Why 24/192 is a bad idea?

[Phelonious Ponk]

True but unrelated to the point I made. When the music is being mixed it is not subject to loudness compression. It is only when it is being mastered for CD that the atrocities are committed . Here is an example of why this is true: http://mixonline.com/mixline/reierson_loudness_war_0802/

"The Loudness War is Over
Feb 8, 2011 2:22 PM, By Greg Reierson

Making loud CDs will become just a bad memory.

I was at the AES show in San Francisco last November and I came back with renewed hope for the future of the music industry—not just from a business perspective, but from a recording-quality perspective as well. Besides the usual discussions about gear and recording techniques, there was a lot of talk about high resolution digital downloads surpassing CDs as the dominant delivery format within the next few years. Optimism is growing as more and more engineers are seeing a way to finally get past the loudness war.

Greg Reierson is the owner/chief engineer at Rare Form Mastering in Minneapolis. Visit him at www.rareformmastering.com. "


I am not stopping at anything as that is not my point. Whatever pros produce is what we should give to the consumer and with it, bypass this silly argument. I would be hearing the same signal that powered their electronics/speakers that way. Anything else and I am at the mercy of them understanding things like dither, resampling, etc. And worst of all, compressing the heck out of it.

I think you and Mr. Reierson are both being a bit naive. The awful loudness of so many pop masters is a deliberate marketing decision on the part of record companies. If hi-res downloads become a major arm of major label distribution, they will impose their marketing decisions on it, just as they do today with CDs, iTunes, etc.

Tim

 

[MarinJim]

I don't know why, but I get an uneasy feeling that hi-res allows the recording engineers again to sloppily record, but this time say, "Hey, it's better than CD, it's Hi-res!" I say put more quality control in the CD recordings first and formost. Straighten that house out first. Because in all this marketing for hi-res, I bet very, very few will in fact deliver true hi-res, instead of using that moniker to sell more garbage poor recordings.

 

[rbbert]

There are plenty of over-compressed peak limited hires releases out there, for the simple reason that they usually use the CD mastering, even when it is true hires.

 

[xiphmont]

Good or bad, unless your business is out united states, you have to abide by the laws of this country.

Disingenuous: You're suggesting we don't follow the laws of the country where we're based.

The day I get sued, my defense cannot be, "Judge, people get sued all the time. Please let me off the hook."

Disingenuous: Implying that would be anyone's 'defense' strategy.

You haven't refuted anything I've said. You've repeated it in a high nasal tone and checked around the room nervously to see if anyone's laughing along with you.

Typical patent litigation costs which includes a jury (as it often does when a big company is sued), runs into millions of dollars.

I suggest starts at about $5M to fight an invalid patent that reads "PEANUT BUTTER PEANUT BUTTER" for fifty pages. It goes up from there. Good thing that none of our codecs have ever been the subject of litigation.

Not so with Vorbis and the rest of the so called "open source" technologies.

Calling bullshit again.

Microsoft itself [the real company, not this other fake company you assert goes by 'Microsoft'] has a stake in our most recent codec Opus after buying our co-developer Skype. Microsoft seems keen to hold onto that stake. You'd think they'd be flinging it on the ground and shrieking 'Unclean! Unclean! Dirty Open Source!', especially since both MPEG and the ITU are clearly pissed about it.

Since no major patent holder is consulted or paid for their use, nor are there any RAND terms in play, when the day of reckoning comes, the costs may easily put you out of business.

True of every piece of software on the market since State Street, except it's the FRAND people that are suing each other out of business.

Witness Apple v Google v entire world. _That_ is the 'safety' of FRAND.

By making sure those were reasonable, then comparative solutions otherwise would potentially cost less to license. In that manner, we helped you without you even knowing it! .

Smilies don't mean 'I was just terribly clever!'

Microsoft games <> Microsoft. Please don't confuse the two.

Right. "Oh please, judge, that's a completely different company despite what the corporate filings say!" <-- please imagine this in a high nasal tone. Rowan Atkinson will do.

Microsoft proper also ships our codecs. As do Cisco, Google, Apple, IBM, Oracle etc. Mac OS does not ship with Xiph IPR but iOS does. How big do we need to get for it to 'count'?

You haven't yet refuted or directly addressed anything I've said. You've fallen back on a false talking point.

When I was there, my group would constantly be educating people who are confused by marketing collateral such as your FAQ thinking open source = patent free.

