Why is it not “desired”? Not necessary, probably, but desires have nothing to do with it.
I am saying that at least I can understand buying the original recording resolution (which could be 16/44.1 or could be DXD; could even be some straight DSD). Paying more for upconversion seems silly, DAC will do it anyway, and if one is insane enough, you could get Roon, HQPlayer, or any number of other things to do it.
Hi-res is a liability. Ultrasonic frequencies can’t be heard, but they can seep into the audible range due to non-linearities causing intermodulation distortion. Not to mention increased storage and bandwidth etc. I would point to a very good article by Xiph on this, but the link seems broken now.
I don’t think original resolution is ever red book, so that would basically make all purchases hi-res. See above.
[Edit] Found a cached page: 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed (bingj.com)
This is why I prefer the term “Red book” as 44.1 / 16 is probably not “lossless”. Lossless is surely the resolution it was recorded in, whatever that may be? It’s never made sense to me.
I listen to Hi-Res as it’s there but at almost 58 years old, I can’t hear a difference between that & Red book & I consider my hearing to be good.
I didn’t know red book quality was being upsampled to DSD & sold at a premium, that’s straight up fraud IMO, like watering down beer or selling anything by volume & giving less that the customer paid for.
For one, I’m using “red book” as a synonym for 44.1/16. Then, since almost all recordings go though some post-processing, even if you released in the original format, it would still not be “lossless” based on your definition. We should only talk about “lossless” when referring to the master, i.e. what is distributed.
Yes, put that way, the master is probably only the lossless version. It’s not my definition though, “lossless” is being incorrectly applied, surely?
Sort of. “Lossless” actually refers to (or originally referred to) a compression scheme. Schemes where no data was discarded were lossless; others, like MP3’s compression, were not. Nothing to do with the resolution.
I heard from an owner of a recording-studio that Donald Fagens Nightfly was recorded in 192kHz and also on analog tape. They prefered the digital recording so went on with that.
Now I see a lot of recordings in 192kHz on Tidal. I don’t think this sounds better then my red book ripped cd files, but they also do not sound any worse.
Yes, I agree, a 192kb MP3 rip of a redbook CD is lossy & I suppose between the two, the CD is the original (between the two) & therefore the lossless one.
Generally applying the lossless tag to CD quality is a bit dubious to me though & many people do.
Nothing is straightforward in this hobby is it.
Yes. As @Bill_Janssen said, it should be applied to the compression, although sometimes “CD-quality” also implies it wasn’t lossy-compressed.
Many people get many things wrong. But not this. The Redbook CD format has no compression, and thus is (trivially) lossless. In fact, when they write the CD, they expand each byte to 14 bits, to cut down on the number of transitions between 1 and 0. This is unexpanded by the CD player when it reads the track.
(1) I don’t see what the hobby is here, and (2) pretty much everything seems straightforward once you know what it all is. It’s the vendors who aren’t straightforward.
One should use a decent DAC, no?
That’s not really an issue for just about anyone, and then, why not use 320Kbps MP3, which are audibly indistinguishable from Redbook anyway?
Not everything is sold in high-res though.
Isn’t that like half of audiophile industry?
If the DAC is supposed to reconstruct the original analog signal, I would argue that if you pass it 192kHz, the output should be flat up to 80-90kHz or so, and if it’s 384kHz, up to 180kHz etc. If the signal has ultrasonics, those will be passed to the amp and potentially to speakers, so the whole chain needs to be ultrasonic-decent for absolutely no good reason.
I have all my music on my phone (where the storage is an issue) in 320kbps MP3 for listening on the go, so no arguments there. I do believe in archiving original bits though so I always rip lossless. If I have hi-res in my library, it’s because Bandbamp. (For DSD, I make kind of an exception: I back up the ISO, but down-convert to red book for my library.)
But if we go with “let’s get the original format”, it ought to be. That’s what Neil Young tried to do and failed.
Can we please try to stay on topic?
If that is was recorded, what is the problem with that?
What are “original bits”? If anything, bits in the DXD master from which CD is downsampled are more original, no?
It ought, if that exists.
Well, this looks very much based on a myth:
At the digital master stage, the most common format today probably is 24 bit 48 kHz. Raw recording is less likely to use higher sample rates but more likely to use floating point word lengths.
AJ
No. There was no 192 kHz sample rate digital audio recording, circa 1982.
Steely Dan recording engineer Roger Nichols was a proponent of the 3M digital multitrack recording system. It utilized an approximately 50 kHz sample rate.
AJ
But if the master is for a CD, it will be 16/44.1, right? For digital downloads, where there’s no physical media involved, the “masters” are the downloads themselves, so they can be any resolution. But whatever resolution they are, those are “original bits” as far as I’m concerned.
So if I’m a photographer and I shoot raw, I ought to give you your wedding pictures in raw format? It doesn’t make sense to ask for whatever “original” resolution was.
I would actually take raws. Or at least a TIFF or PNG after developing. If you shot 50 megapixel originals though, I would be quite ■■■■■■ if you only offered to deliver 12 megapixel JPEGs “because nobody needs higher resolution.”
Alright this is just getting a little out of hand, and if there ever was any point to this thread it disappeared a long time ago!