hard drive/networked hifi vs CDs for classical music
Discussion
Mermaid said:
& yet when I have heard 96/24, 192/24 at hi-fi dealers, it sounds so much more open/revealing.
Because you've been told what they are and you're being sold products at a dealer. All this and they won't even sound the same in your own home or setup. You also have no idea whether the same master was used for all the audio and that the 16/44.1 master was downsampled from the 24/96 recordings. You also have no idea if they were properly level matched.But if it made you happy and convinced you to spend lots of money then they're good sales people
Mermaid said:
Crackie said:
+1
Higher bitrates are helpful for recording engineers and when controlling volume levels in the digital domain but 'Redbook' 16/44.1 has more than enough bandwidth and dynamic range for playback.
& yet when I have heard 96/24, 192/24 at hi-fi dealers, it sounds so much more open/revealing.Higher bitrates are helpful for recording engineers and when controlling volume levels in the digital domain but 'Redbook' 16/44.1 has more than enough bandwidth and dynamic range for playback.
My 2p worth........When well respected journalists like John Atkinson and Robert Harley are so complementary about what they've heard during MQA demos; Meridian's new process is an exciting prospect.
Crackie said:
We shouldn't hijack tgr's thread and get into another debate about the higher res format; the links in this thread might be of interest because its been discussed on PH before. http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=5&a...
My 2p worth........When well respected journalists like John Atkinson and Robert Harley are so complementary about what they've heard during MQA demos; Meridian's new process is an exciting prospect.
I disagree - I thinks its totally relevant. If you go CD you are limited to CD quality. If you go HD and download music to store and play you can select higher formats.My 2p worth........When well respected journalists like John Atkinson and Robert Harley are so complementary about what they've heard during MQA demos; Meridian's new process is an exciting prospect.
You can also tell the difference. I accept the effect that if someone tells you the difference before hand then you may decide to convince yourself, but I often blind test friends (as its as easy as 2 clicks on the ipad) between different formats of the same material. Pretty much everyone can tell the difference between good quality MP3 and Flac. And some can tell the difference with the higher quality sources although the difference is less stark - it tends to just sound cleaner and more open somehow.
There is no universal rule here about the transition point, but I'd more often than not prefer to listen to a high quality format on a £200 streamer/DAC than I would an MP3 on the most expensive front end there is. Once its gone, its gone, and no amount of electrical wizardry will get it back. That's assuming the pre and power amp and speakers are the same. Any system is only as good as its weakest component and rubbish in... rubbish out.
The sad reality is a lot of music is just recorded and mastered badly so there's a lot of rubbish.
Jon1967x said:
The sad reality is a lot of music is just recorded and mastered badly so there's a lot of rubbish.
This is well worth mentioning. I remember when my band recorded an album, the first CD we created sounded incredible on my hi-fi, but when we passed it out to a few friends we quickly realised it was almost unlistenable on cheap portable CD players and low end car stereos (genuinely - it sounded awful!). The mastering process has to account for lots of different types of equipment, so can often sound very inferior to the original mix, especially on a decent hi-fi. That said, mastering varies - some is great and some is bad. Metallica for example have always struggled - Death Magnetic received very vocal criticism for its poor mastering, which is a great shame as its their most musical and sonically diverse album, and it all got squashed and ruined in mastering 
Classical music also (relevant to the OP here) has a huge range, both in terms of pitch and dynamics, and mastering can often create a poor relation to the live experience.RobM77 said:
Jon1967x said:
The sad reality is a lot of music is just recorded and mastered badly so there's a lot of rubbish.
This is well worth mentioning. I remember when my band recorded an album, the first CD we created sounded incredible on my hi-fi, but when we passed it out to a few friends we quickly realised it was almost unlistenable on cheap portable CD players and low end car stereos (genuinely - it sounded awful!). The mastering process has to account for lots of different types of equipment, so can often sound very inferior to the original mix, especially on a decent hi-fi. That said, mastering varies - some is great and some is bad. Metallica for example have always struggled - Death Magnetic received very vocal criticism for its poor mastering, which is a great shame as its their most musical and sonically diverse album, and it all got squashed and ruined in mastering Classical music also (relevant to the OP here) has a huge range, both in terms of pitch and dynamics, and mastering can often create a poor relation to the live experience.It has to be said that there is a Huge catalogue of classical SACD's out there which generally do sound superior to standard CD. On that Basis a CD player with SACD reply or a Universal Player may be a good choice. Downloaded files are usually marked as "New" hi band recording. Streaming from the net is a crap shoot. Some of the services say hi band but are cd quality only. And as for MP3 it's a dying format. why get a incomplete recording when others are available without losing any information.
