I can agree with most (maybe all) of that but...
As I see it, he has missed a part of the point: i.e. future-proofing. When I bought my Chord Dac64 mk2, 24bit 96kHz was the stuff of science fiction and the occasional reviewer who also dabbled in recording. When I sold it a month ago 24/96 was beginning to look limited even if there is not that much available at higher resolutions...
Now I shall get back to ripping my SACDs
And even then...24/192 is the max requirement really.
24/192 is the max requirement really.
24/192 makes sense for the studio and production side; but to consumers - it only basically guarantees that the massively -increased storage overhead is min. c 75% pure noise - i.e. far more than added, useful, musical information.
A well recorded CD can be breathtakingly beautiful on the right DAC
100% agreed, its a case of max headroom availability. IMHO the requirements for likes of DSD and MQA with fade just as SACD did.
I have 1800-1900 albums and less that 2% is 24/192. a long time ago (as an experiment) i bought a 24/192 studio master and down sampled it in dbpoweramp to 16/44 there was no audible difference really which i put down to the superb engineering of the studio master file.
I always believed in ‘source first’ or ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’, but upsampling really does work. The Chord MScaler works miracles!
Not true, I am afraid. Output of digital audio does not consist of discontinuous "sound pixels", even if the idea is intuitively tempting.Upscaling an audio signal is like enlarging a digital photograph in the sense that the quality of the result will depend on the upscaling algorithm being used.
Not all but some 24/ bit recordings were stretched out by computer to make it fit the medium so not true 24bit but you pay extra. Lot of cons was going on.Even funnier when you consider that connoisseurs of digital, rate the playing of 16 bit CDs (and SACDs) as the best digital playback medium...
I remember when I brought out the first generation Tron Seven DAC using the TDA1541 chip set, many didn't buy it because it wouldn't do 24/96 which was just coming out. Ironically that DAC playing 16 bits CDs absolutely trounced other DACs playing 24/96 recordings. Even today it beats 95% of DACs proving there is more to Digital than a few numbers. Like most things today its a numbers game and for a salesman quoting figures and specification is the easy way to sell something and requires very little work. Basically the selling is done by the brand's marketing department.
Surely if there was no audible difference it doesn’t matter if the original recording was good or not.
Upsampling is adding/interpolating new discrete points before converting to analog, so it is discontinuous at that point.Not true, I am afraid. Output of digital audio does not consist of discontinuous "sound pixels", even if the idea is intuitively tempting.
In photography there are many different algorithms – for example bicubic, sinc, and those using fractals. To return to the original point, a system may not be able to reveal the extra detail just like a computer screen may not reveal all the detail when a photo is enlarged.