Re: Can lossy high resolution outperform lossless at standard resolution?
Reply #33 – 2024-04-02 00:45:46
Turn the volume way up during a very quiet passage from a CD (like a reverb tail) and the hiss (or distortion, if not properly noise-shaped) you hear is the limitation of 16-bit audio … the point is that 24-bit audio has the advantage of a greater dynamic range than 16-bit, and this is achieved with a higher signal-to-noise ratio. The advantage comes while editing. As for playback, how many bits can you hear ?If you’re a subjectivist then any form of lossy encoding is very suspect (and virtually always audible)… I remember subjectivists who, ignoring the research of optical illusions, saw signs of civilization in low-resolution spots on Mars that resemble a face. Okay, there is Pi. It is used, for example, to build bridges and dams. The decimal expansion of Pi is infinitely long, namely 3.1415926535897932384626433… Downsampling 192 kHz and higher rates at least by a factor of 4 is as lossy as rounding Pi up to this length, which is still sufficient to serve the purpose. Expecting someone to hear the difference is like expecting someone's eyes to see millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that compose our skin microbiota. It's just that the word lossy, uttered without specifying the scale of the loss, first brings to mind the worst artifacts of the MP3 childhood, whereas in this case it's just the operation that was not done in the studio for marketing reasons, although those anxious folks somehow accept without worries the fact that the studio reduced 64-bit or 32-bit float to 24-bit integer before delivery. No doubt in the future they will worry about this too.Neither of these philosophical camps have ever left any space for something like lossy WavPack. I had. But then I found a few cases when WavPack hybrid failed. You called those cases anomalies. But in the course of your explanation, you outlined ways how this encoding mode can be improved, which is what I now pray for, even in my own signature. Until then, WavPack lossless only, which looks advantageous against FLAC, which has difficulties with the preservation of non-audio data . Peace of mind, you know.
• Join our efforts to make Helix MP3 encoder great again • Opus complexity & qAAC dependence on Apple is an aberration from Vorbis & Musepack breakthroughs • Let's pray that D. Bryant improve WavPack hybrid, C. Helmrich update FSLAC, M. van Beurden teach FLAC to handle non-audio data