, I am not confusing things, but they do. Here is the quote:

> up to 192kHz/24-bit Hi-Res Lossless

If this makes sense in your world, kudos!

It means that the audio is sampled at 192khz and each sample is 24bit, not that the audio is recorded with hardware capable of recording sounds up to 192KHz

I know about nyquest, do you? 192kHz sampling rate means the highest tone representable is 96kHz, which is roughly 80kHz more then what the average human can actually (still) perceive.

For audio-postprocessing, I might be convinced that there is a benefit of raising the sampling frequency that high, but for pure hi-fi consumers? No way. This is snakeoil.

That's an unconvincing argument because the presence of ultrasonic sounds can affect human perception. It is just not perceptible via the exact same mechanism that ordinary sound is.

The argument you should be going with is that the speakers and headphones that people will be playing the music on doesn't do ultrasonic sound.

This is a good point. Also, I don't see the economic incentives for this to be snakeoil.

"ultrasonic sounds can affect human perception. It is just not perceptible via the exact same mechanism..."

talk about unconvincing

If the average human can’t hear these sounds, that’ll just make the audiophiles think they have above average hearing.

I think I misunderstood your first message. Yes, you are right.

For simple listening there is no benefit. As you pointed out it ca be beneficial if the audio is processed (for instance, slowed down).

By lossless they mean “losslessly compressed from source” (FLAC, or likely in Apple’s case ALAC) as opposed to “lossy compressed” like MP3 or AAC streaming services usually use.

Wether or not the original recording was done/mastered in 24/192 or higher/lower is a whole other question. In the grand scheme of things all ADC involves “compression” in the form of quantization.

The idea that there's a noticeable benefit to having a sample rate higher than twice the highest frequency is the snake oil here. Many audiophiles seem to believe this but it's not supported by the mainstream understanding of digital signal processing.

A higher bit rate lets you digitally process audio without introducing artifacts. It's very common to record, mix, and master audio at 192/24 and even oversample well above 192k.

It has nothing to do with snake oil or hearing things above 22k it's about not introducing aliasing and other digital artifacts, and on highly dynamic content like classical can definitely be heard in the audible spectrum.

Wouldn't you get more artifacts downsampling a 192k mix to AAC as opposed to just using an AAC-optimised file from the start?

I am all for 24 bit to get more dynamic range. But I am still unconvinced that anything above 48kHz makes a difference for the final consumer.

It’s not that high- some music streams with higher sampling frequencies and bit depths.

The main snake oil phenomenon that goes on is up sampling cd quality recordings to these levels. That doesn’t accomplish much other than confusion.

Certainly the majority of systems out there are not high end enough to appreciate higher quality recordings unless they are wired headphones (a quality setup there doesn’t cost too much).

There is no system high-end enough to allow your ears to magically hear 96kHz, or even 48kHz. Unless you’re very young with golden ears it’s extremely doubtful that you can hear a 24kHz tone. It is absolutely snake oil.

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html is an overview by the creator of Ogg and Vorbis explaining exactly, scientifically, why these inflated sampling rates are snake oil.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM is a longer video by the same person that debunks a lot of digital audio myths.

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