There's the talking point again. Our FAQ says nothing of the sort. It says only that our own codecs are unencumbered and RF.

But by all means keep repeating something completely different. I realize that's your talking point and it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

First of all, you would not know about all the "lawsuits."

Lawsuits are public filings, and part of the public record. There have been no lawsuits.

It is not like you are a licensing and provide an indemnity and hence will be called on every one of them.

Our license doesn't require asking our permission. We will issue a formal license if a company asks, but it's not required. Completely foreign concept, I know.

It is still a license, and we enforce it.

No other codec licensing authority offers indemnity. It's a brilliant PR stunt by Microsoft to do so-- worded in such a way to only cover those with whom Microsoft already shared liability.

Does Microsoft's indemnity apply to Joe Random Small Startup Co? No, it does not.

Getting back to an earlier point that you avoided, you haven't answered my question yet: Are you still a compulsive shoplifter? We know each other extremely well, so I'm interested in the answer. _Yes_ or _no_ please. Why are you evading the question?

We can both play the mocking condescension game, but I don't think anyone falls for it. If Xiph codecs are legally radioactive, why are they on most of the world's computing devices? Why is Microsoft itself now our co-developer? Why has there been zero litigation?

Monty
Xiph.Org

 

[rbbert]

Before sigma-delta DACs/ADCs became common, most DACs and ADCs would often work at (e.g.) 4x the sampling rate internally. So a DAC would take your 48 kHz signal, up-sampling it (digitally) to 192 kHz internally, and then convert to analog. At this point, the analog filtering is indeed trivial because there's no signal between 24 kHz and 168 kHz. The same idea applies to ADCs. The bottom line is that you get the benefits of 192 kHz sampling (simpler analog filters) without the pain of having to store all those samples.

Totally irrelevant to the issues of A>D conversion, quantization distortion and anti-aliasing filters.

In most music, the top 1-2 octaves are typically 8-9 bits lower in volume than peak levels, making 24 bit (or more) ADC's necessary to keep 16-bit resolution (a point made repeatedly and apparently repeatedly ignored).

 

[rbbert]

I could. Don't think I've ever been able to tell the difference, but most of my collection came from CD, and hard drive space is cheap enough that lossless makes sense. 24/192 is much larger, but still the HD space is not the issue as much as the download time.

Tim

Even on my midlevel Internet plan, one hour of losslessly compressed 24/192 music takes less than 30 minutes to download.

 

[jmvalin]

In most music, the top 1-2 octaves are typically 8-9 bits lower in volume than peak levels, making 24 bit (or more) ADC's necessary to keep 16-bit resolution (a point made repeatedly and apparently repeatedly ignored).

So what you're saying is that while I'm playing music at 96 dB SPL (i.e. LSB goes to 0 dB SPL), my top octaves will only be at 48 dB SPL and I still need 96 dB range to get my noise floor down to -48 dB SPL? I suggest you have a look at "Absolute Threshold of Hearing". Unless you listen to music really loud (in which case there's other masking issues that get involved), then 16-bit quantization noise is below/at the ATH and there's no way you're going to hear it.

 

[Ethan Winer]

IMO this thread should split off into two, one with the Amir versus Monty discussion, and another about the supposed benefits of hi-res audio.

--Ethan

 

[Steve williams]

In sure Amir will do that if his debate continues with Monty

 

[Ethan Winer]

The IASA is devoted to archiving sound as is. They would not approve of removing clicks and pops from vinyl.

Sure, but if someone later wants to clean up the vinyl, it's possible that having used a higher sample rate could help. I can't believe I'm arguing for excessively high sample rates!

I keep two projects for any LP or cassette I add to my digital library -- as recorded, and as processed.

Agreed fully. Every once in a while I'll call up an old mix from years ago to see if I can improve the overall EQ or compression or reverb. If I didn't have the original to use again each time, I'd have to also undo whatever I did last time, assuming I could even remember what I did to undo it.

--Ethan

 

[Ethan Winer]

I suspect that the myth of quantization creating harmonic and intermodulation distortion is due to the fact that for really low bit depth it actually does. For example, quantizing a sine at one bit per sample (two levels) will actually create a square wave with the associated harmonics. Of course, when using 16 bits, we're *way* passed the point where this is measurable and the argument breaks down. But because IMD arguments are usually based on drawing a sine with about 8 levels (3 bits), the fact that quantization ends up looking like noise is lost.

