All the 24-bit recordings I’ve heard have a liquidity, flow, ease, and naturalness about them most 16-bit recordings don’t, and as a result they sound relatively, for lack of a better word, grainy and less refined/natural by comparison. But there are 16-bit recordings from the likes of ECM, MA Recordings, etc. that do possess that liquidity and sound very much like 24-bit recordings, so I’ve found it can be very recording dependent. Either my DAC/system is good enough to clearly hear those differences or my DAC isn’t good enough to allow more 16-bit recordings to sound better (or just doesn’t gloss over their shortcomings, but that’s a whole other can of worms) — dunno but that’s my experience.
Can you hear bit rate?
Almost all the music I listen to these days is from Roon and often a "station" created from an artist I like. So I click on say Melody Gardot and Roon start randomly picking similar jazz music. All great.
As Roon finds new tracks I get stuff rom Qobuz or Tidal and in a variety of bit rates. from 44.1/16 to I think 96kHz/24. Sometimes I think "wow that sounds great" and the source material is high res, other times it is not.
I've typed here for a while that around the turn of the century DAC's have gotten much better at paying Redbook (44.1/16) music than before, so that the difference in sound quality is almost gone. In addition I use Roon to upsample everything to 176 or 192 kHz.
I'm finding the question of source depth, at least with PCM, kind of irrelevant these days. What do you think?
- ...
- 52 posts total
@soix What is your DAC? |
It's more than just resolution. I've heard 16 / 44 sound great and there's 24/192 that can sound worse. It seems that how the original was recorded and mastered is FAR more important than the broadcast resolution. BTW... Be careful up-sampling in Roon or Audirvana. Pushing the envelope can many times make things worse.
|
- 52 posts total