24/192 Opinion

Posted by: willie45 on 13 February 2013

First off, I've not been around the forum much and I know very little about streaming, computing, or engineering and TBH I haven't read the thing all the way through. I hope you will forgive me if I'm either re-hashing an old argument or being naive in some way.

Anyway, I came across this

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

When I decided to move from CD to HDD stored files, I was quite excited at the prospect of really superb sounding music provided by these 24/192 records. I wondered if the view expressed in the article was pretty much shared on here or not.

I have only downloaded one "higher than CD" resolution file and that was 24/88 IIRC and I just wanted to try something in that format to discover what I could hear. As I'm just setting my HDD and mac up I haven't been able to check it out thoroughly. I very briefly played a snatch of this through a very cheap optical cable and into my S/n and it sounded pretty good. This might have simply been an example of a finely recording and I haven't compared to similar other good recordings.

I'd be interested to hear your views

Posted on: 14 February 2013 by jobseeker

I feel that '24' has more significance than '192'. Also, beware of upsampled poor original material I think. There seems to be some good stuff out there though. I don't think I personally would pay extra for 192 material over 96 though.

Posted on: 14 February 2013 by Mr Underhill

Willie,

All the points in that article are old saws and have been debated widely on this and other fora:

Human Hearing:

Yes, the ear is not designed or capable of hearing very high frequencies. One argument mounted to rebut this attack is that these higher frequencies excite the air and cause effects at lower frequencies that you CAN hear.

Many people who use Supertweeters claim it improves the perceived base, for instance.

Bit depth and sampling frequency:

To be VERY brief - one argument is that this is getting you closer to an analogue wave.

But, to cut to the chase, do any of us own files that are HiDef and make a perceptible difference?

Historically I have taken files and upsampled and downsampled them, if you want to do this the look up and consider dithering.

Ultimately my opinion is that the MAIN thing to look for is the quality of the original recording. Sometimes this is signalled by the fact that the recording IS released in HiDef - sometimes it is just a con by a carpet bagger; look on http://www.computeraudiophile.com/ at the reviews of HiDef files, many are just upsampled.

Problem is that I don't think there is any free lunch here. Some, such as the Naim Antonio Forcione release, have had a considerable amount of TLC applied during the conversion process. You cannot take a naive view that HiDef equals quality, nor that HiDef equals con.

Currently I am converting all my vinyl to 24bit 96KHz, a LONG process. The best complement I have had from a friend is that they sound like my LP12. Would they, DO they sound the same at 16/44.1? Don't know. In going through this pain I would rather capture at the highest quality i can!