
24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed - mbrubeck
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
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natch
Wow this is such bullshit. The sample graph he shows where he (correctly)
debunks the stairstep theory gives no acknowledgement of the real-life
situation, which is that many waves are interacting with each other in a
signal, and it's not the stairstepping of the pure simple waves he showed that
is the problem, it's the stairstepping of the _interacting_ waves, which are
complex enough that a low sampling rate can throw things way off (meaning off
far enough to cause artifacts at audible frequencies) when rounding errors
come down on the wrong side.

~~~
mbrubeck
No, even if you sum any number of signals, as long as each component signal is
bandlimited then the resulting signal is also bandlimited and can be
reconstructed perfectly according to the Sampling Theorem. This may be
counterintuitive, but it's provable. (I could prove it using just what I
remember from a couple of semesters of undergrad signal processing courses.)

Of course a _low_ sampling rate can result in errors, but what the sampling
theorem says is that we can calculate exactly how high a rate we need to
always perfectly reconstruct signals in a given band. This doesn't change just
because your signal is constructed from many component signals.

Of course, if you think the math is wrong, then you have an easy way to
disprove it: Construct a counterexample out of "many waves interacting" and
show that the resulting signal isn't perfectly reconstructed as the Sampling
Theorem claims. (Or perform a double-blind test that shows any human can
detect the difference between a 192 kHz recording and the same recording
downsampled to 48 kHz.)

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pasbesoin
I appreciate the lengthy exposition; however, I've found that 320 kbs with
cross channel bit sharing (or whatever it's called) is where I'm finally
reasonably happy, at least with rock/pop.

Perhaps as with eyesight and the "fourth type of cone", we'll eventually
measure/document that not all listeners are equal.

P.S. Also, pay attention to the subsequent analogue amplification stages, not
to mention speakers. Your digital metrics will prove less important when your
analogue pathway suffers.

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jemeshsu
Many years ago my audiophile friend said amplifier should not have remote for
volume control, it reduced the sound quality. So I asked him 50-100 years down
the road, does human being still need to manually walk to their amp to adjust
the volume.

It's true that most people can not tell the difference between a 320bps mp3 vs
24bit lossless audio. But 50-100 years later, will we still be listening to
320bps lossy quality audio? That will sound really silly.

