Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5 (Read 38128 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

I got me a fancy new Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.  The fine print states that the DAC in the device supports 24-bit/192kHz audio. Google's Play Music app (their default music player) supports FLAC.  I copied some 24/192 albums in FLAC to the phone and it plays them.  However, I'm not sure if the app itself supports this sampling rate/bit depth natively or if it does any kind of on-the-fly processing to downconvert to a more standard format.  I guess the case could be made that if I can't tell whether they are being played at full fidelity, it means that I don't need them in that fidelity to begin with.  But humor me, if you will.

BTW, I'm talking about files that I copied to the device's microSD card, not files I uploaded to Google's cloud service.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #1 –
Generate a 30khz tone and use a sound card line in running at 96 or 192 k to confirm its played back.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #2 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Generate a 30khz tone and use a sound card line in running at 96 or 192 k to confirm its played back.


Do you mean to play it through the line in and inspect the waveform visually to see if the tone is present, or was that a joke about how humans can't hear past 20khz?

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #3 –
Let's not forget that even if the phone can "play" 192 kHz files, there is no reason to expect the analog out to pass a 30 kHz tone.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #4 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
Quote from: saratoga on
Generate a 30khz tone and use a sound card line in running at 96 or 192 k to confirm its played back.


Do you mean to play it through the line in and inspect the waveform visually to see if the tone is present, or was that a joke about how humans can't hear past 20khz?


Completely serious. How else would you test this?

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #5 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
Quote from: saratoga on
Generate a 30khz tone and use a sound card line in running at 96 or 192 k to confirm its played back.


Do you mean to play it through the line in and inspect the waveform visually to see if the tone is present, or was that a joke about how humans can't hear past 20khz?


Completely serious. How else would you test this?


Sorry for being defensive, I just know a lot of people around here are very anti-anything-above-16/44.1, and some can be a bit snarky.  Thanks for the suggestion, I hadn't thought of it.  I'll have to give it a try.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #6 –
Any suggestions for tone generator software/site that will go up to 30khz?  I'm finding a lot of online tone generators that stop at 22khz.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #7 –
Here you are:
[attachment=7898:30kHz192-24.flac]
A 192kHz 24-bit stereo 10 second 30kHz tone.

It could possibly be the most exciting audio sample ever uploaded to HA

Cheers,
David.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #8 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Here you are:
[attachment=7898:30kHz192-24.flac]
A 192kHz 24-bit stereo 10 second 30kHz tone.

It could possibly be the most exciting audio sample ever uploaded to HA

Cheers,
David.


Haha, wow.  Thank you!  That was very nice of you.  I'll report back on my findings when I get a chance to perform the experiment.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #9 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
Any suggestions for tone generator software/site that will go up to 30khz?  I'm finding a lot of online tone generators that stop at 22khz.
I've uploaded a test file with a sine sweep from 0 to 48 kHz. See the upload post with instructions.
Hope that helps.

Testfile sine sweep 0-48kHz


Note: David was faster ! I should learn how to handle attachments

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #10 –
RMAA is also able to generate these test files.  Just set it to 192kHz sampling rate. 

Remember though, playing very loud ultrasound will tend to generate a lot of distortion.  So will bad resampling.  In many cases you will hear something when played through speakers.  That does not necessarily mean anything.  You'll need to use a high sampling rate ADC to figure out what is actually happening.  RMAA is a great tool for this.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #11 –
BTW, maybe I'm missing something, but what is the significance of the 30kHz tone if I'm trying to determine if it will play 192 kHz?  Bear with me, I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the technical side of this stuff.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #12 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
BTW, maybe I'm missing something, but what is the significance of the 30kHz tone if I'm trying to determine if it will play 192 kHz?  Bear with me, I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the technical side of this stuff.

A 192 kHz sampling rate will theoretically allow signals up to 96 kHz to be represented. Most hardware will not remotely try to reproduce that, so a much more conservative frequency was suggested. If anything over 24 kHz is seen then that rules out, for example, resampling to 48 kHz.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #13 –
An easy test is if you have a dog....they supposedly can hear up to 60KHz

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #14 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
BTW, maybe I'm missing something, but what is the significance of the 30kHz tone if I'm trying to determine if it will play 192 kHz?  Bear with me, I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the technical side of this stuff.


The point of higher sampling rates is to enable higher frequencies.  Hence, if you want to see if you're actually running above 48kHz, you'll need to play a tone above 48/2=24 KHz.  30 KHz is just a little higher, and so it should work at 96kHz (and higher) and fail at 48KHz (and lower). 

Of course, you'll need a sound card that actually supports at least 96k to perform this test.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #15 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
BTW, maybe I'm missing something, but what is the significance of the 30kHz tone if I'm trying to determine if it will play 192 kHz?  Bear with me, I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the technical side of this stuff.


The point of higher sampling rates is to enable higher frequencies.  Hence, if you want to see if you're actually running above 48kHz, you'll need to play a tone above 48/2=24 KHz.  30 KHz is just a little higher, and so it should work at 96kHz (and higher) and fail at 48KHz (and lower). 

Of course, you'll need a sound card that actually supports at least 96k to perform this test.


Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of the dividing by two thing.  I have a current generation Mac mini, which supports up to 24/96, as shown on the Audio MIDI Setup utility included with OS X.  Will report back later tonight with my findings.  Thanks everyone for the help.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #16 –
OK, I performed the experiment.  Here are my results. 

I copied the 30kHz test FLAC file kindly provided by David to my Galaxy S5 and ran a mini stereo cable from the phone's headphone jack to my Mac mini's line in.  I made sure my sound card's input settings were set to 24/96.  Using Audacity, I created a new track set to 32/192.  When I began recording monitoring with the phone hooked up to the line in, I noticed a buzzing noise.  However, when I started playing the test tone on the phone, the noise stopped, although the file was playing.  When the file finished playing, the buzzing resumed. 

I recorded several seconds of the "silence" while the file was playing and made sure there were no audible noises in the audio captured.  I exported the audio to a 32-bit WAV file and then performed a spectrum analysis on the file using Audacity.  Here's the graph that came up:



So, does this prove that the Galaxy S5 can accurately playback 96kHz files at full fidelity, or did I do something wrong?

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #17 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
So, does this prove that the Galaxy S5 can accurately playback 96kHz files at full fidelity, or did I do something wrong?


I don't know about "full fidelity", but it does look like the software did not need to resample.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #18 –
Quote from: saratoga on
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
So, does this prove that the Galaxy S5 can accurately playback 96kHz files at full fidelity, or did I do something wrong?


I don't know about "full fidelity", but it does look like the software did not need to resample.


Great!  I can rest well tonight with the knowledge that my phone's music player can play frequencies that are inaudible to human ears.      I may have to rethink the need for high sampling rates.  I'm not sure it justifies the amount of spaces the files take up.  If you can't hear those frequencies, what's the point?  Thanks again for the help, everyone.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #19 –
Just so I don't leave anyone out, here is the frequency graph from Kees de Visser's 0-48 kHz sine wave sweep, as played back from my phone (thanks!):


Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #20 –
What are you going to be playing these through? Headphones? IEMs? I've never seen any IEMs that go above 20KHz, I'm sure there are some but even very good ones don't go higher than this.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #21 –
Quote from: probedb on
What are you going to be playing these through? Headphones? IEMs? I've never seen any IEMs that go above 20KHz, I'm sure there are some but even very good ones don't go higher than this.
And why would they? If you engineer something like that you're not doing your job. Unless they are made to fit animal ear canals.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #22 –
Quote from: Kohlrabi on
And why would they? If you engineer something like that you're not doing your job. Unless they are made to fit animal ear canals.


I know  My point was really about the space aspect too, 24/192 FLAC files are going to take up a lot of room on a phone, even if you want FLAC you could reduce that a lot by downsampling them all before copying.

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #23 –
Quote from: devoidzer0 on
Just so I don't leave anyone out, here is the frequency graph from Kees de Visser's 0-48 kHz sine wave sweep, as played back from my phone (thanks!):
It's a 0-96kHz sweep actually. When uploading the testfile I typed that wrong. Moderator Kohlrabi has corrected that, thanks!.
The frequency response you measured looks very good indeed. Are you sure the playback sampling rate was 192kHz ? The sweep frequency goes up to 96kHz but "only" 40-something comes out. This could indicate resampling to 96kHz. That's probably not enough reason to sell your S5 and buy a Pono though

Google Play Music and high res FLAC on Samsung Galaxy S5

Reply #24 –
Lossless in general, and (IIRC) flac in particular, just isn't efficient for higher bitdepths - and, to a lesser extent, higher sample rates.

I'm not talking about audibility, or anything like that. What I mean is that the extra LSBs are effectively almost all noise, and hence unpredictable, and hence incompressible. For PCM, the raw datarate increases by 50% from 16-bits to 24-bits. For non-loudness war recordings, the increase in FLAC bitrate can be much greater.

The increased sampling rate isn't so much of a killer, especially on the many recordings where essentially "there's nothing extra up there" in the higher frequencies. However, I have a recollection (correct me if I'm wrong) that FLAC's predictors (and maybe its default black size) don't work as well at 192kHz as at 44.1kHz. Even if there's no extra real information (i.e. you simply upsample 44.1 > 192 essentially perfectly), the bitrate increases.


If you want measurable perfection beyond the bounds of the best human hearing while taming bitrates slightly, something like 20/96 with a gentle low pass filter starting at about 25kHz is a good choice. 24/96 or 24/48 run through lossyWAV with conservative settings (including, for examples, always keeping at least 16-bits intact) is another option. A higher bitdepth gives you a wider dynamic range (which you don't need) and the ability to turn the volume up during fades and reverb tails without hearing dither noise; a higher sample rate gives you a wider frequency response (which you don't need) and the ability to play back inaudible test signals instact and without intermodulation due to slow roll off DAC filters. It's things like this that are really important when you're listening to music on the move

Higher bitdepth and sample rate don't make things within the normal audible frequency and dynamic range more accurate. Certain people claim they do, but that's because they don't understand digital audio and, frankly, like to imagine things - or are trying to sell you something. People who believe this stuff often take great care with their recordings, and so they sound very good. The same recordings still sound very good converted to 16/44.1.

Cheers,
David.