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Topic: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates (Read 7050 times) previous topic - next topic
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curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Hi all,
First, I know a million discussions addressing these questions probably exist, both on here and on other sites, but as a curious hobbyist sound designer/musician, I like to know what people think of various hot topics in the digital realm. I've always enjoyed the critical attitude here so I look forward to discussion. It's a long post since I have a lot of thoughts. They're just my musings though, I don't really expect them all to be responded to in one swoop.

First topic: What do you see as advantages when using very high bit depth and sampling rate, say, above 24 bit/48 K for digital audio? A friend of mine asked me about things like HDTracks or HDMusic or something a few years ago, and ever since then I've been thinking about it when I produce audio. I have two completely separate viewpoints on this, one from a sound design aspect and one from a listening aspect.

The reasons I like to use higher bit depths is perhaps obvious, because of greater dynamic range. Though I read somewhere that going beyond 24 bit was senseless since it already offers more dynamic range than most high-level equipment can provide, and human hearing isn't able to go beyond that either. I don't have any hard evidence to support this though, but such statements do seem logical to me. 6dB per bit*24 bits = 144dB which is roughly the range of human hearing from what I remember. So the only real reason to go beyond is for special case stuff I would think, but I don't know any examples of that where 32 or more bit would be beneficial. Is this a reasonably well-founded conclusion? Are there still advantages above 24 bit?

Higher sampling rates seem more useful to me. Most mid range digital audio recorders like Olympus, zoom, edirol etc. can go up to 96 K. Provided they can actually pick up frequencies up there and you're using mics that can take it, you can pitch those recordings down by an octave or more and the sounds won't audibly degrade in quality because inaudible frequencies, if they exist, are being transposed into the audible range. This seems useful for sound design, and the scope of effectiveness increases the higher the original sampling rate. If you can capture at 192 for example, and still get representative material in those really high frequencies, then transposing by 2 octaves down could still be very sonically useful, and you could go a lot further down if audible highs are not of utmost concern.

Using higher sampling rates, and higher bit depths, seems also useful for oversampling purposes in DSP. The rounding errors in such processes would be less audible which I think would mostly mean less aliasing or other similar distortion, and you could then downsample the end result of the more precise processing instead of using a low sampling rate/bit depth to begin with. I do this in Reaper pretty often, with 96 K being my baseline, and downsampling to 44 after I render. If I work natively at 44 K, I can hear more aliasing in some processes like pitch shifters, virtual analog synths, distortion effects, samplers etc. Some processes don't seem to be designed to work at higher rates though so they might break. I have several that illustrate this.

I discovered, mostly by accident, that using higher sampling rates improves the sound of aggressive non-psychoacoustic compression like ADPCM. The 1 bit DPCM format used on the NES for its low quality samples sounds much better if oversampled. If used at 176 K, that 1 bit of audio actually sounds pretty good, considering how cruddy it sounds at the sampling rates it's intended for! Of course size is the tradeoff here, and it couldn't be practically used, but the nerd in me still can't resist being fascinated.

The reasons why I can see HD audio being nonsense would be if you're not really into sound design or some other form of high level creation, and just want to listen to music as it's intended. While I can understand reasons that people prefer lossless compression, I don't know the rationale behind using anything higher than 24/48 or even 16/48 for music listening. Where it gets really interesting is with psychoacoustic encoding. AAC, WMA and Vorbis can all do 96 K or beyond, though they end up lowpassing and doing weird things in the highs which is sometimes audible if you lower the pitch. Why a psychoacoustic codec would offer sampling rates above 48 K I don't really know, since I can barely hear a 20 K sine wave, and don't know anyone who I know can hear higher. A rate of 44.1 K is quite sufficient to reproduce that. A similar concept can be discussed with dynamics, if you have an encoder that supports 24 bit input and a decoder that can decode in 24 bit. I only tested this with Vorbis a long time ago, but quality starts to snowball down and out of control below a certain point, and I think by around -110 dB, there's hardly anything at all to be heard. Of course I had to normalize the volume to hear this. I do recall reading threads though where various lossy formats were being criticized for producing artifacts in quiet but still audible parts, so that line between saving and wasting space is something I don't know but I've always found interesting. I guess it has some subjectivity to it but there's also hard science behind it too.

BTW I realize I'm making a lot of statements without proof and that is against the rules here. I am prepared to back up most if not all my statements, but I really am not certain about the extent of proof needed or what I will need to prove, so I will leave that open for discussion and be open to direction.

