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Topic: 16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz (Read 17698 times) previous topic - next topic
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16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #25 –
Quote from: JapanAudio on
Quote from: Canar on
Quote from: BlueDragon on
But maybe it's like the topic if one can hear the difference between mp3 cbr 320 and flac 16bit for the same source. So probably the discussion will never really end...
Myself and several others like me have scientific proof that we can hear that difference, at least on certain samples. Generally though, 320 is good enough. I use LAME V5 on my portable/in my car sometimes. Sounds great.
Yes I did a test with a professional pianist with a great ear and she could tell pretty much every time which was which.

Are still talking about hi-res or are we veering further off-topic?  Other than the fact that the testing is the same and there are plenty of people who claim to be able to hear the difference but really cannot, detection of lossy artifacts and the ability to hear frequencies over 22kHz and/or quantization error at the 16th bit are really two different things.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #26 –
Quote from: WernerO on
Consider DSD with a signal chain ultimately feeding a loudspeaker with low bandwidth as a limit case.

I'm talking about the noise used to dither and then it's removal.  If the noise used to dither is filtered, then there is no more dither.  If there is no audible distortion after the filtering then the dither was never necessary to begin with.  IOW, there is no free lunch.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #27 –
Quote from: BlueDragon on
Having understood what I could I dont't see then why it's a very wide spread habit to digitalise older vinyl audio material in 24bit.

There are two valid reasons to digitise vinyl at 24 bit:
  • You're going to be doing many passes of post-recording processing and want to avoid the danger of rounding errors accumulating enough to bring them above the vinyl noise floor. I don't personally believe this is actually a danger - it would takes dozens of DSP operations at 16 bit to get to that stage.
  • It just makes you feel happier that you've avoided any possibility (no matter how tiny) that using 16 bit might not be good enough. Knowing you've done it at 24 bit can create an expectation bias that the recording will sound better, and so as a result it does.

There is another (completely invalid) reason to digitise vinyl at 24 bit:
  • You think that vinyl has greater resolution than 16 bit PCM. Having debated the topic with a number of vinyl digitisers, I think the majority of them who choose to do so at 24 bit fall into this category. (AndyH-ha: if you're reading this, I don't include you among them  )

Let me just say that I'm a long-time vinyl digitiser, and I do all my work at 16 bit. Having done some experiments at 24 bit, I couldn't find any advantage at all.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #28 –
Quote from: greynol on
I'm talking about the noise used to dither and then it's removal.

Do you mean something like:
24-bit -> reducing bit depth with noiseshaped dithering -> 16-bit -> lowpass filter -> 16 bit ?

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #29 –
I don't  think that's what Arnold was talking about, no.  Though, quite frankly I don't have the faintest idea why Arnold was lumping noise shaping and oversampling together.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #30 –
Quote from: cliveb on
You're going to be doing many passes of post-recording processing and want to avoid the danger of rounding errors accumulating enough to bring them above the vinyl noise floor. I don't personally believe this is actually a danger - it would takes dozens of DSP operations at 16 bit to get to that stage.

Perhaps this is a good reason to perform processing at higher than 16 bits, but I don't see it as a reason to necessarily digitize at higher than 16 bits.  They aren't the same thing, of course.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #31 –
Quote from: greynol on
I'm talking about the noise used to dither and then it's removal.  If the noise used to dither is filtered, then there is no more dither.  If there is no audible distortion after the filtering then...


Which is exactly what I meant, please read again (and lvqcl's post as well).

It all depends.

If the filtering domain remains at the same resolution, then the benign effect of the noise shaping is nulled and quantisation distortion rises.

If the filtering domain has a higher resolution than the noise shaped source stream, i.e. expanded to 24/32 bit or to the analogue domain, then the low-pass transfer of the filter smears the shaped noise energy through the passband, thus recreating the required intermediate signal states in the pass band, maintaining the source's resolution.

Again, DSD. It is 1 bit. Its noise-shaped dither part is low-pass filtered by the whole post-DAC signal chain. And yet what you hear is better than 1 bit in resolution. Are you going to argue that the noise shaping then wasn't necessary in the first place?


