Well, sorry for the confusion, but with either interpretation I think we've had some excellent replies.
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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It would hardly challenge anyone with two working ears to tell the difference between mono and 2-channel stereo (double the bit rate). Equally it is blindingly obvious when surround sound and immersive sound come into play. But of course, you need more hardware for that. Music-centered magazines like Gramophone extol the quality of some immersive recordings, which are also over-represented at Grammy awards. Equipment-focused magazines like TAS and Stereophile pin 2-channel to their mastheads and resolutely ignore these advances in sound quality, encouraging their readers to spend thousands on power cords instead. |
@erik_squires wrote:
That's actually how I understood it (falsely, going by your OP), but thanks for clarifying. With changes in bit depth and sample rate (one usually follows the other) there appears to be changes in the mastering as well (here as well: one usually follows the other), so I guess it comes down to this: do I appreciate the overall outcome of high-res versions over their Red Book iteration(s)? Well, it depends. Years ago, with the exception of the Norwegian 2L label, I often if not mostly had a preference for the CD versions in finding quite a few high-res dittos to be dynamically stale and downright flat sounding. Today I still prefer many Red Book versions, but there are an increasing number of great sounding remastered high-res titles as well (mostly compared through Qobuz). All told though I can't say for certain whether my sonic preference for a given title comes down to its mastering and/or higher bit depth and sample rate. |
@richardbrand wrote:
Whether it leads, in more absolute terms, to an advancement in sound quality with immersive recordings through multichannel setups is debatable, certainly from my chair. There are many variables involved comparing a 2-channel setup to an immersive ditto, and likely it means comparing two completely different setups where the core 2-channel audio will be the deciding factor by the end of the day. |
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