I can tell you from experience exactly what one gets, a convenient way to buy digital material without buying and storing CDs. I actually use SOX to downsample and downbit these recordings to 16/44 using the default dithering setting which is triangulation dithering. Some of the worst earbleeding recordings I own are remastered hi res albums and some of the best sounding I have are redbook 16/44. I bought Nirvana's remastered high res Nevermind, I also own the 1990s CD. For compulsory reasons I listened at high res first as I always do since I paid for it and was not prepared for the nails on the chalkboard overly compressed with occasional clipping sound that was produced. The 1991 CD version sounds superior in every way.
When I wanted a copy of Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive, I bought the so called High res version. While it sounded as good as I have ever heard of this album and saved me from buying yet another CD, it was merely an upsampled 44.1k version. There was a brick wall at 22khz. everything above that is merely padded with zeros creating a huge file. I'm amazed at people swearing that upsampling something that was originally sampled at 44.1k can somehow add information that was never there to their bigger file. Sampling is done in the pre-digitization process and can never be raised above what it was originally sampled at, only lowered. See attached image and notice the brick wall at 22khz, this is a 96k file! I will tell you that many recordings DO sound better due to more careful remastering by someone who actually can hear but when I convert them to Redbook, they retain every bit of the improvement. I keep the original hi res downloads in an archive folder and all my music files are on a fault tolerant raid server using one of the few filesystems that protect against bit rot, a COW (copy on write) filesystem that does self checksumming and can restore itself due to the copy on write data. To give a visual example of what bit rot can do, think of when you visit a website and only part of an image shows up and the rest is grayed out, that my friends is bit rot of an image file. You do not want it EVER on any file. Trying to reproduce non musical noise above 22khz if your speakers and amp etc could even reproduce it if anything might be cruel to certain pets you may have, there may be some musical information there but it's effects within our hearing range have already been captured once. No human in the last 100 years has ever heard very far beyond 20k just as none of us can see infrared and ultraviolet. Do certain lower harmonics of certain instruments exist in the audible range, sure they do but those lower harmonics we can hear in our audible range were already captured by the recording equipment as I touched on above, trying to reproduce it twice, once before the recording and once again on playback is not what I would consider proper reproduction. In many cases, your tweeter as well as amplifier, preamp and such have a good chance of creating problems above 20khz since they are designed to behave in the audible range and are not designed to double as an RF amp or transducer in the case of the tweeter. Throughout my life, the poor harsh quality of some recordings has always been in the upper midrange and in my late teens as well as now, it is the same and can drive me up a wall while cursing the deaf engineer who subjected us to that. Some of the best tweeters on the market that I would unhesitatingly use in my speaker designs, have a breakup node well above 20khz to the point that I would use a notch filter outside our hearing range just to kill it unless it somehow keeps pests away without bothering me or pets. There are benefits to rolling off sharply above 20khz. Many are fooled by the engineering representation of a sampled sine wave that shows a stair step effect, this effect does not exist in reproduction. It has never been seen on a scope or otherwise. The assumption is that the higher sampling will make this non existent stair step effect more fine grained and thus closer to an analog sine wave, nope, one only needs the sampling to be twice that of the desired top frequency to reproduce a perfect waveform. Digital audio was worked on for nearly a century before we got it. As far as 24bit depth, well it harms nothing but a dithered 16 bit recording can easily produce a clean -105db signal. 96db is not the limit on these recordings, even at that, the worst sounding digital recordings are usually compressed to have about 20db dynamic range at the top of the scale and are are overdriven above 0db producing clipping. You don't need even four bits of depth to produce some of these awful recordings. With digital, distortion is extremely low below 0db but increases horribly above 0db. It is not like the analog days when it was common and preferred to have an occasional signal hit +3 or +6db on peaks only since good tape had headroom and not much signal to noise so you had to fully utilize what you had. the heavy compressed and marginal overdriving effect used on far too many modern recordings are a relic of the perceived loudness effect some think still sells even though it has not worked since AM radio. In the late 70s FM Stations began trying this, it just sounded awful, not louder as it was with AM and now people are trying this with digital, enough already! High sampling and larger bit depth will solve none of the ills created by this technique, just bigger file size. I know this is long and sounding like a rant. I will say that I did find some places to download redbook quality FLAC files for certain artists such as dead Can Dance. I finished out my collection of their music only to see that whoever converted them to FLAC created files that have tons of clipping. My three CDs from the 1990s of their material when ripped by me to never go above -1db in peaks have none of these problems. There just is no need for something that can produce over 100db of dynamic range to have clipping in it nor is there an excuse. The attached analysis shows The Fatal Impact from the eponymous Dead Can Dance album that I purchased as a download. The red sections are where the clipping occurred. Dead Can Dance recordings usually are recordings worthy of judging equipment by, not these downloads who were converted by someone who does not know or does not care what they are doing, possibly both. Of note is that the 1999 remaster of Roxy Music's Avalon is agreed on by many as the best sounding version of this beautiful album, may have to buy as CD and rip yourself. All the High Res downloads mentioned here by me are from HD Tracks and is likely the only practical way to get a remastered lossless download even though most are High Res. Many do sound great because of the remastering itself. Another side note is that analog LPs converted to CD sound exactly like the LP complete with the pre post groove echo that gives the false impression of more depth and air as well as the audible effects of wow, flutter, rumble, tangential tracking errors, skating, surface noise, tonearm microphonics and hum if audible not to mention the higher distortion of the inner tracks of the LP due to less molecules of vinyl per second passing the needle and least of all, don't forget the only 45db of stereo separation and 8 bit equivalent dynamic range at best. I lived that for 25 years of my life and miss none of that and certainly do not miss playing one side of one record at a time. Heck, I don't even miss digging CDs out of their jewel cases. I started moving to server storage around 1999 when Flac was well on it's way, then the iPod completely derailed the progress being made on the server/streamer method that we thankfully and sanely resumed. Seriously, did we need a 3000 dollar docking station for the lossy mediocre sound from these devices? What were people thinking? I DO miss the huge 12" album covers in my hand while dreaming of being a rock star, the latter really added to the experience. Apple ruined that too with the iPod, bastards! they really have the marketing savvy to dumb down the public and convince them that the sows ear they bought really is silk. Who else could make a fashion statement from polycarbonate which is all the iPod really was? Top Image: Spectrum of 96k download Frampton Comes Alive obviously originally sampled at 44k. Waste of file space. Bottom Image: Dead Can Dance DB showing clipping. 2448524486 +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: Screenshot_20180205_161958.png | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=24486| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Davesworld's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=63649 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=108499 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
