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Comment by Yodel0914 | Hacker News Reader

I can understand the move back to physical media with CDs, because for almost all people on almost all audio equipment, 44.1khz 16bit is indistinguishable from higher resolutions.

DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality. And you have to deal with region restrictions, unskippable anti-piracy propaganda etc. Before we moved we just gave away about 200 DVDs because we couldn't even sell them.

Physical media itself is quite a pain too, which I re-discovered when I recently ripped my ~300 CD collection. I am very much enjoying the experience of listening to "my own" digital collection though - it's far more satisfying than trying to remember/discover what I want to listen to on Spotify.

I was surprised to find that it's quite easy to buy DRM-free, CD quality (or higher) digital downloads these days from bandcamp, qobuz etc. I wish it was like for that for video.

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24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones. I don't know why you think that. Similarly, 4k Blu-ray is obviously vastly superior to crappy compressed streams from Netflix or YouTube.

Do you mean lossless over lossy? Few people if any will be able to tell the difference between 16/44.1 lossless and 24/44.1 or 24/48 lossless.

24bit is definitely noticeable.

The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.

> The extra dynamic range helps bypass bad mastering.

I'm not an audio engineer by any means, but I'm not sure that sentence makes sense. Mastering is what produces the final audio output - if you take a badly compressed master it's not going to matter if you export it to 16 or 24 bit.

Exactly, you can't "bypass" poorly mastered audio.

Nor can anyone hear the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit file, all else being equal.

>Nor can anyone hear the difference between a 16bit and a 24bit file, all else being equal.

While we don't know the exact dynamic range of human hearing, we do know it to be above 96dB.

Either way, using these 96dB in 16bit requires careful mastering.

With CDs, it is not possible to e.g. make a song quieter than the others in the CD without losing this 96dB range. There's no "ReplayGain" metadata in the discs; the format is aged and not fancy at all.

"Louder is better". At 16bit, there's not that much room to do so without destroying dynamic range.

At 24bit, there is plenty, thus preserving what was in the original recording is possible even with bad mastering.

The way the “loudness wars” work is by reducing the dynamic range to be far narrower than what’s available at 16bit, which gives the impression of loudness even though the loudest sounds are no louder.

Lets say the mastering process compresses the recording extremely to a 42dB (8bit) range - outputting that to either 16 or 24 bit will make zero difference. The audio will still have a dynamic range of 42dB.

The mastering would have to be basically non-existent for it to use a dynamic range larger than available in 16bit, and would mean noone would ever hear the quieter parts.

If we're talking unmastered recordings for archival, yes 24bit is very useful. For final mastered copies released for listening it's completely untrue that 16bit doesn't offer enough dynamic range.

> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement even on $150 headphones

Not going to question your subjective experience, but I do not think most people will hear any difference between 16 and 24 bit playbacks under normal conditions, even with fancy headphones.

"120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.

16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever." [1]

[1] https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

> Not going to question your subjective experience

Read enough glowing product reviews from "audiophiles" on nonsense like $100 electrical sockets and $75 Ethernet cables and you'll start to question everything.

> https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

That's a great article; thank s.

Your source disagrees with your claim there.

" It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions. Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.

None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space. "

It isn't obviously noticeable when 99.9% of people could not tell the difference. Take Pet Sounds which was mixed in mono onto analogue tape, hiss and all. Most people do not have magic ears.

> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement

16-bit is (IIRC) 96 dB of dynamic range, going from well below human perceptual noise level to above damage threshold.

24-bit is good for headroom when recording/mixing but useless for listening.

If there's any difference between a 16-bit and a 24-bit version it's either because they're actually not the same (different mixing/mastering^) or they're just poorly mixed/mastered from the start and don't use the full 16-bit (or 24-bit for that matter) dynamic range: if you by and large use only 2/3 of the bits to actually convey a signal change then it may say 16-bit on the tin but it's actually 10-bit or something, (and for 24-bit it's only using... 16-bit!) and the remainder bits are just wasted space.

^ I find that quite frequent on vinyl vs digital: vinyl sounds better not because of some inherent property of the medium but because the mastering (and sometimes even the mixing) is simply not the same, presumably because it doesn't cater for the same audience/use case (vinyl at home for amateurs/enthusiasts/audiophiles, digital for a much wider variety of users, listening conditions, and listening hardware)

I thought I'd read studies on this, but it turns out it was on sample frequency rather then bit depth.

However, seeing as in audio bit depth only affects dynamic range, you'd have to be listening to something with an extreme dynamic range to hear it. I can see why higher bit depth is useful in recording, but not in playback.

> 24-bit audio is obviously a noticeable improvement

Audio quality is famous for having an extremely strong placebo effect. Unless you did the test double blinded, your anecdote has a good chance of being wrong.

> DVD though, is just objectively terrible quality.

But I can play it on many devices, or it can be format shifted if needed.

I can't play Blu-ray on Linux even if I had a compatible reader.

When you say play, do you mean something else other than reading the disc?

I can't remember if I've tried to play any Blu-ray disc recently, but I know for sure that they can be read. I have a recollection that you might need some software to "mount" the disc so that normal media players can work with the disc.

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