Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

Try Qobuz

The French download store Qobuz has had these on sale for a while. I've tried a couple - on promo for the same price as CD quality - and they sound very nice when fed into the main amp via an Audiolab M-DAC.

How much of that is down to the higher bit-rate and sampling frequency and how much is down to sympathetic remastering of the original recordings I wouldn't like to say.

Re: You'll need to upgrade your cables

Presumably they sound just the same when downloaded from TPB.....

Re: Nevermind

Quite. Rock music hardly benefits from extreme quality seeing as it's largely based on distortion anyway....

Stuart Castle wrote:

"99% of the music buying public actually don't seem to care what quality their music is"

Thats exactly what I was thinking. There's an entire generation of kids, and some young adults, that think listening to MTV through their crappy TV speakers is acceptable; that use YouTube as a jukebox on their laptops; convert YouTube videos to MP3's and listen to them on their phones or, in the case of young adults, in cars (with fairly decent sounds systems!); that listen to their MP3 players/phones with the crappy earphones that came with the devices and when they break replace them with just as crappy earphones.

Most people, in my experience, just don't care about the quality of the music, they just want to listen to it.

Depends on your setup

If you have a 5.1 / 7.1 surround sound setup then you should get a very definite benefit over playing some stereo CD. I doubt the actual sound per channel from the higher bitrate would be very noticeable though.

MP3

People haven't lost a desire for sound quality. An mp3, if encoded at sufficient bit rate is as good as 16 bit CD. By "as good as", I mean that any differences are inaudible to any human and acceptably low according to measurement. In the same way, 16 bit CD is as good as 24 bit CD imo.

The audible/inaudible boundary is not exactly certain. Anybody can hear the shortcoming of music encoded at 128 kb/s. I am not sure if I can hear artifacts or not at 192 kb/s. My own research indicates 256 mb/s is well into the "inaudible" area, and my music collection, while archived in FLAC, is encoded at 256 kb/s VBR for mp3 use.

It remains to be seen if compressed formats will survive once storage ceases to be a question. Probably they will survive, for several years at least, if only because some much mp3 kit is out there.

Re: Woah

Given the 25Gb capacity how come no lossless (FLAC) ?

Re: Frequency, not resolution

"So higher frequency recording can be useful in representing higher frequency sounds more accurately. but resolution doesn't matter so much. What's more important is the audio being mastered correctly in the first place to retain the dynamic range of the recording."

This, this, a thousand times this.

You don't need audiophile hifi to tell the difference between a well mastered record and one that has been dynamically compressed for 'loudness' and 'pop'.

Steven R

Re: Frequency, not resolution

It's not dynamic range, it's low level detail. Ambience sounds noticeably grainy at 16 bits because it's down to 8-bits or so of useful resolution. Good 24-bit audio is smoother and clearer.

More bandwidth certainly helps, but mostly because it's really, really hard to design smooth artefact-free digital filtering for 44.1k, it's slightly easier at 48k, and it's easier still at 88.2k and 96k. 192k is mostly just hype. (Unless you're putting the sound into a sampler and using a full-range mic, in which case you'll get a bit more of a useful transposition range.)

High resolution audio only makes sense if it's transcoded and mastered by someone who really knows what they're doing. But considering the industry used to do things like make a CD master by recording vinyl off a turntable instead of using the master tapes, it's impossible to say how good these recordings are.

Re: Frequency, not resolution

High frequency oddities.

I have heard these on occasions on CD, I assumed it was due to the 44.1 sampling frquency, as missing from analogue play back formats

Re: Quality gets overlooked these days

SACD bombed because they used it to bump up "nice price" back catalogue prices by 50%. If they had continued to sell one album at £9.99 or £10.99 instead of two with one at £15.99 then more customers would have bothered to change their player when buying a new one.

"With storage, bandwidth and silicon ever cheaper, why not?"

As noted by earlier contributors, beacause nobody cares.

Storage, bandwidth and silicon have got ever cheaper over the years, and still you will struggle to find any decent lossless catalogue available for download. And that will continue until you can offer the masses hi-fidelity music without in anyway impinging on (for example) the speed of the download/stream, without compromising the amount they can store, and without them paying any more. The sad record of digital failure that passes for the music industry would seem likely to torpedo any prospect of hifi downloads even if the technology were able to offer it without any compromises.

And then there's the demand side: Those who claim to care about sound quality are split by more schisms than the church, with true believers still at war over analogue versus digitial, semiconductor versus valve amplification, every form of equipment and interconnect, the true range of frequency response needed for fidelity, sampling rates, codecs, error correction, etc etc etc. Arguably the people who don't care about the quality, but just want to listen to the music are in a stronger position both for enjoyment and their pilosophical integrity than the hi-fidelity mob.

Solution looking for problem

24 bits gives you a theoretical dynamic range of 144dB, ampifiers capable of providing such a range tend to come in very large trucks with three phase power supplies. For headphones the proximity to the ear means that you need significantly less power, but even using 1cm from the ear, the power required to represent that dynamic range is tens of watts.

Since Feb 2013 there are EU limits on how much volume portable music players can supply to headphones of 85dB, well within the 16bit range. Once you start going beyond that, damage to the ears can occur and eventually lead to a permanent shift in the ear's frequency response.

Recording at 24bits gives you a significant safety net to avoid digital clipping, especially when dealing with erratic musicians (used to work in a studio), but for playback makes much less sense, especially for portable devices.

The loudness wars of recent years have also severely limited the active dynamic range of recorded music, thankfully classical music has escaped, but it is a well known frustration of many a recording engineer to have recorded "as the artists wanted it" only to have it utterly mangled at the mastering stage.

As for higher sampling rates, whilst some time ago it might have made DAC design cheaper, average human hearing frequency range, especially as we age, renders this pointless. Microphones and instruments have a limited response and sampling at higher rates doesn't improve that.

If Hawkwind ever decide to re-record some of their earlier work for an audience of giant sized bats, then the new formats might be of interest, but as the utter defeat of SACD to MP3 showed, most people just aren't interested.

"Needs to have ultra high resolution"

For who's benefit? You have an owl listening to your music for you?

Its not that simple...

There are few A/D converters which sound good at sample rates above 96k. The analogue electronics in a converter are as important as any other stage, if not more than some, so having a converter with the best analogue side is going to give you a better digital signal.

The converters which top out at 96k sound a lot better than ones which go higher. As a result a lot of masters are done at 96k and not higher. I've not met anyone (and we are talking about some of the best ears in the industry here) who argues that 192k is worth it. The benefits you get from going to 44 to 96 are huge, you are moving the filters well away from human hearing range. Going further to 192 is a case of diminishing returns, and 384 is just pointless (Sorry Neil Young)

If you really want to capture something genuinely better than 96k, try DSD, but given Sony stopped developing that 6 years ago, its not easy.