Why CD quality (as through Tidal) is all you need and higher res a waste of money

Fantastic.

However, Engineer by nature, built and study models. Any models, necessitate simplification of fact, yet almost all engineer forgot that the reality doesn't simplify, thus their ideals used in model may even be false in the first place. For example, Engineer of the past must have believed sun rotate around.the Earth, light doesn't bend, lightspeed is the fastest speed in the universe etc etc. Anyone of this or anything they assumed in their models can be wrong.......

gramophone posted:

I used to wonder why whereas Tidal is fully integrated by Naim, Qobuz isn't.

The answer to that is simple. Naim told me at the time they were  starting the integration development project there were questions over Qobuz’s future and Tidal was in more markets... although Naim were considering Qobuz. Ironically Qobuz is far stronger now and expanding now is probably in a stronger position than Tidal... the shifting sands of time.......

I have run both for a time through BubbleUPnP, and I definitely found on average the SQ from the Qobuz (16/44.1) catalogue was better.. for some reason I quite often found (but not always) Tidal masters sounding inferior to my home CD rip collection. No such issue with Qobuz.

As far as high def audio, if you have capable equipment inc speakers, it can make a huge difference, especially with the flow and feel.. but it depends to what the mix master has been encoded as.. a lot of rock and pop is mix mastered at, I understand, 48/24 and so is not hugely different from CD. A lot of classical music is mastered higher.. and it shows. Listen to a good orchestral recording at 96/24 or higher and it definitely stands out compared to 44.1/16.

As far as setting the sample rate standard for CD, Philips had the range of 44kHz to 44.5kHz and 14 and 16 bit sample sizes... and was fit for the  disc sizes available and required runtime. But it it was with their partnership with Sony that set the joint Sony/Philips standard of 44.1/16 on 120mm discs with a max playing time of 74 minutes 33 seconds.. and some of this was not about technical optimisation, but ensuring Sony and Philips production plant did not have any advantage of one over the other... and was mindful to align with  or ‘not be much larger’  than the play times of the then extremely succusful compact cassettes of C60 and C90..  I know this sounds drab and not as delightful of the then PR story of the length being chosen to contain Beethoven’s 9th Symphony... but reality is often not as glamorous.

Quboz may be able to survive, but until now it is not available in Denmark unlike Tidal. So a  quality product in select markets. However Chromecast the Naim implementation of it should solve this problem, and probably there are ways to Fool Quboz to believe you live in one of the supported countries.

Claus

Why would you try to fool people and risk to be unlawful? Best is still to ask them when they might bring services to you.  ????

Chag -

Chag... posted:

Why would you try to fool people and risk to be unlawful? Best is still to ask them when they might bring services to you.  ????

Chag -

Why not. More than 3 years after it was announced nothing has happened. So the chance of this ever happening is minimal. Unfortunatly highres music has reintroduced the stupid idea of regional constrainss of download and music services, but of course if you do not  want to sell your product it should not come as a shock that your sales are low. Also why force people into semi legal measures? And you would still have to pay for the service.

Claus

Claus, to access and use Qobuz from outside its stated territories which as you say currently excludes Denmark is specifically against its terms and conditions of usage... I just checked... so would be unlawful. I am afraid right now if in Denmark then Tidal at least is your best bet.

It is however technically  very straightforward to make your access appear from wherever you want it to within certain constraints... but I guess that is not the point.

Mark Furneaux has fallen for the old 'Nyquist sampling rate is all that you need' fallacy.

True the Nyquist sampling rate will mathematically precisely encode all the frequencies that we can hear, but, there are two remaining factors that are not covered by this one mathematical principle...

Point 1:  In terms of timing (rather than frequency) humans can beat the Fourier uncertainty limit, and detect timing difference less than 1/4 of the period of the waveform; making allowance for this requires a sampling rate greater than the Nyquist rate.
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-...ainty-principle.html

Point 2:  Using a  Nyquist sampling rate that covers the range human hearing doesn't take account of the aliasing of components in the original signal that are above the Nyquist limit, as, in practice, the aliased frequency of these higher frequency components will 'fold down' into the audio band and they then become audible.  If it were possible to actually produce perfect filters that could completely remove these components with no time shifts (remember point 1!) then it may be possible to prevent this problem occuring, but perfect filters are a mathematical impossibility.  Adding dither somewhat reduces the audible significance of this effect, but doesn't actually eliminate it.

