Why are we still listening to over-compressed music through low-quality headphones when advances in bandwidth, storage capacity and speakers (not to mention headphones) means we could be listening to high-quality uncompressed audio all the time?
The volume levels are then quantised into 16-bit quantities, which can represent 65,536 discrete values for the loudness. 24-bit audio is often sampled at 96kHz or 192kHz; those 24 bits can. With a dedicated signal rate convertor, upgrades ALL audio signals to 24-bit/96kHz High-Resolution signals across all listening devices. Comforting Noise-Isolation Dual-layered earcups are strategically designed to reduce ambient noise by up to 20dB while giving your ears a stress-free listening experience. HDtracks high resolution music downloads. HDtracks - High Definition Music. River: The Joni Letters (96kHz/24-bit) by Herbie Hancock. Album Credits and Pers. Your Queen Is A Reptile. Sons Of Kemet. Your Queen Is A Reptile. Sons Of Kemet.
We are going to talk about bit depth and sample rates, how these translate into storage requirements, and then talk about the subjective differences between the two methods of recording your music. In short, what is the relation of 24 bit recordings to the. Browse: Home » Barre Phillips – Music By (1981/2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] (1981/2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] November 12, 2018 by admin in Studio Masters.
24 bit 48kHz verses 24 bit 96kHz. The type of music, and ultimately your ears. First of all, the sample rates we're discussing here (96 kHz) aren't high enough. 24 bit 48kHz verses 24 bit 96kHz. How much difference you might perceive depends on what converter you have, your monitoring situation, the type of music, and ultimately your ears. The cons are that 96K sampling requires more bandwidth (more RAM, hard drive space, faster computer, etc.) per number of tracks and plug-ins you use.
Neil Young’s Pono player has spurred a renewed interest in high resolution audio – music that promises to bring the high-fidelity experience of vinyl to the digital age.
The premise is simple: high-resolution music sounds better than the highly compressed MP3 and even the CD, which preceded it as the most favoured form of digital audio for the best part of 30 years. The failures of higher-quality music formats such as Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio, and the continued absence of “24-bit audio” - which should give far higher resolution to sound than the 16-bit audio used on a CD - suggests that high-resolution music faces many challenges.
Briefly: CD audio is digitally sampled at 44kHz, which sampling theory says can capture any frequency up to 22kHz - the upper limit of human hearing. The volume levels are then quantised into 16-bit quantities, which can represent 65,536 discrete values for the loudness. 24-bit audio is often sampled at 96kHz or 192kHz; those 24 bits can represent 16.7m discrete loudness values. By contrast MP3s are compressed by an algorithm that throws away parts of the sound that long laborious testing determined could not actually be heard. (Pub quiz fact: the song used as the comparator for each attempt at the algorithm was Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner.)
But the key question for hi-res audio is: can listeners can actually hear the difference?
To attempt to answer that question, the Guardian recruited Linn Records, purveyors of high-resolution music since 2007 and a recording label with access to the original files recorded by artists, bands and orchestras.
What is hi-res?
The term “hi-res” will be bandied around more and more in the coming months as electronics manufacturers build branded support for higher quality music into smartphones, tablets and headphones.
There is even debate what actually constitutes hi-res. As Linn’s managing director Gilad Tiefenbrun explains, “there’s confusion over what is and isn’t hi-res music. Is CD hi-res? Perhaps a high-quality MP3? Or does it have to be 24-bit music? For us, hi-res music is the 24-bit studio master - the original recording the artist made, from which all other files and formats are made.”
The studio master is something Young and his Pono player and music service has embraced and is likely to become the true mark of what is and isn’t hi-res music.
Can you really tell the difference?
With that debate out the way, do hi-res studio master tracks actually sound any different or better than MP3s or CDs?
Tim Jonze, the Guardian’s music editor, Jason Phipps, the Guardian’s head of audio, and I sat down in Graham’s Hi-Fi in London’s Islington to listen to a variety of tracks, each in four formats: 128kbps and 320kbps MP3; CD; and 24-bit studio master. All were played through the same high-quality system and speakers.
