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Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

192kHz is overkill of the overkill, but 10bit, seriously?! That is 1024 levels for the whole dynamic range, you are cutting it down to its 64th fraction man! With classical music where it is not filled up to the level of clipping but silent parts contain plenty of details you really must be joking with 10 bits or perhaps rely on listening experience of rap with through the roof bass and inarticulate jabber, there even 6bits may be too much, I give you that.

Also the standard 44.1kHz is good to have so the waves could be followed with little deviation and for the sake of reproduction. 192kHz is really snake oil but please do not jump over the horse to the other side in the frenzy of compensating.

Please study https://www.headphonesty.com/2019/07/sample-rate-bit-depth-b... or others.

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> With classical music where it is not filled up to the level of clipping but silent parts contain plenty of details […]

And just because the music is silent doesn't mean the recording is: there's one album I have where there is a short rest in the musical work, but they recorded in a church in the country/rural area and seem to have have left the window(s) open, so during the musical stop you can hear birds chirping in the recording (if you have decent headphones).

On Pat Metheny's Travels album, there's a live recording of Farmer's Trust. It has birdsong added in by one of his band members (the name escapes me)

For a long time the version in Spotify didn't have these.

In a similar vein, in Vince Guaraldi's Live from Grace Cathedral album, you can hear coughing from the congregants in the background of some songs, notably Theme to Grace. Crush the dynamic range and it disappears

Even in "loud" music 10 or 12 bit is definitely noticeable. Many modern samplers include a legacy mode meant to mimic the grungy sound of old 10 or 12 bit sampling hardware. It might not be noticeable to non-musicians, but anyone who makes music will hear the difference. Even if you turn off other features that are usually included in tandem, like dac emulators.

That's when it's used as a "bit crusher" effect by converting to 10/12 bit samples by simple truncation, rather than dithering (randomized rounding up or down to the nearest quantization value, with P(round_up) = the relative closeness of the sample to the upper quantization value).

With dithering, the only difference a smaller bit depth makes is a higher noise floor, with the noise being just background white noise (like tape hiss). With most pop music a 10 bit depth with dithering would likely not be audibly worse, since pop music is usually compressed into like the top 10dB of the dynamic range.

>perhaps rely on listening experience of rap with through the roof bass and inarticulate jabber, there even 6bits may be too much, I give you that.

I think you made a great recap on why this is good and especially good for classical music listeners. But I can't fathom why so many music lovers online are only able to communicate about their love of music while trashing a specific genre. I think more people should be exposed to high quality audio and know how to appreciate it, theorizing to the ignorant that their tastes are wrong because their preferred music is bad probably doesn't move the needle in that direction, and IMO, reflects a different ignorance.

It wasn't about the genre or taste at all but about people accustomed to only less demanding settings drawing wrong conclusion based on that, projecting it on else. The situation looked like that.

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