Which best represents your opinion of 96kHz high res recordings vs. redbook?

[sandyk]

On the other hand, 24-bit (or higher) is very easily and audibly superior to 16-bit in every way by anybody willing to listen. The increased headroom and greater dynamic range decreases noise and distortion, increases low-level detail, and gives music greater impact, and being able to capture virtually the entire loudness spectrum of human hearing from very near the threshold of audibility to pretty close to the threshold of pain imparts a realism to recorded sound that is otherwise unobtainable by any previous LPCM or analog methodology.

 

Well said.

[christopher3393]

Can I vote "None of the above"? It used to be a standard response options on multiple guess tests. Please?

[gmgraves]

Can I vote "None of the above"? It used to be a standard response options on multiple guess tests. Please?

 

 

I wish that were a choice on presidential election ballots. Then maybe the powers that be would realize how disgusted most Americans are with the choices they're given every four years!

[Teresa]

I voted "Options 4,5,7 and 8 may all be relevant", as that was the closest to what I feel. However, it's only partially my choices as I don’t believe in option 7 as redbook has never sounded acceptable to me.

 

My real choices are Options 3,4,5, and 8.

 

Did you know you could have set the poll up to allow multiple answers instead of just one?

[Harpy]

Option 10 (2-3). I can't hear them but my dog and cat can. A super tweeter would be on the low end of a dog whistles frequency. I can't hear above 16khz, but we must think of our pets as well. Cats can hear up to 64 kHz.

[firedog]

 

 

The fact that I haven't seen a single person on CA complain of continuous piercing tones when playing back affected high-res recordings leads me to believe that no-one is hearing or otherwise affected by any of the ultrasonic content.

 

...I would say that this is somewhat fallacious though.

In a huge number of recordings, there's a lot of spurious tones/noise in the 25-35kHz range - to the point that I would actually be concerned about your tweeters if it is not filtered out of some recordings.

 

 

No, most of this extremely high frequency content in recordings will be so far down in db level that won't harm your tweeters or your ears.

[wgscott]

Not always, especially when its HDtracks:

 

[sandyk]

As SACD/DSD has been excluded in this poll, it seems both irrelevant AND unfair, to include a screenshot of what appears to be an SACD to LPCM conversion.

[wgscott]

I bought it on HDtracks. How is that unfair?

[sandyk]

I bought it on HDtracks. How is that unfair?

 

I don't give a damn where you bought it, but it wasn't derived directly from an LPCM file, and neither does it meet the criteria of the Poll you started.

Which best represents your opinion of 96kHz high res recordings vs. redbook?

[wgscott]

Go take your shit in someone else's thread for a change, you senile twit.

[sandyk]

Go take your shit in someone else's thread for a change, you senile twit.

 

 

[beanbag]

7 will always be true because a "correct" brickwall filter requires the signal to be changed faster than light, a physical impossibility.

 

What's the conversion factor between volts and meters/s?

[gmgraves]

I bought it on HDtracks. How is that unfair?

 

If you bought it on HDTracks, you're lucky that isn't a 16/44 red book recording up-sampled to 24/96 or an old analog recording full of wow and flutter! I won't buy from them. They're crooks.

[Jud]

What's the conversion factor between volts and meters/s?

 

Or to put the same thing in more elementary terms for those harder of thinking: It requires a change in state to happen instantaneously, that is, in literally no time at all, a physical impossibility.

[beanbag]

I'm certainly "thinking very hard" (LOL) about what the speed of light has to do with this.

[DigiPete]

IMHO, none of the choices in the poll are in the least bit relevant. If one hears any differences between files at sampling rates higher that 48KHz, it has little or nothing to do with ultrasonics, per se. I'll grant that higher sampling rates are sonically superior for moving the sampling frequency further away from the audio passband (assuming 20 KHz as the upper limit of human hearing). In recordings I've made, I have captured performances at 44.1 KHz, 48 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, and 192 KHz as well as DSD, and frankly there is no difference in the presentation of high-frequency content (with the same mikes, mixer and playback chain). I don't pretend to be able to hear those frequencies above 14 KHz, but my 16-year-old "nephew" Brian (a buddy of mine's son) can and as a budding audiophile, I trust his ears for that region of the spectrum. However, the highs at 88 KHz and above all exhibit a similar high-frequency cleanliness which I can hear, that is missing at either 44.1 or 48 KHz. I put this down to moving the sampling frequency far enough away from the passband to not cause any harmonic interference with those frequencies thereby lowering perceived distortion.

 

On the other hand, 24-bit (or higher) is very easily and audibly superior to 16-bit in every way by anybody willing to listen. The increased headroom and greater dynamic range decreases noise and distortion, increases low-level detail, and gives music greater impact, and being able to capture virtually the entire loudness spectrum of human hearing from very near the threshold of audibility to pretty close to the threshold of pain imparts a realism to recorded sound that is otherwise unobtainable by any previous LPCM or analog methodology.

 

 

LIKE

 

 

I voted 1) in lack of a suitable answer.