I agree with all of that, and I processed my example at 8 bits just to prove the point that using terms like "sounds bleached" only confuses matters. There's no definition for that term, and we already have much better established terms to define fidelity.

As for content down at the lowest one or two bits, with normal music played at normal levels, that stuff is almost always inaudible. I know you're not arguing otherwise, but some people miss that the masking effect hides extremely soft content in the presence of much louder content. Even if nothing louder is playing to mask the low-level stuff, it's typically too soft to hear unless you crank the playback volume unnaturally high. For example, playing music at 100 dB SPL is very loud! Content that fills only two bits is 84 dB below that, or 16 dB SPL. Very few domestic rooms have a noise floor even close to that soft!

--Ethan

 

[rbbert]

So what you're saying is that while I'm playing music at 96 dB SPL (i.e. LSB goes to 0 dB SPL), my top octaves will only be at 48 dB SPL and I still need 96 dB range to get my noise floor down to -48 dB SPL? I suggest you have a look at "Absolute Threshold of Hearing". Unless you listen to music really loud (in which case there's other masking issues that get involved), then 16-bit quantization noise is below/at the ATH and there's no way you're going to hear it.

Of interest only if you believe that noise floor is the only relevant measurement for bit-depth in digital audio systems. If that were true, we'd really only need 13-14 bits, not even 16. For that matter, we'd only need 320k or good VBR MP3's or OggVorbis

 

[Ethan Winer]

The high resolution master is usually free of the crazy rush to heavily compress the audio on its way to the CD. So you solve the "loudness war" while you are at it.

I can't imagine where you got that idea. Music is mixed and mastered to sound a certain way. Without at least some compression, many types of music can sound wimpy, for lack of a better word. The problem is when they overdo it in a misguided effort to be louder than the next guy. But this is a totally different issue from whether music benefits from being distributed at "better" than 44/16.

--Ethan

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Even on my midlevel Internet plan, one hour of losslessly compressed 24/192 music takes less than 30 minutes to download.

You are evidently a more patient man than I.

Tim

 

[Ethan Winer]

If that were true, we'd really only need 13-14 bits, not even 16.

Even the best analog tape recorders are equivalent to about 12 or 13 bits at best. So in fact that is all that's strictly needed, other than to avoid further noise added by subsequent generations / copy passes.

Have you ever played music through software that let's you vary the bit depth as it plays? It's very telling! There's an example of this in my AES Audio Myths video. That section starts at 45:48 into the video.

--Ethan

 

[amirm]

I think you and Mr. Reierson are both being a bit naive. The awful loudness of so many pop masters is a deliberate marketing decision on the part of record companies. If hi-res downloads become a major arm of major label distribution, they will impose their marketing decisions on it, just as they do today with CDs, iTunes, etc.

Tim

Here is the cool thing: the CD will be around for a long time as will compressed MP3/AAC. So all the attention will be on that. High-res is under the radar....

 

[amirm]

I can't imagine where you got that idea. Music is mixed and mastered to sound a certain way. Without at least some compression, many types of music can sound wimpy, for lack of a better word. The problem is when they overdo it in a misguided effort to be louder than the next guy. But this is a totally different issue from whether music benefits from being distributed at "better" than 44/16.

--Ethan

The only "idea" I is what you describe . I want the upstream product however it is produced. I realize it may also use compression but as you say, it is not nearly the same as what is downstream. Here is a great video on what goes on there: http://www.digido.com/loudness-war-explained.html

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Here is the cool thing: the CD will be around for a long time as will compressed MP3/AAC. So all the attention will be on that. High-res is under the radar....

I hope you're right.

Tim

 

[JasonI]

I hope you're right.

Tim

I tend to agree. The considerable investment in DVD-A and SACD was a flop. I'll bet against another effort with physical media.

 

[xiphmont]

IMO this thread should split off into two, one with the Amir versus Monty discussion, and another about the supposed benefits of hi-res audio.
--Ethan

I agree that this is completely off the rails. But I don't have high hopes of a genuine debate happening elsewhere either.

I'd suggest nuking further offtopic replies, but something tells me Amir would be exempt. Feel free to convince me otherwise, I'd even apologize.

[edit for mods: in fact, if we're going to stick to it, feel free to nuke this as offtopic.]