Going off that topic... The other thing I've been thinking about lately is, the whole analog vs digital debate. How well-founded are criticisms that digital audio sounds different from analog? There are times when I believe I can perceive a warmth in analog that I don't in digital, but I highly doubt I could identify which was which. I was never a huge fan of working with analog stuff because I'm not old enough to have truly appreciated it. I'm more than happy to digitize any analog media I have made/might obtain in future. I prefer getting digital copies directly so I think I'm safest saying I just don't perceive a difference, or at the very least, prefer digital for various reasons. I wonder if what most people claim to hear as a difference between the two media is just different masters and versions, and or equipment used. That's been my theory ever since I heard about the controversy, but I've always wondered if there was more to it, if any controlled tests were done to put some sort of closure on whether there was a point in using analog over digital or having hd music instead of normal.

Again, sorry for the long-winded post, but both of these things have been on my mind a lot lately.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #1 –
You've probably seen this already, but since others may stumble on the subject for the first time. I find these videos really relevant:

https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

And for those who want some reading material:
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

And there's 2 wiki's associated with the videos above:
https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Geeks
https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #2 –
Quote from: raygrote on



The other thing I've been thinking about lately is, the whole analog vs digital debate. How well-founded are criticisms that digital audio sounds different from analog?

High quality analog and high quality digital sound exactly the same. Of course when you are talking about high quality analog, that automatically excludes all common forms of analog recording and playback, both tape and disc.

Quote
There are times when I believe I can perceive a warmth in analog that I don't in digital,.

Perceptions can be reliable or they can be illusions, which is to say utter fakes, purely the product of overheated imaginations or the usual inherent flaws of the human sensing and perceptual mechanisms.

How do you know that your perceptions are reliable and factual?

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #3 –
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #4 –
Quote
I have two completely separate viewpoints on this, one from a sound design aspect and one from a listening aspect.
Pros record at 24/96, so if you're doing music/sound production you might want to go with that.   (Of course, most music is distributed on CD or MP3/AAC.    24/96 is overkill for almost everything (maybe absolutely everything), but pros also often record at -12 to -18dB, so they are loosing a few bits of theoretical resolution, no matter what the bit-depth.

 
Quote
...   = 144dB which is roughly the range of human hearing from what I remember.
That's really not relevant to musical dynamic range...   If someone shoots a gun next to your ear, your ears start ringing and it may be a few minutes before you can hear a whisper.   You loose some of that theoretical range after hearing loud sounds, and music with that kind of dynamic would be totally unpleasant.   

Quote
...and I think by around -110 dB, there's hardly anything at all to be heard.
I suggested an experiment to someone recently, and you might find it enlightening too...   Load a song into Audacity* (or your favorite audio editor).  Somewhere around the 30-second mark, drop the volume by -90dB for a few seconds, then bring the volume to back to normal.     (-90dB is near the lower-limit for 16-bits.)   Play back and listen as loud as you like, but "no fair" boosting the volume during -90dB part.    I suspect you'll be surprised how far-down -90dB is.    Then you might also want to try something more "realistic" like -60 or -70dB.

Quote
The other thing I've been thinking about lately is, the whole analog vs digital debate.
There's no "debate" among people rational/scientific people.   Does anyone debate that analog VHS is better than DVD or Blu-Ray?  The situation is similar in audio and video, and digital "wins" in every way.**   (Except with "audiophiles" who enjoy the "warm" crackle and distortion from vinyl records.) 

Quote
you can pitch those recordings down by an octave or more and the sounds won't audibly degrade in quality because inaudible frequencies, if they exist, are being transposed into the audible range.
There nothing intentional in the ultrasonic range.   Any ultrasonic artifacts may "enhance" or degrade the sound if pitch-shifted down into the audible range.   Or more likely, they are attenuated to the point where they are totally masked, except possibly for any high-frequency noise that's present when there is no signal.   And, any pitch-shifting THAT extreme is going to sound completely unnatural anyway.




* In Audacity, use the Amplify effect to attenuate the level, and since the maximum attenuation in Audacity is -50dB, you'll have to do it in two steps if you want to go to -90.

** I'm speaking of at-least CD quality or high-quality MP3, etc.   Of course we can have "telephone quality" digital audio that's worse than some analog formats.  

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #5 –
Quote from: DVDdoug on
Quote
...and I think by around -110 dB, there's hardly anything at all to be heard.
I suggested an experiment to someone recently, and you might find it enlightening too...
Or Audible Dynamic Range Sound Test @ audiocheck.net: full scale pink noise interleaved with ever quieter voice saying current loudness.

Or the version without noise (scroll one page down and play "16-bit • The Original" sample).