Jon1967x said:
As far as I understand one of the reasons is compression - to be able to hear quiet bits and loud bits when you only have 16 bit samples requires the dynamic range to be compressed. The higher 24 bit samples gives significantly more dynamic range.
No.16bit is easily capable of ample dynamic range and headroom - the issue is compression used by 'engineers' so that (as already mentioned) CDs sound listenable on crappy little stereos.
legzr1 said:
Jon1967x said:
As far as I understand one of the reasons is compression - to be able to hear quiet bits and loud bits when you only have 16 bit samples requires the dynamic range to be compressed. The higher 24 bit samples gives significantly more dynamic range.
No.16bit is easily capable of ample dynamic range and headroom - the issue is compression used by 'engineers' so that (as already mentioned) CDs sound listenable on crappy little stereos.
Jon1967x said:
legzr1 said:
Jon1967x said:
As far as I understand one of the reasons is compression - to be able to hear quiet bits and loud bits when you only have 16 bit samples requires the dynamic range to be compressed. The higher 24 bit samples gives significantly more dynamic range.
No.16bit is easily capable of ample dynamic range and headroom - the issue is compression used by 'engineers' so that (as already mentioned) CDs sound listenable on crappy little stereos.
RobM77 said:
Jon1967x said:
legzr1 said:
Jon1967x said:
As far as I understand one of the reasons is compression - to be able to hear quiet bits and loud bits when you only have 16 bit samples requires the dynamic range to be compressed. The higher 24 bit samples gives significantly more dynamic range.
No.16bit is easily capable of ample dynamic range and headroom - the issue is compression used by 'engineers' so that (as already mentioned) CDs sound listenable on crappy little stereos.
RobM77 said:
As in my post above, I always thought compression in the mastering process was mainly applied so that music sounded ok on rubbish stereos. The bit rate is just the digital approximation of the analogue continuum that you'd otherwise have, so that's a seperate thing. I'm more of a musician than a sound engineer though, so I am willing to be corrected!
Its relatively easy to understand - 16 bit 44.1khz is CD - crudely the former is how many different levels of volume it can resolve and the second it how many it can record/play in a second. The latter via something called the nyquist rate says half that number, call it 22khz, is the theoretical max frequency you can extract/hear. Hearing runs out for most people well below that so its not a problem (technically there are issues but lets keep it simple). The volume level is more where it gets interesting - the volume of somebody speaking is much quieter than a full band thrashing stuff out - yet the same 16 bits needs to capture that and the same dodgy stereo has to play it. So the frig is basically to make the quite bits louder and the loud bits quieter which reduces the range but makes it easier to hear. The brain copes to a point with this and doesn't go "that can't be right", but what you listen it just sounds a bit naff. TV does it a lot too.Compression of the data (as opposed to the sound) is where you try and take all those volume levels in all those samples and reduce the amount of data you have to hold and transmit. A lossless format like flac lets you rebuild the original digital information exactly, its just efficiency thats been done and you don't really need to know how it works. Mp3 is different and it looses information and the lower the mp3 format the worse it is as its having to compromise more and more. There are some techniques that use variable bit rate which adapts to whats being encoded just to confuse.
When data is streamed and the lower the bit rate used the more compromises that have to be made than with a higher bit rate and the more compromises made the less accurately you can put it all back together again. It doesn't matter if they start from the same quality, the streaming does roughly the same thing that mp3 does (in terms of impact on the sound).
Downloading a lossless format like Flac means you can recreate to the accuracy of the recording - 16/44 or even higher formats like 24/96.
That's the simple version on the differences between audio compression and the compressing the digital information!
A while ago I was really enthusiastic about a High Res recording, specifically DSOTM, compared to the CD version I had (ripped to FLAC)
The thing is I downsampled the 96/24version to 44.1/16 and it still sounded better than the CD version and no different to the original high res version. This was all listened to on a mates highish end Linn system.