Completely agree with Huge, and this is perhaps the reason that a number of well respected speakers have good responses well above human hearing. My wife and I are in our 60's so probably not hearing much above 10k, but can easily hear the difference between cd and higher res. Rich. 

It does not have to be high res either. I have several concert DVDs with 16/48 PCM tracks that sound better than the CD of the same performance. As always, trust your ears and do blind testing if possible to see what works best for you. 

Regarding the Nyquist sampling rate: Isn‘t it so that the measurement points exactly have to be at the highest and lowest point of the sinus curve to describe it „perfectly“? If you accidentely measure always in the middle (at level value 0) you only see a level 0 line instead of the sinus curve. So if you do not know when a sinus curve starts you need way more of sample points and thus a higher frequency?

Huge posted:

Point 1:  In terms of timing (rather than frequency) humans can beat the Fourier uncertainty limit, and detect timing difference less than 1/4 of the period of the waveform; making allowance for this requires a sampling rate greater than the Nyquist rate.
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-...ainty-principle.html

You are definitely better informed than me. But isn't the matter of timing and duration something that is captured by the bit rate rather than the KHz ceiling to which Nyquist formula relates?

It's not related to the Nyquist frequency limit - that's the point of referencing the phys.org paper, reproducing the timing discrimination that the human brain can distinguish requires a higher sample rate than the Nyquist principle requires for the frequency limit of human hearing.

If by "bit rate" you are referring to bit depth, then no, that's a different matter.

I'm gonna have to read some heavily technical stuff. Thanks for your knowledge and directing me to Fourier and the link you gave

Forget the format, sampling rate or bits- the recording engineering is all that matters....my 2cents.

gramophone posted:

I'm gonna have to read some heavily technical stuff. Thanks for your knowledge and directing me to Fourier and the link you gave

Sounds like fun. Sure to enhance your objective appreciation of music replay.

T38.45 posted:

Forget the format, sampling rate or bits- the recording engineering is all that matters....my 2cents.

some of it are numerical too. I have the following logic in my mind (which may be false).....

Take 44.1K, or say 44K sampling rate, the probability of sampling a 22khz sine wave at the peak of the amplitude is only 1/22,000? On average digitization is going to be at the mid or around sin(.25pi) = 0.71 of the original amptitude, if you are not lucky, the sampling occur at exactly at 0 and the sound disappear.

On the other hand, if the 22khz is luckily sampled at exactly the peak, say anothrr16Khz wave that began together would be recorded at off its peak?

For lower frequency waves the 44K sample rate should be able to capture almost perfectly, but for sound above say 11,000 it is only 1/4 likily to catch the some wave perfectly and this applies unevenly to the top end sound as well?

This appears to me that CD should be quite fine for vocals as Soprano is up to around D6 at 1175hz, there should be good chance to catch close to perfect sampling. When you get to the upper end of piano range of C8(4186hz), the amptitude is only 1/10 likely to be perfect. So instruments such as Piano and Piccolo maybe less than optimal.....

I wouldn't lose sight of the fact that redbook CD is an accepted, functional replay medium and not a calculus quiz.

gramophone posted:

I'm gonna have to read some heavily technical stuff. Thanks for your knowledge and directing me to Fourier and the link you gave

This is not as strange as it may appear... and if you are after technical papers, over the years  a huge amount of research has been done on this and the AES  (Audio Engineering Society) is a good place to start.

 Our hearing is pitched or frequency constrained, and as we get older the nerves  in our Cochleas start to die such that the higher frequencies and pitches start to disappear to us. However our brains can detect the starting and stopping of the commencement of sounds irrespective our pitch.. this is pretty essential in nature in gives us many cueues.. and is not limited to spatial awareness between our two ears either..and doesn’t significantly deteriate as we get older and our frauency limit reduces.

