Focus on 24/192 Misguided?.....

All this talk about tests and links to this study and all this technical stuff....

REALITY: All that means nothing when you have people that like and dislike things based on their own opinion of what "sounds good". Many feel tubes sound better than SS.... HOW CAN YOU TEST THAT? YOU CANNOT. The listener has their opinion of what sounds good. So posting links to these different things is POINTLESS.

I found this nice article called "A Beginner’s Guide to High Resolution Downloads of Music". here is the link:
http://audaud.com/2012/03/a-beginners-guide-to-high-resolution-downloads-of-music/

In this article is a para called "How hi-res should you go?" towards the bottom (scroll almost to the end). That para cut & paste:
'Unless you have extremely youthful hearing ability plus the highest-end speakers and audio gear, many of us feel that the improvement of 192K over 96K is inaudible. The word length expansion from 16 bits to 24 bits makes a much greater enhancement in the sound. 24/96 or 24/88.2 is fine for nearly everything. Also, remember that 192K and 176.4K files take up much more memory on hard drives, for little audible improvement.'

Looks like many people think alike: there's a case for 88.2K or 96K sampling but not beyond......

04-20-12: Bombaywalla
Al, Kijanki: I *think* that I might know what the author is intending to say here: To do an A/B comparison, the author would like to level the playing field.... Does this make sense guys?

Hi Bombaywalla,

I think that what he is referring to in note 21 and in the "Clipping" paragraph is a comparison between a 192 kHz hi rez signal, and that same signal downsampled to 44.1 or 48 kHz and then upsampled back to 192 kHz. Both 192 kHz signals would be played back through the same DAC and the same downstream components. If they were to sound different in any way it would presumably mean that the lower sample rate, and/or the downsampling and upsampling processes, degraded the signal. Which signal sounds subjectively better would be irrelevant.

As I indicated earlier, though, it seems to me that the flaw in that methodology is that it does not take into account the sonic effects of the anti-alias and reconstruction filters that would be used if the recording and playback processes were done at the lower sample rate.

Best regards,
-- Al

put it into a device that could only add noise and jitter and eventually will fail (drive, optics), ....

hey Audiofreak32, don't talk about hardware failures! With your being sold on computer playback you don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to hardware failures! How often does computer hardware fail compared to CD drive & its optics? Even the cheapo $40 DVD players from Walmart outlast almost all HDDs & other computer hardware.....

Yeah, the convenience of HDD playback is immense, I have to agree.

If you have not heard a properly setup DAC with hi-res files, you owe it to yourself to do so...

I have - dedicated computer for music playback, going into a dCS upsampler, going into a dCS DAC. Both dCS upsampler & DAC were clocked by a dCS Verona Master CLock. All interconnects were some very expensive WireWorld stuff. The total $ outlay on this whole setup made my knees weak - I could never afford anything like this for a long time! The sonics were easily beaten by my 1-box CDP.....There was no body or soul to playback MUSIC but the SOUND was stellar.

Al, I wonder if 24/192 contains any ultrasonic frequency at all. Why would they leave it preparing hi-rez files? Where this ultrasonic frequency comes from? Again, notion that 192kHz sampling is harmful is a little farfetched. Do we have any studio sound engineers on our forum that could explain it to us?

Bombaywalla, Thanks for the info on filters. I'm dealing mostly with 4-tap lowpass FIR filters at work but 500-tap filter is really something. One graph shows interesting step response typical to most of CDPs with ringing appearing before and after the pulse. That might affect the sound since our ears are very sensitive to it. Stereophile posted similar test results comparing apodizing and non-apodizing filters. In comparison there is no antialias filters used in SACD creation making better, more natural step response (transients).
I do not have golden ears and like the sound of my system very much but just believe that processing back and forth 24/192=>16/44=>24/192 is not likely to improve anything. Higher sample rates are not to extend bandwidth but rather improve filter response reducing pre-echo effect. Apodizing (windowing) filters, available in few CDPs like Meridian, allow to eliminate pre-cho completely but AFAIK are not suitable for 44.1kHz because there is not enough space between 20kHz passband and first alias to fit filter's windowing function. DSP processing is not my field of expertise but even if everything looks peachy in frequency domain there is a lot to be improved, possibly by higher sampling rate, in time domain (transient response).

Audiofreak32, technical articles are to understand better what is happening but you're right, that at the end what counts is listening experience. At the level of 20/96 or 24/192 placebo (or negative placebo) effect might be a dominating factor. Just the fact that I feel good about my gear can make it sound better to me than to others.

Oldears, Choice or audibility of different formats might depend on setup. In my setup, for instance data is wirelessly delivered ALAC compressed to Airport Express and contains no timing. It is also bit perfect. Lack of timing is important because it eliminates any influence of computer processing or playback program, computer noise, etc. At this point timing is recreated in AE and data is streamed to Benchmark DAC1 with low 258ps jitter further suppressed by Benchmark processing. I could also save data in other formats but it would eat up some processing power of my computer that I use for other chores (like typing this).