
24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012) - eaguyhn
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
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naniwaduni
The headline is true under the assumption that music downloads are only for
listening to. But it is a tremendous loss to forget about downstream
processing, e.g. remixes &c., which _will_ want extra bit-depth:

> An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering.
> Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations.
> The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be
> undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand
> times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at
> a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there's no reason
> to keep more than 16 bits.

192 kHz less practically useful, but for the time being is still a useful
signal as to the target audience.

If all that mattered were playback, lossless 16/44.1 would be almost as silly
compared to distributing only with lossy compression. The space savings of,
say, 128 kbps opus, surely outweigh the few audible difference that nobody
will even notice without a comparison, right?

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navjack27
I'm a big fan of getting final exports at whatever the studio recorded the
multitrack at. For fully digital music, meaning, fully in a DAW with synthetic
almost everything, please give me the highest bit depth and sample rate. For
old music, don't bother, classic rock or stuff like that, a high bit version
would just be somebody "remastering" it and faking quality where there never
was any. I don't understand the space argument for this either nor do I get
the reaching in comparison to wavelength of light and video capture. It's
simple, if the studio recorded everything in 32/192 then at least make a 24/96
available for download and purchase.