 

 

My preference would have been a combination of:

 

a) Redbook contains all the frequency information needed.

b) +20 (24) bit is preferable over 16 bit, as it pushes past human ability.

c) +60kHz (88/96) is preferable over 44/48, as it allows us to construct real world filtering that can't be heard.

d) 16/44 / 16/48 is actually fine unless the recording and mastering was done exceptionally well.

e) Surround is the dimension that will really up the game for me.

[Jud]

I'm certainly "thinking very hard" (LOL) about what the speed of light has to do with this.

 

A slightly more sophisticated way of viewing the requirements of special relativity is that the transmission of any information cannot occur faster than the speed of light. The action of a filter can be viewed as transmission of information from the filter to the signal. A true "brickwall" filter would transmit its information to the signal instantaneously, which is faster than light speed, violating the laws of physics.

[Paul R]

A slightly more sophisticated way of viewing the requirements of special relativity is that the transmission of any information cannot occur faster than the speed of light. The action of a filter can be viewed as transmission of information from the filter to the signal. A true "brickwall" filter would transmit its information to the signal instantaneously, which is faster than light speed, violating the laws of physics.

 

What? You are not using quantum tunneled entangled particles to effectively run filter software faster than light? How- last year...

[sandyk]

What? You are not using quantum tunneled entangled particles to effectively run filter software faster than light? How- last year...

 

Paul

If you have further information in this area , please forward it to the guy at NASA who is researching Warp Drive.

We could then send quite a few politicians to another planet in a distant system!

 

Alex

[beanbag]

A slightly more sophisticated way of viewing the requirements of special relativity is that the transmission of any information cannot occur faster than the speed of light. The action of a filter can be viewed as transmission of information from the filter to the signal. A true "brickwall" filter would transmit its information to the signal instantaneously, which is faster than light speed, violating the laws of physics.

 

What? No. Very no.

 

A true brickwall filter has a very narrow transition band, so it takes a long time to process the signal, e.g. it takes many cycles to tell 20000Hz apart from 20001 Hz. This signal processing stuff has nothing to do with the speed of light, as evidenced by the lack of the constant "c" in any of the equations.

[Jud]

A slightly more sophisticated way of viewing the requirements of special relativity is that the transmission of any information cannot occur faster than the speed of light. The action of a filter can be viewed as transmission of information from the filter to the signal. A true "brickwall" filter would transmit its information to the signal instantaneously, which is faster than light speed, violating the laws of physics.

 

What? No. Very no.

 

A true brickwall filter has a very narrow transition band, so it takes a long time to process the signal, e.g. it takes many cycles to tell 20000Hz apart from 20001 Hz. This signal processing stuff has nothing to do with the speed of light, as evidenced by the lack of the constant "c" in any of the equations.

 

If you spent more time reading and understanding and less time thinking of arguments, explanations would penetrate more easily.

 

You are describing brickwall filters as implemented; I am describing a true brickwall filter, which is a physical impossibility.

 

"A true brickwall filter has a very narrow transition band" - No, a brickwall filter as implemented has a very narrow transition band. A true brickwall filter has no transition band at all. It has only passband and stopband, which overlap at the frequency of interest. Wait, the passband and stopband overlap? That makes no sense, it's imposs... - Exactly!

 

So a true brickwall filter would pass - perfectly - everything up to, say, 22050Hz, and then would stop - perfectly - everything from 22050Hz up. Precisely at 22050Hz, the filter would act instantaneously, in literally no time at all, to take the signal from full pass to zero. So at 22050Hz, the signal would both be fully passed and reduced to zero simultaneously. Passband and stopband occurring simultaneously is exactly what it means to have a brickwall filter act instantaneously, in no time at all. And that is of course physically impossible.

 

That is why, though Nyquist is mathematically proved, a perfect true brickwall filter to implement it in reality is a physical impossibility, so you have the entire field of filter design for digital audio applications as a result.

[wgscott]

If you compare the speed of sound to the speed of electrons moving through circuitry, how close are they?

[AlainGr]

So a true brickwall filter would pass - perfectly - everything up to, say, 22050Hz, and then would stop - perfectly - everything from 22050Hz up. Precisely at 22050Hz, the filter would act instantaneously, in literally no time at all, to take the signal from full pass to zero. So at 22050Hz, the signal would both be fully passed and reduced to zero simultaneously. Passband and stopband occurring simultaneously is exactly what it means to have a brickwall filter act instantaneously, in no time at all. And that is of course physically impossible.

Hi Jud,

 

Would offline filtering offer a better alternative or is it totally unrelated ?

 

Thanks

[Jud]

Hi Jud,

 

Would offline filtering offer a better alternative or is it totally unrelated ?

 

Thanks

 

Hi Alain. Doesn't matter, it's how the filter is written/programmed to operate. So no matter whether inline or offline, a filter with both a passband and a stopband at a particular frequency is impossible. You could think of as slow an action as you'd like - a traffic cop, let's say, deciding whether a signal should pass - and if the cop must decide both to let the signal pass and​ to stop it, well, he has an impossible job.