Those papers you quoted are 10 years old!
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’s easy for me to tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit on symphonic works, the dynamic range is greater. But the difference between CD rate and 192 is more subtle, slightly better treble, minor compared to the audible difference between 16 and 24 bit. But the overarching problem with PCM is lesser detail definition and a propensity for treble glare compared to 128DSD or higher DSD rates. |
@davide256 What DAC and what tracks do you find cause you glare? |
@erik_squires Gustard R26, holo spring 3 KTE and Chord Qutest. Occurs to varying degrees on about 75% of PCM recordings and with PCM upsampling even to 1.5M rates. Qutest was least problematic but still had symptoms. PGGB and HQPlayer both attribute it to DAC reconstruction artifacts at lower sampling rates. HDTT DXD downloads behave best for me with PCM but I usually opt for DSD as I’ve had problems with streamers not supporting DXD |
I do a fair amount of listening to channels which provide a combination of both familiar and new tracks. Whenever a track sounds particularly smooth or spacious it is almost always 96X24 or better. I attribute that mostly to bit depth and the greater resolution low level signals enjoy with greater bit depth. I'm not sure greater sample rates matter as much. One thing I do notice is people confusing bit depth and bit rate. Bit rate is the X axis and bit depth is the Y axis. I also tend to agree with Anthony Cordesman's assessment, and disagree that the early Philips '14-bit' CD players sounded better. I always found them lacking in low level detail and 'spaace'. But theirs were sins of omission, not sins of commission. Sins of commission include things like harsh edges on acoustical instruments, brass, and female vocals. Might just be my ears, but that failures are immediately audible and annoying to me. |
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