Hi-rez foolishness

You need to get a demonstration of a good audio system and then make your own mind up. You can do so much better than MP3 and Bluetooth.
When we can, start going to see live music at venues that deliver great sound.

I know. And mp3 is way behind me already. I was just explaining the size of possible improvement step. Like is it worth to go from CD to hi-res? Or from 3K setup to 50K? Is the difference so big as difference from mp3 to FLAC?

I think we believe we can, however, I don’t know. But, it doesn’t matter. If we think 24/192 sounds better, then it does.

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I see. But I’m this type of person:

obrazek

Indeed in opposite - without opinion you’re just another person with a data.
So I don’t want to pay placebo stuff unnecessarily :wink:

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I stream from Tidal and Qobuz in the highest available resolution for the albums I listen to. I also have a free Apple Music account that I only use in my car because it seems to work better with CarPlay. To me, Tidal and Qobuz sounds much better than Apple Music, but I don’t have a sound quality meter to verify that. I don’t need any data other than my ears and brain to know what sounds good to me.

That said, if Tidal and Qobuz were to increase their price significantly, I might have to have a battle with myself to decide if the increased cost was justified by the perceived SQ.

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No. I’ve had my hearing tested and I hear above 25khz (dog whistles are unbearable) and besides test tones I can’t hear a difference. Now what I will say is 24 vs 16 bit is a world of difference. Let me explain, so its useful for 2 things,
1: If you plan on eq’ing stuff, remastering things, remixing etc, those extra bits help
2: Digital volume control, similar to the first reason, if you are controlling volume in the digital domain (and lets be real here, the majority of people are for convenience reasons), you are reducing the number of bits, so you might as well have more.

tl;dr, anything higher than 48kHz is pointless and you’re dumb for caring, 24bit however makes a ton of sense if you have the space.

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Wow. Amazing 25kHz. Are there any negatives? Maybe you hear something that audio engineers cannot hear. Don’t you feel sometimes you hear unwanted things which engineer didn’t filter?

I thought that 24b has reason in studio while mixing giving some room to engineers. Otherwise so high range (or volume if I simplify) is unnecessary. Or?

It might be very entertaining and enlightening for some to read, what Mr. Hi-Res himself has to say about this matter - I think it’s been referenced before.
You can still get the files and test for yourself…

I myself get hires when available and additionally upsample the hell out of everything to get D/A artifacts as far out of the audible range as possible, whilst applying digital filters with no preringing.
I’m using digitally corrected full range line source speakers, with a near perfect impulse/step response, so all the the effort makes sense to me…

May the sound be with you…

https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6713

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Yeah, like I said, dog whistles and stuff suck. Same with harmonics, distorting small speakers, electrical noise (like power supplies), florescent bulbs, etc

Also yes, thats sort of what I’m trying to explain, since we often use digital EQs, DSP and typically digital volume controls (I don’t), those extra bits can really help.

Speaking of Hi-rez foolishness…

What is the point of pressing an album from a recording that was originally made digitally.
Doesn’t that kind of defeat everything? But they do it!

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It is question if people know what they’re buying. If they expect analog quality/sound feeling and are cheated or it is just life style to play vinyl and they don’t expect true analog process.

It’s good someone introduced in this thread the challenge of the quality of the audio system and associated costs.

For years I put up with iTunes and Spotify on my mobile using budget buds (maaaan for me those were wasted musical years) and then I got Roon and I ran it off my Mac onto desktop speakers, and I was like ”really what is the difference between mp3 and CD I dont hear it.”

Then after 3 months I got a Blusound Node and some entry level Spendor speakers and I was like oh I hear some difference between mp3 and CD, but I can’t tell difference between CD and hi-res, so then 3 months later I got the bug and got a Naim amp and a Chord Qutest DAC and Focal Kanta speakers and now on complex modern-recorded orchestral music I’m going “damn there’s something better about the hi-res files, not all of them of course as the points on this thread on mastering are absolutely valid, bad mastering = bad files, and I’m thinking is it expectation bias?” but I kept my Bluesound system and I simply play the music on that and then pop into the Naim room to listen to it on that to see if any differences.

But that wasn’t all of it, because as someone else pointed out, audio is complex, and the room itself screws up the best audio. So, having gotten the bug and because I spend at least 2-3 hours a day listening to classical music, i acoustically treated one of the rooms. Cleaned it out, put in absorbers/diffusers, bass traps, put in some simple acoustic soundboards on the walls to reduce any ambient external noise, put in a whiskey cabinet :wink: and now I’m “ damn damn, is this how music should be heard?” On good quality mastered files I hear more easily the difference between CD and hi-res, not on all files of course, the original source makes all the difference.

I’ve upgraded my system once again not because I’m trying to prove something to anybody, just simply that I want to hear music on the best quality system I can afford, and Mahler 6th Symphony needs an amp capable of such huge dynamic range, and as my wife keeps reminding me, for the price of a nice car. Yikes! :flushed:

By this point in my audio and educational journey and in a dedicated listening room, I hear for me personally music as best as I have ever heard in my life, and of course I play hi-res files when it warrants it. All started by Roon!

And frankly if I couldn’t hear a difference between CD and hi -res on good quality mastered files I would simply pop round the corner to the room with the Bluesound which I still have (nice piece of kit) :grin::grin:

My thoughts are don’t jump to conclusions on hi-res, exploit the best system you can, it’s a journey, keep improving it.

Ah what a long post, sorry!

Cheers
H

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Congrats on your nice gear and your decision to acoustically treat your dedicated listening room. But just because other people admit the SQ differences between CD quality and HiRes are very small in their experience doesn’t mean they have bad hearing, a less capable system or no listening room with high-quality acoustic treatments.

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For some people a “nice car” costs less than £20,000, for others it may cost more than £200,000. This is all very subjective. No matter how good or expensive our audio gear is, there will always be other people with a better or more expensive system…

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The thing is, you have to be happy with your system now or you will never be happy at all. When I get this, I’ll be happy, when I add that I’ll be happy… but the future always turns up as Now!
Thought for the day perhaps :joy:

Ok, to bring it to music… The lyric from Circle of Hands by Uriah Heep… “Today is only Yesterday’s Tomorrow”

Always the same old tune. “If you can’t hear it, you must be deaf or your system is crap.” There are millions of music lovers with healthy ears and more than decent audio gear who agree that the difference between high res and CD quality is extremely small (if it’s audible at all). I have a Qobuz subscription and I regularly stream high res stuff – just because I can, not because I think it makes much of a difference.

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In my experience in life all ‘nice to have’ purchases have to be justified. How we all do that differs from person to person.

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The difficulty of testing in another sensory area.


http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf

Liked this quote from that article:

More evidence that wine-tasting is influenced by context was provided by a 2008 study from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The team found that different music could boost tasters’ wine scores by 60%. Researchers discovered that a blast of Jimi Hendrix enhanced cabernet sauvignon while Kylie Minogue went well with chardonnay.

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New discussions to open: is Hires quality better than CD quality with or without wine, and music wine pairing.