But our machines don’t have this ability... everything has to ‘encoded’ as a continuous sound. So if we are to capture this stream of sounds and the timing between them by sampling into a discrete stream of values we are governed by Nyquist theorem so as to capture the information... otherwise that timing information is lost forever. 

joerand posted:

I wouldn't lose sight of the fact that redbook CD is an accepted, functional replay medium and not a calculus quiz.

Indeed Red Book is an extremely effective replay standard; capable of very good, highly enjoyable results.

Technically speaking, it doesn't quite manage to cover all the auditory capabilities of human perception - but it does come fairly close to doing so.

I suppose that it's the old argument that no matter how high the sampling frequency, there's always going to be that infinitesimal small piece that gets missed and there's always going to be arguments about if it matters or not. Of course it will to those that have ears to hear it! T38.45 said all that matters is the recording engineer and forget about bit rate. I agree that the engineer can make or break a recording but I wouldn't want to listen exclusively to lower sampling rates or mp3 although it does have it's place and I can still enjoy it for example when working around the home or garden, listening to DAB etc. Those of you out there who are analogue aficionados are probably saying we don't have any of the above digital problems. Although they do have other issues. I do have a decent collection of digital and analogue recordings that I enjoy so I have a foot in both camps. Rich 

Rich 1 posted:

Completely agree with Huge, and this is perhaps the reason that a number of well respected speakers have good responses well above human hearing. My wife and I are in our 60's so probably not hearing much above 10k, but can easily hear the difference between cd and higher res. Rich. 

Crispy posted:

It does not have to be high res either. I have several concert DVDs with 16/48 PCM tracks that sound better than the CD of the same performance. As always, trust your ears and do blind testing if possible to see what works best for you. 

One significant factor often overlooked is the mastering - direct comparisons between higher resolution formats and 16/44 are only valid if the lower resolution version is simply downsampled from the same high resolution master. In some, or maybe many, cases where different resolutions are available the two are released from different masterings, in which case audible differences may have nothing whatsoever to do with the resolution ...and the lower resolution one might even be the better sounding one.

See here please- good discussion point!

T38.45 posted:

See here please- good discussion point!

Rather nice article (and I mean the whole thing not the final para regarding hi res) - thanks for linking

gert posted:

Regarding the Nyquist sampling rate: Isn‘t it so that the measurement points exactly have to be at the highest and lowest point of the sinus curve to describe it „perfectly“? If you accidentely measure always in the middle (at level value 0) you only see a level 0 line instead of the sinus curve. So if you do not know when a sinus curve starts you need way more of sample points and thus a higher frequency?

I was confused about this for a long time also. It turns out Nyquist is fine for this, as a condition of the theorem is that it holds for a single continuous signal. So a single sine wave at 22khz can eventually be recovered, both in phase and amplitude, provided you sample it at a rate greater than 44khz... it just doesn't say how long it will take to do this. The rate has to be greater than the frequency, even if only by a tiny bit, or else you could accidentally measure at the zero crossing point. If the sample rate is just slightly higher then each sample will read at a different point on the signal.

I think this relates to Huge's point about timing... 44.1khz is enough to describe a 22khz signal but the brain might require more cycles of the signal to hear enough information to fill in the gaps: a higher sample rate describes the signal with more confidence sooner.

As music is usually more than a single frequency at a steady amplitude, I'm not sure Nyquist really helps when it comes to describing how to adequately measure music. I'd imagine there is more than one PhD thesis covering the topic, but I've not gone looking. LIkewise, the many wonders of the human ear + brain (and the tricks it can play on us) also muddy the waters.

I don't "trust my ears" because I know they are attached to a human brain. You will have a hard time convincing me that changing the power cable to my NAS box will increase the sound-stage, however redbook seems adequate rather than the last word in audio storage (although playback might be a different matter).

I'd also back the view that mastering is a significant factor, particularly with regard to dynamic range. The range is often compressed on chart music so that it can be heard on cheap earbuds and car stereos...some HD recordings are remastered with better systems in mind (and I've even seen several 'uncompressed' recordings available). My understanding was that classical music tended to be mastered for better systems in the first place (unlikely to be header leaking from Beats headphones).