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #6 –
Quote
There are times when I believe I can perceive a warmth in analog that I don't in digital

Inherent to analog is imperfection.
This might yield distortions we can detect and perceive as "warmer"
A nice article by Hugh Robjohns: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/analogue-warmth
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #7 –
Quote from: raygrote on
Hi all,
First, I know a million discussions addressing these questions probably exist, both on here and on other sites ...

Stop right there.

I will answer your question exactly  as asked in the title. What do I think about the debates? They are pantomime shows, in which Oh yes it is! and Oh no it isn't are repeated ad infinitum just as they were in the same show the previous year. I've taken part, to some extent, on both sides over the years. Now it's boring.

Sorry, but you did ask. Literally.
The most important audio cables are the ones in the brain

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #8 –
MQA Bob tells us digital as we know it is blurred and smeared until you add aliasing, remove the lower bits and wrap it in DRM.
Others trust only in DSD when it has to be digital.
What a mess :)
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #9 –
Since reproduced sound is always reproduced in ones mind (in the end), I see the analog vs. digital discussion more as a "I'm X years old, I grew up listening to mostly Y. My brain tells me that Y is the better sound, because that is what it knows.

Further thoughts:  (Depending on age, ones ears won't hear the high frequencies possibly - but our brain can easily fill in the blanks from previous experiences.)

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #10 –
Also, it is an aquired taste, People "new" to audio will "always" love overblown bass and highs. Its also "ok" to like it.

Sorry about the analogy, but to see past the HDR and effects in digital pictures these days to find actual ART if kinda hard too. Same thing in Audio: "Everything" is "art" and the perception of said art,

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #11 –
Quote from: ev13wt on
Since reproduced sound is always reproduced in ones mind (in the end), I see the analog vs. digital discussion more as a "I'm X years old, I grew up listening to mostly Y. My brain tells me that Y is the better sound, because that is what it knows.

Further thoughts:  (Depending on age, ones ears won't hear the high frequencies possibly - but our brain can easily fill in the blanks from previous experiences.)
If it really could, we wouldn't have to ask people to repeat themselves, speak more slowly and  clearly... get hearing aids.

The thing is that, unless you have some sudden traumatic hearing loss, the world does not sound much different today to how it did yesterday or the day, or the year before. Or what we can remember of that, which we probably can't anyway.

No, you can't fill in the blanks. But only stuff like the complete absence of sound from baby birds, mosquitoes, etc, and the increasing blur of other people's speech, make the loss all too obvious.  I'm sorry to say that I know what I'm talking about.
The most important audio cables are the ones in the brain

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #13 –
Quote from: ev13wt on
Since reproduced sound is always reproduced in ones mind (in the end), I see the analog vs. digital discussion more as a "I'm X years old, I grew up listening to mostly Y. My brain tells me that Y is the better sound, because that is what it knows.

Further thoughts:  (Depending on age, ones ears won't hear the high frequencies possibly - but our brain can easily fill in the blanks from previous experiences.)

The curious factoid is that there is no necessary audible difference between good analog and good digital, both of which abound as long as you stay away from FM, analog tape and the LP. FM in the days before the processing that became common was much better than LP, and live broadcasts of concerts were widely appreciated. It broke the stranglehold that the LP had on audio.

As Greynol pointed out, many of us grew up with analog LP and tape, mostly the former.

My situation was that I also grew up with live music 2-3 times a week. The violence that vinyl did to sound quality was abundantly clear.

Good analog tape (7 1/2 ips  half track) lasted just long enough as a distribution medium, and I had just enough random visits to one of the best recording studios in town, that there was no doubt about how severe the LP-induced -violence was.

Then one day a local broadcast engineer played his PCM-F1 digital tapes of some live concerts that he was engineering for broadcast.  When the first CD players were being sold in town, I scraped up close to $1K and entered the world of digital, never to look back.

ABX tests show that CD quality audio is indistinguishable from the source, and analog tape and the LP are not. It is as simple as that.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #14 –
Quote from: danadam on

Or Audible Dynamic Range Sound Test @ audiocheck.net: full scale pink noise interleaved with ever quieter voice saying current loudness.

Or the version without noise (scroll one page down and play "16-bit • The Original" sample).

Whoa, that's really cool... putting my in ears on full blast on my laptop (which was pretty uncomfortable) I could barely make out the -72 dB point. So for my ears - even when leaving ~13 dB headroom - I'm still a comfortable 11 dB away from the 96 dB limit of 16 bit audio.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #15 –
As far as I can see, the "Analog vs Digital" debate is comparable to the "debate" about global warming: Among those in the know, there is no debate.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #17 –
Quote from: 4season on
As far as I can see, the "Analog vs Digital" debate is comparable to the "debate" about global warming: Among those in the know, there is no debate.