16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #32 –
Quote from: JapanAudio on
Yes I did a test with a professional pianist with a great ear and she could tell pretty much every time which was which.

Sorry, but unless this was a true double-blind ABX test, this information is worthless!
 

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #34 –
Quote from: greynol on
I don't  think that's what Arnold was talking about, no.  Though, quite frankly I don't have the faintest idea why Arnold was lumping noise shaping and oversampling together.


Noise shaping is an integral part of why oversampling converters work so well.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #35 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Quote from: greynol on
I don't  think that's what Arnold was talking about, no.  Though, quite frankly I don't have the faintest idea why Arnold was lumping noise shaping and oversampling together.


Noise shaping is an integral part of why oversampling converters work so well.
...but you can noise shape without oversampling.

...and you can oversample without noise shaping - but noise shaping makes it far more efficient - i.e. in an oversampled system you need far fewer bits to delivery a given SNR in the base band if you use noise shaping.

I'm sure you know this, but just for clarity!

Cheers,
David.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #36 –
Quote from: greynol on
Quote from: WernerO on
Consider DSD with a signal chain ultimately feeding a loudspeaker with low bandwidth as a limit case.

I'm talking about the noise used to dither and then it's removal.  If the noise used to dither is filtered, then there is no more dither.  If there is no audible distortion after the filtering then the dither was never necessary to begin with.  IOW, there is no free lunch.

I don't really see the free lunch...

Dither is used to pseudo-randomly spread out the quantization noise. Noise shaping will shift the noise power to different frequency bands. Sure if you shift most of it to the high end then apply a lowpass filter you may be getting a free candy, but not the whole lunch. On the other hand if you're not applying a lowpass then the noise is still there, subjectively less audible, but still objectively present.

Quote from: pdq on
Quote from: JapanAudio on
Yes I did a test with a professional pianist with a great ear and she could tell pretty much every time which was which.

Sorry, but unless this was a true double-blind ABX test, this information is worthless!

I'm not asking you to believe me --It's not like I'm pretenting to be able to do it myself. I'm just reporting what I've witnessed.

TBH I'd rather look at a waveform, a spectrum and statistical data rather than relying on a person's opinion. And all the facts are there.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #37 –
Quote from: greynol on
Quote from: JapanAudio on
Quote from: Canar on
Quote from: BlueDragon on
But maybe it's like the topic if one can hear the difference between mp3 cbr 320 and flac 16bit for the same source. So probably the discussion will never really end...
Myself and several others like me have scientific proof that we can hear that difference, at least on certain samples. Generally though, 320 is good enough. I use LAME V5 on my portable/in my car sometimes. Sounds great.
Yes I did a test with a professional pianist with a great ear and she could tell pretty much every time which was which.

Are still talking about hi-res or are we veering further off-topic?  Other than the fact that the testing is the same and there are plenty of people who claim to be able to hear the difference but really cannot, detection of lossy artifacts and the ability to hear frequencies over 22kHz and/or quantization error at the 16th bit are really two different things.

I'd love to see neuroimaging on people hearing higher-than-audible frequencies... Anyway, isn't hearing lossy artifacts enough of a motivation to go lossless?

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #38 –
Quote
TBH I'd rather look at a waveform, a spectrum and statistical data rather than relying on a person's opinion. And all the facts are there.
The focus at HydrogenAudio is what we can hear rather than what we can measure.

Of course there is some correlation.  (i.e. Nobody is going to argue or demand an ABX test if you claim that 16-bits sounds better thatn 8-bits.)  The people who develop lossy encoders probably know more about human sound perception than anyone else and they should be able to make a good correlation between what we measure and what we hear. 


But, the audiophile community is full of people who claim to hear differences that they cannot hear in blind tests.  (The audiophile community is also full of people who say blind tests are invalid!!!)  Thus, we have TOS #8[/color] that says all claims of sound quality must be based on proper listening tests.

16bit/22.1kHz or 24bit/44.2kHz

Reply #42 –
Despite attempts to do so, the results of that test have not been replicated.

Those who wish to discuss this study can do so here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=68348

Any discussion about it in this thread will be binned per TOS #5.