A number of years ago, I tried a not particularly rigorous experiment with various bit depths and sample rates. It involved taking an excellent sounding 24/192 FLAC file and converting it down to 16/44 and a couple of points in between. On listening back with a highly resolving replay system, the CD quality file was just as enjoyable an experience as the original high res version. It appeared that not much was lost in the conversion. I came to the conclusion that the mastering of the album and quality of the streamer and DAC, etc. was far more important than than the resolution of the file.
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?
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@erik_squires wrote:
Reliably and with my current source (i.e.: streaming device), no. Usually there's more than bit (and sample) rate to determine the sonic outcome of a file, so the basis for comparison is hardly one to one in terms of isolating the bit-rate itself. And to be honest, I don't care (any more): if it sounds great, it sounds great, and bit or sample rate in itself isn't a reliable marker in my experience. Next year I'll be upgrading to a new streamer, and whether that will be able to make a difference with regard to discerning the audible impact of changing bit or sample rate, remains to be seen/heard - assuming I would be able to make a reliable comparison in the first place. |
Just to be clear, I used 'bit rate' specifically and not 'bit depth' for shorthand, which I guess wasn't fully clear. Bit depth = a power of 2 number, usually from 16 to 24 in audio, describing the bits per sample. Synonymous with sample size. Bit rate = bit depth * number of channels * sample rate. So, apologies, I meant to ask: Can you hear differences as the sample rate or bit depth changes? |
I think the original question about "bit rate" implied the sampling rate, as opposed to the number of bits used to encode the analog input signal. According to Nyquist, you need at a minimum two samples per cycle at the highest frequency of interest. This is a minimum and doesn't imply that you will get a quality reproduction. The Red Book CD standard at 44.1 kHz, was barely above the minimum. The problem with it was that the recording needed to have very steep cutoff (brick-wall) filters to prevent "aliasing" distortion. The higher the sampling rate, the more gradual the anti-aliasing filters can be, and the better that is for preserving the phase relationship between the different harmonics of the instruments. Therefore, in my opinion, all else being equal (which is usually not the typical case), the higher sampling rates are better. Since digitizing is just one of myriad ways in which the signal can be adversely affected, not all recordings will appear to have benefitted from higher sampling rates, but when all else is equal, they will benefit from it. Also, in the same vein, the more the number of bits used to encode the analog input, the better; however, in my opinion the sampling rate is the bigger "bang for the buck". For the number of bits, anything above 24 may be wasted bandwidtth. |
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