From this I took away that it's not actually the high bit rate that made the difference at all but whatever mastering had taken place. Some high resolution recordings are better than the CD but they are still better than the CD when resampled to the same bit rate.
If you're going to try and compare bit rates and sample depth in a meaningful manner you have to make sure you start with a level playing field else you're not just comparing different bit rates you're also comparing different masters
The thing is I downsampled the 96/24version to 44.1/16 and it still sounded better than the CD version and no different to the original high res version. This was all listened to on a mates highish end Linn system.
From this I took away that it's not actually the high bit rate that made the difference at all but whatever mastering had taken place. Some high resolution recordings are better than the CD but they are still better than the CD when resampled to the same bit rate.
If you're going to try and compare bit rates and sample depth in a meaningful manner you have to make sure you start with a level playing field else you're not just comparing different bit rates you're also comparing different masters
Edited by JimbobVFR on Monday 12th January 16:22
JimbobVFR said:
A while ago I was really enthusiastic about a High Res recording, specifically DSOTM, compared to the CD version I had (ripped to FLAC)
The thing is I downsampled the 96/24version to 44.1/16 and it still sounded better than the CD version and no different to the original high res version. This was all listened to on a mates highish end Linn system.
From this I took away that it's not actually the high bit rate that made the difference at all but whatever mastering had taken place. Some high resolution recordings are better than the CD but they are still better than the CD when resampled to the same bit rate.
If you're going to try and compare bit rates and sample depth in a meaningful manner you have to make sure you start with a level playing field else you're not just comparing different bit rates you're also comparing different masters
Exactly.The thing is I downsampled the 96/24version to 44.1/16 and it still sounded better than the CD version and no different to the original high res version. This was all listened to on a mates highish end Linn system.
From this I took away that it's not actually the high bit rate that made the difference at all but whatever mastering had taken place. Some high resolution recordings are better than the CD but they are still better than the CD when resampled to the same bit rate.
If you're going to try and compare bit rates and sample depth in a meaningful manner you have to make sure you start with a level playing field else you're not just comparing different bit rates you're also comparing different masters
Edited by JimbobVFR on Monday 12th January 16:22
Apologies to the other poster I quoted in my earlier post - starting with 'No' sounds a little rude.
Cd can produce a dynamic range of around 90dB which is easily enough for all genres of music and is capable of excellent sound quality when conditions are right.
When conditions are wrong (have a look at 'loudness wars') they are equally capable of sounding horrendous - try RHCP's releases for a taste of truly nasty, compressed noise with a dynamic swing of around 10dB
Compare and contrast that with a mid-80's release that has been sympathetically mastered and you can see (hear?) why vinyl almost died a death.
Now that the vast majority of chart fodder is dynamically compressed it's little wonder that vinyl has made a bit of a comeback (even though a really decent set-up is still somewhat short of the dynamic range of CD).
I say this is someone that has tried DVD-A, DSD / SACD and 96 and 192 24 bit downloads over the years and I'm quite happy with a well mastered 44.1/16 file (I stream FLACs from a NAS having ripped all my music to a stream magic 6 - still got a decent CD player but I think it's been powered up twice in 12 months and that was only when I had network issues!).
Purely from a sound quality standpoint there is no (or none I can detect) difference between bit-perfect streaming and CD.
A disc played from cd-player to streamer via co-ax digital using the on-board DAC sounds identical to the streamer playing a FLAC ripped from the same disc.
However, my ears could be knackered
Jon1967x said:
RobM77 said:
As in my post above, I always thought compression in the mastering process was mainly applied so that music sounded ok on rubbish stereos. The bit rate is just the digital approximation of the analogue continuum that you'd otherwise have, so that's a seperate thing. I'm more of a musician than a sound engineer though, so I am willing to be corrected!