I don't see that. With global warming there is just one globe named Earth.

With analog and digital there is a plethora of alternatives to consider.

With a digital system dynamic range that is limited by the digital part of the system can always be improved by adding more bits, and circuitry to do that can be increased greatly with few if any  practical limits. This is so commonly true that the digital parts of most audio systems do not usually cause the dynamic range limits that are observed in practice. For example, the hiss we hear in CDs is almost always due to the microphones and other analog elements of the recording process.

In an analog system dynamic range is limited by influences such as thermal noise, which is ultimately limited by the inherent nature and operating temperature of the electrical components.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #18 –
One of the problems with comparing analog and digital recordings is the effects of processing in between.  For example, the processing that must be done before a vinyl record can be cut or the abuse that goes on with many digital masterings - eg the loudness wars.  So rarely are people comparing like with like.

The only study of peer grade review I know of that compared listener preferences between analog and digital recordings was in 2000, some excellent research was published in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education where subjects listened to digital and analog recordings of the same concert performance, recorded unequalized and unmixed especially for this test. They were able to switch back and forth between the two at will, and everything was blinded and well controlled. Overall, the digital version was preferred in all ten scoring areas. The researchers concluded:

Results showed that music major listeners rated the digital versions of live concert recordings higher in quality than corresponding analog versions. Participants gave significantly higher ratings to the digital presentations in bass, treble, and overall quality, as well as separation of the instruments/voices. Higher rating means for the digital versions were generally consistent across loudspeaker and headphone listening conditions and the four types of performance media.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #19 –
Quote from: old tech on
The only study of peer grade review I know of that compared listener preferences between analog and digital recordings was in 2000, some excellent research was published in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education where subjects listened to digital and analog recordings of the same concert performance, recorded unequalized and unmixed especially for this test.

I assume it is not available online? [edit: found reference http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319018 ]

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #20 –
Quote from: julf on
Quote from: old tech on
The only study of peer grade review I know of that compared listener preferences between analog and digital recordings was in 2000, some excellent research was published in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education where subjects listened to digital and analog recordings of the same concert performance, recorded unequalized and unmixed especially for this test.

I assume it is not available online? [edit: found reference http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319018 ]

Often the abstract is all that is needed.  According to the abstract he so-called analog samples were Dolby-B encoded analog tape, possibly cassettes.  That's not exactly representative of the best analog can do, and in fact IME audible differences between playback and the source are often fairly easy to detect.  In general it is safe to assume that the DAT tapes were sonically transparent representatives of the original performances's mic feed, subject to whatever mixing took place.

This issue is not necessarily a problem given the purpose of the study was not about comparing analog to digital, but seems to have been about comparing real world option one for concert audition tapes which was Dolby B cassettes to real world option two for concert audition media which was CDs. Back in the days of the study,  (ca. Y2K) there were probably still a small number of cassette tapes for that purpose still being made.

By the time I entered the business of making concert audition tapes for bands and orchestras in 2006 or so, CDs were pretty much the standard product. That's what our little company did, and it seemed like nobody else in the business was providing or accepting anything else. The key technology was CD-Rs.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #21 –
Yeah it certainly wasn't a perfect test just the only one I could find of peer grade quality. It would have been better to use a 7.5 or 15 ips open reel but who still used them in 2000? 

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #22 –
I really like the analogy to digital video/cinema, because it illustrates just how absurd the analog-mania among Hi-Fi enthusiasts has become.

It's only been in recent years that we reached the point where digital cinematography and projection became as good or even better than 35mm film.
During the first wave of big budget movies shot digitally, there was an even bigger wave of skepticism, especially among the old guard of filmmakers. But over the years, most oldschool directors and cinematographers have embraced digital as the technology matured and many of those who still prefer to shoot on film admit they're doing it mostly for aesthetic reasons, in the same way that musicians and producers might use inferior analog technology for aesthetic reasons (that said, you can also achieve a quite convincing approximation of "analog" sound or "film"-look in post production).

The point i'm trying to make is: Digital Audio has reached a maturity comparable to what we're currently seeing in digital cinema roughly 40 years ago (although it took another five years for a digital consumer format to emerge). And still people act as if digital audio reproduction were a problem that's yet to be solved.

Re: curious about opinions on hd music vs normal, and digital vs analog debates

Reply #23 –
Digital audio has been mature for... how many decades?

People act as if it is a problem yet to be solved so  that they can credit their egos, rather than science and engineering, with what they think they are hearing on their systems. Variously called audiophools, placebophiles, etc.
The most important audio cables are the ones in the brain