Jonze found that how much you noticed was down to how hard you concentrate on the music.
The first question is ‘could I tell the difference?’. And yes, I could, although perhaps not in the transformative way I was expecting.
The higher quality recordings become ever crisper and clearer, with each instrumental part emerging from a murky swamp of sound. But for me, appreciating the difference was reliant on a degree of concentration.
Have them on in the background and I might not notice any change between the studio masters and the nastiest compressed MP3. Listen attentively to, say, the bassline in The Who’s Pinball Wizard, and it’s undoubtedly easier to hear where the notes roam rather than just getting the general impression.
The difference between MP3 and CD was most striking – I struggled to differentiate much from CD to studio master.
Ultimately the difference is there but it’s subtle and I really think it depends on how you listen to music.
My favourite method of listening to music is with headphones while walking – it’s while doing this that I fully lose myself in the music, but it’s never the precise sound I’m interested in, more the way it transports me emotionally to another daydream universe.
It takes me away, rather than draws me in. And the truth is, I find the impressionistic sound of an MP3 just as effective at providing this emotional hit as the photographic realism of a studio master recording.
Phipps was in two minds as to whether studio masters were better.
Could I tell the difference? It depended on the recording. On listening to Nick Drake’s One of These Things First and listening a very high-quality set of Linn speakers, going from low quality MP3, to high-quality MP3 and finally the high resolution studio master, I personally found it difficult to discern a sharp and noticeable difference other than to the quality of the lower frequency sounds, the bass line and the bass strings on the guitar. The difference was subtle to my ears.
But listening to different tracks the quality gap became more pronounced. Moving again from low-res to a studio master recording of Overture from West Side Story, a myriad of instruments improved in clarity and depth of tone. It was the same with The Who’s Pinball Wizard.
The more layers and instrumentation the starker the difference when we moved from low- to high-res digital files.
In some cases, however, the clarity of the high-res file had the overall effect of what I describe as a ‘chilling effect’ on the music; the clarity created for too much space in the music and diminished its warmth and cohesion for me.
My impression at the end of our listening session was that yes, there’s a distinct quality difference between the kind of compressed, middling MP3 commonly downloaded from the major platforms and the 24-bit high-res studio master. But mostly I found the CD-quality track on Linn’s superb hi-fi equipment to be the overall best listen for my particular ears.
In my view, there was a real discernible difference between the MP3 or CD and the studio master tracks. But it wasn’t always a good thing.
The difference in quality wasn’t analogous to the marked difference between standard-definition and high-definition video, being much more suitable in most cases.
Overall the studio masters sounded fuller, more spacious and less flat. Some tracks sounded very close to CD. Others, like The Who’s Pinball Wizard, were strikingly different, sounding more real, less produced and more raw or natural, as it would be listening live.
But that difference wasn’t always a good thing. It was disappointing to hear a recording of Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma sound worse in studio master, as it exposed the fact that the orchestra and the tenor’s tracks were recorded separately in different environments. They sounded disconnected – something that is masked in the CD version.
What was very apparent is just how bad a poor-quality MP3 sounded, how good a 320kbps MP3 and CD sounded, and how cutting out the middle man in the audio production chain with a studio master could have unexpected results.
Hi-res music is currently available from Linn and others through their music store, but it costs more than a standard MP3 file at around £18 for an album which takes up around 2 and 5GB of storage space. MP3 typically take up around 5MB per track.
More devices will support hi-res music in the near future with Samsung, Sony and LG already selling music players and smartphones capable of playing 24-bit music. Wether Young’s Pono service will be enough to propel hi-res studio masters into the mainstream remains to be seen, but Tiefenbrun thinks it’s inevitable that other companies including Apple, Amazon and Spotify will offer a similar hi-res service.
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iPods are the most ubiquitous music-playing devices on the planet, but are they the best sounding? Not exactly. iPods tapped into the boom of the MP3, and with iTunes and its own AAC encoding system, Apple quickly grabbed control of the lossy audio world and never let go. That position is what makes a recent statement from the chairman of the A&M record label so intriguing--he claims that Apple is interested in offering hi-fi 24-bit audio files on the iTunes music store.
That would give iTunes better than CD-quality audio, but the move might not make sense for Apple. Users go to iTunes for quick downloads of compressed lossy files, and 24-bit implies a brave new world of audio that many portable devices can't fully take advantage of.
Deep Bits
When it comes to judging digital music quality, the discussion usually begins and ends with bitrate. A song encoded at 320 kilobits/second is going to sound a whole lot better than a song with a 128kbps bitrate, right? Well, sure, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Bitrate stems from two different elements: bit depth and sample rate. Here's where we can understand the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio.Bit depth is essentially the number of bits you have to contain a piece of audio--the range from the imperceptible whispers of virtually no sound to the loudest noise a piece of audio gear can crank out. The difference between 16-bit audio and 24-bit audio isn't just a matter of eight bits. As TweakHeadz explains,
'The easiest way to envision this is as a series of levels, that audio energy can be sliced at any given moment in time. With 16 bit audio, there are 65,536 possible levels. With every bit of greater resolution, the number of levels double. By the time we get to 24 bit, we actually have 16,777,216 levels. Remember we are talking about a slice of audio frozen in a single moment of time.'
Without turning to compression formats, those sample rates mean big file sizes. A 16-bit, 44.1kHz song requires a bitrate of 1.35 megabit/second of data, and a single minute of stereo audio takes up about 10 megabytes of space. A 24-bit song with a 96kHz sample rate, by contrast, requires a bitrate of 4.39mbps and requires 33 megabytes of storage for a single minute of stereo audio. Now you can see why MP3 filesizes are so appealing.
But How Does It Sound?
24-bit sound is a tricky thing to gauge. Does it provide for a greater resolution of sound? Definitively. It has room for 256 times the data, remember. Are you going to be able to hear that difference? Harder to judge. Human hearing supposedly tops out at 20kHz, but that doesn't make higher sample rates useless. According to the Nyquist rate, to fully capture a wave, it should be sampled at twice its highest frequency. In other words, a higher sample rate, and a greater bit depth, gives your sound more wiggle room, meaning sound peaks are less likely to be truncated and the subtleties of the music are less likely to be drowned out.Lossy, Lossless and EAC
Lossy audio--your MP3s, AACs and (blech) WMAs--offer far more compression by sacrificing quality. A technique called variable bitrate (VBR) can improve compression quality by doing exactly what the name implies: varying the bitrate of a song. With VBR, more complicated portions of a song are allocated more bits, while simpler segments take up fewer bits.
Even with lossless compression, achieving perfect fidelity isn't easy. Popular CD ripping tool EAC demonstrates exactly how complicated the process of reproducing sound bit-for-bit can be--it will read each sector of a CD several times, perhaps dozens of times, compensate for errors, and present you with a dizzying range of compression options to give you the perfect rip.
24 Bit Audio Downloads
More Bits, More Problems
Hopefully at this point you have a handle on what separates all these file formats and types of compression, so let's get back to the original topic: Apple and 24-bit audio. As we've clearly demonstrated, 24-bit sound files are big--something like 100MB for a regular song, though FLAC compression can cut that down to something more manageable. Even if we assume Apple is interested in 24-bit audio, will there be a market for it? After all, their most popular music players have taken a step backwards in terms of capacity, opting to use flash memory over physical disks. You sure couldn't fit many lossless files on an iPod nano.
a company like SanDisk or Samsung. But until the price of flash memory has drastically lowered, 24-bit audio on portable media players will remain a space-hogging luxury.
24 Bit 96khz Music Download
Thankfully, we don't face those same constraints on our desktops--cheap terabyte harddrives are voluminous enough to hold hundreds of uncompressed albums. If you feel like trying out some awesome lossless FLAC music, check out Archive.org's selection of 24-bit music. It's free! foobar2000 is an excellent (and skinnable) music player that can handle FLAC, and dBpoweramp on the Windows side and Max on the Mac side can help you convert between FLAC and ALAC. It takes a bit more work than downloading a 99 cent AAC song off iTunes, but just remember: 256 times as many bits!