Its relatively easy to understand - 16 bit 44.1khz is CD - crudely the former is how many different levels of volume it can resolve and the second it how many it can record/play in a second. The latter via something called the nyquist rate says half that number, call it 22khz, is the theoretical max frequency you can extract/hear. Hearing runs out for most people well below that so its not a problem (technically there are issues but lets keep it simple). The volume level is more where it gets interesting - the volume of somebody speaking is much quieter than a full band thrashing stuff out - yet the same 16 bits needs to capture that and the same dodgy stereo has to play it. So the frig is basically to make the quite bits louder and the loud bits quieter which reduces the range but makes it easier to hear. The brain copes to a point with this and doesn't go "that can't be right", but what you listen it just sounds a bit naff. TV does it a lot too.Compression of the data (as opposed to the sound) is where you try and take all those volume levels in all those samples and reduce the amount of data you have to hold and transmit. A lossless format like flac lets you rebuild the original digital information exactly, its just efficiency thats been done and you don't really need to know how it works. Mp3 is different and it looses information and the lower the mp3 format the worse it is as its having to compromise more and more. There are some techniques that use variable bit rate which adapts to whats being encoded just to confuse.
When data is streamed and the lower the bit rate used the more compromises that have to be made than with a higher bit rate and the more compromises made the less accurately you can put it all back together again. It doesn't matter if they start from the same quality, the streaming does roughly the same thing that mp3 does (in terms of impact on the sound).
Downloading a lossless format like Flac means you can recreate to the accuracy of the recording - 16/44 or even higher formats like 24/96.
That's the simple version on the differences between audio compression and the compressing the digital information!
On the topic of a player, check out the Oppo 105D. It is a universal CD / SACD / DVD-Audio / Blu-ray player that is also a network streamer and USB DAC. Pretty much everything you could need. It also has amazing reviews. Get hold of a copy of this months HiFi-World. The review was in a previous issue, but the opinion piece on page 69 should give you an idea (as will the letter reply on page 39).
All of this corresponds with my own experience of the 105D - sounds great whatever you throw at it - I'd seriously recommend investigating.
All of this corresponds with my own experience of the 105D - sounds great whatever you throw at it - I'd seriously recommend investigating.
Jon1967x said:
Crackie said:
We shouldn't hijack tgr's thread and get into another debate about the higher res format; the links in this thread might be of interest because its been discussed on PH before. http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=5&a...
My 2p worth........When well respected journalists like John Atkinson and Robert Harley are so complementary about what they've heard during MQA demos; Meridian's new process is an exciting prospect.
I disagree - I thinks its totally relevant. If you go CD you are limited to CD quality. If you go HD and download music to store and play you can select higher formats.My 2p worth........When well respected journalists like John Atkinson and Robert Harley are so complementary about what they've heard during MQA demos; Meridian's new process is an exciting prospect.
You can also tell the difference. I accept the effect that if someone tells you the difference before hand then you may decide to convince yourself, but I often blind test friends (as its as easy as 2 clicks on the ipad) between different formats of the same material. Pretty much everyone can tell the difference between good quality MP3 and Flac. And some can tell the difference with the higher quality sources although the difference is less stark - it tends to just sound cleaner and more open somehow.
Absolute threshold of hearing varies from person to person but is generally held to be around 20db ; 120db is held to be the threshold of pain and permanent hearing damage. The maximum dynamic range of a live symphony orchestra is generally accepted to range from 80 to 85dB. Dithered, noise shaped 16/44.1 is capable of handling this.
Imho the main benefit of higher bitrate formats is to improve convenience for the end user; for example they're useful if wants to control volume in the digital domain.
Edited by Crackie on Saturday 17th January 11:50
Jon1967x said:
Hi res audio was on click (BBC) this morning. I thought it was inaccurate on a few respects primatily suggesting hi res flac files were significantly larger than cd quality wav files. Anybody see it?
I saw that too, the graph representing MP3, CD & FLAC was very misleading and the program hardly mentioned Bob Stuart / MQA. I'm going to watch the full show again on iplayer to see if the bias changes.Crackie said:
Jon1967x said:
Hi res audio was on click (BBC) this morning. I thought it was inaccurate on a few respects primatily suggesting hi res flac files were significantly larger than cd quality wav files. Anybody see it?
I saw that too, the graph representing MP3, CD & FLAC was very misleading and the program hardly mentioned Bob Stuart / MQA. I'm going to watch the full show again on iplayer to see if the bias changes.Gassing Station | Home Cinema & Hi-Fi | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff