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An awful lot of truth in this...

I’ve never watched that YouTube channel, and to be honest don’t even know who the guy is, but I loved the way he commented on equipment visuals and the concept of buyer perception (heavy build implies quality etc) whilst so carefully positioned between a studio open-reel recorder and a stack of equipment including an oscilloscope and more studio racks. Made me chuckle. But a flat chiclet computer keyboard?! Surely not! Breaks the whole pro aesthetic!

PS FWIW I agree with the notion that 16/44 is perfectly sufficient for domestic use. My view is that the advantage of high-res is getting the brick-wall filter up further out of the way, it has nothing to do with actual bandwidth or headroom. Bad filters trying to deal with bad mastering is where the unwanted ‘digital glare’ etc comes from. A genuinely good CD reproduced via a really good player/DAC sounds truly superb IMO. The main advantage of SACD, high-res etc is usually that more care was taken at the mastering stage (though not always, some are terrible!).
 
Cereal Killer said:
Let’s take the analogy a little further: with a picture it would be easy to see the ‘added’ volumes of blank spaces between the colour. These spaces offer nothing but a bigger canvas and frame. If you were 20m away looking at the picture you’d not notice the white pixels between the colours.... In digital audio the same spaces that would be added by upsampling, add voids in the overall volume of the file. These spaces don’t contain any information in them but the file size becomes remarkably larger. There’s is an argument that these spaces allow extra dynamic/headroom in audio but in an image it would registered as a bleed of colour.

I suppose it’s a bit like trying to revert and MP3 into a FLAC/lossless file.
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But it's not blank space in the case of audio upsampling. You are adding new interpolated data points between existing ones. This would be like figuring out new color to blend between pixels and fill the space in your example.
 
Alexh said:
the extra resolution of the Dac is still digging out much more information at 44.1 16bit.
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Same here with the new SMSL M400 it goes to show that Red Book has far more to offer than was previously thought possible.
I see no point in upsampling or converting to DSD, in the same way as making the Mona Lisa twice the size or covering with a high gloss laquer.
 
Ian M said:
Really, if you downsampled a studio master and there was no difference then you wasn’t listening hard enough.
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That would only be true if there really is an audible difference between 24 and 16 bit - and we already know that most studio and home equipment doesn’t have that much resolution - even dCS only has about 22 bits resolution due to the noise floor of the analogue circuits IIRC. I recall at the Scalford HiFi show, an exhibitor took a 16 file and reduced it to 8 bits and people were shocked that it still sounded the same. The dynamic range of the file just didn’t need the other 8 bits.

Since 16 bit already allows for 96dB of dynamic range, why would going up to 120dB (24 bit) make any difference? I certainly don’t play my stereo that loud, which would be required in order to theoretically hear the extra resolution from the 24 bits, and even then I’m not aware of any commercial sound recordings with that much dynamic range either. No one says this in the hi-fi industry because it’s all just a business and they need new bandwagons to sell the Mk2 DAC etc.

Due to the above, my view is that 24 bit audio is an inaudible technical bauble.
 
Even done in a technically perfect way, with 44kHz sampling when ADC or down-sampler input has content around 20-22kHz, you must have one or more of: pre-ringing; post-ringing; aliasing; imaging. Even the best mastered CD is subject to this.

This is due to the short gap between ~20kHz hearing threshold and 22kHz limit. This is the necessary difference between 44kHz and higher sampling rates - it's not about resolution, smoothness etc. But whether above differences are audible or not is another matter - I think that will be at least partly system-dependent.

NOS DACs do output stair-step waveforms, so higher sampling rates will lead to a "smoother" waveform, if you want to see it that way. But I'm not sold on the technical side of NOS myself.
 
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darrenyeats said:
NOS DACs do output stair-step waveforms, so higher sampling rates will lead to a "smoother" waveform, if you want to see it that way. But I'm not sold on the technical side of NOS myself.
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The human ear naturally compensates for the steps...
 
That may be true. (BTW the images present may cause distortion in amps and tweeters and this may leak down to audible frequencies.)

Earlier posters wrote that higher res is smoother - my point is that 44kHz is perfectly smooth for correct recordings via conventional DACs (though there are other problems).
 
I think most of today's current DACs do not use passive filters which were the major cause of poor sound quality and the digital nasties that got digital a bad wrap. Most good modern DACs use digital filters, the better ones use pre-selectable filters using FPGA's and these don't suffer the same artefacts that early filters had, as in ringing etc. However upsampling does do something that negatively impacts on the audio performance and the most noticeable trait is a lack of stereo depth and realism to the sound.
 
Cereal Killer said:
It's still blank data, you can't add something thats not there.
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actually you can, to a first approximation. it's called interpolation, and can involve some high order polynomials. however it is accepted that each interpolated point may have an "error" from what would have been the exact point on the curve if the original waveform had been digitised at a higher rate.
 
You can get perfect smoothness and accuracy even between the sample points (the magic of the sampling theorem!) Only one correct analogue waveform passes through the sample points.

But that holds only when the /original/ waveform was band-limited during production to 22kHz (necessary for ADC or down-sampling). So you get a perfectly smooth, accurate recreation of the analogue waveform yes - but the one that was band-limited to 22kHz, missing any HF content there may have been prior.

I think the technical (not necessarily audible) issues with 44kHz are mostly around the band-limiting step, the DAC enters the picture a bit late in the day - the DAC filter stuff can shift/transform problems, not make them disappear.
 
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Nagraboy said:
Since 16 bit already allows for 96dB of dynamic range, why would going up to 120dB (24 bit) make any difference? I certainly don’t play my stereo that loud, which would be required in order to theoretically hear the extra resolution from the 24 bits, and even then I’m not aware of any commercial sound recordings with that much dynamic range either. No one says this in the hi-fi industry because it’s all just a business and they need new bandwagons to sell the Mk2 DAC etc.

Due to the above, my view is that 24 bit audio is an inaudible technical bauble.
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My understanding is that the increased dynamic range also benefits the noise floor. My experience is that SACD is generally better than CD because instruments have more shape, body and texture and the whole thing just feels more alive. I doubt this difference is down to mastering. Whether it is down to resolution, noise, or what, I couldn’t say, but it’s worth it to me.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
My understanding is that the increased dynamic range also benefits the noise floor. My experience is that SACD is generally better than CD because instruments have more shape, body and texture and the whole thing just feels more alive. I doubt this difference is down to mastering. Whether it is down to resolution, noise, or what, I couldn’t say, but it’s worth it to me.
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That pretty much sums up my impression of RedBook CD on a good transport as opposed to file-based replay, regardless of 'hi res' formats or otherwise. The CD is more 'there.'

Ironically I first became aware of this listening to hi-res downloads, to my ears these tick a lot of boxes on the 'audiophile clipboard' but I've yet to hear them bring anything of musical value to the table. It was the realisation that I'd enjoyed the same albums more on CD which lead to the decline in my interest in squirting bits through the ether.

I own a couple of SACDs, but to the best of my knowledge I've never heard either SACD or DVD-Audio playback, no interest on my part primarily because of the lack of a catalogue which matched my musical tastes.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
My understanding is that the increased dynamic range also benefits the noise floor. My experience is that SACD is generally better than CD because instruments have more shape, body and texture and the whole thing just feels more alive. I doubt this difference is down to mastering. Whether it is down to resolution, noise, or what, I couldn’t say, but it’s worth it to me.
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Yes I agree, the noise floor is lower meaning greater resolution of even lower level signals - that’s what dynamic range is. However, if we’re playing music at normal levels it’s not possible to hear any more of this resolution, as 16 bit audio already has far more dynamic range than we’d ever be able to use for music listening.
 
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