24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
So, having come from an image-processing background to put in 15 years of experience at audio processing companies, I&#x27;ve seen the xiph arguments, or something like them, several times.  Heck, I worked for Sony (where that precious 22KHz cliff was made) for close to ten years... in professional media... many of those years with Sony professional audio people.<p>And the &quot;44.1KHz is enough&quot; or &quot;48KHz&quot; is enough&quot; people are, sadly, kind of dumb.<p>How do I know?  Because I was dumb, too.<p>Being a coding&#x2F;math&#x2F;audio&#x2F;video badass, after a few years of industry experience, I rattled off some mouthy kid quip, saying &quot;well, I don&#x27;t know why we do 24&#x2F;96, since nobody can hear above 20K anyway...&quot;<p>And a very talented, very knowledgable, and generally reserved engineer suddenly perked up one eyebrow and said, incredulously &quot;because temporal and frequency response are inherently linked...&quot;<p>That look was in 2001, and I still remember that feeling of dread sinking in, realizing that I had no idea what he was talking about, no concept of why that would matter.  I knew about Nyquist and could write a quick FFT, but he&#x27;d spent four years getting a degree in pure audio engineering at the most selective program in the country.  That look, which I <i>completely</i> remember today, was like a deeply disappointed parent after a kid has just been bailed out of jail, from one of the nicest engineers I know.<p>It was late, I was brash, and I pressed on, asking him what he meant.  &quot;What&#x27;s a transient look like, spectrally?&quot; he asked.  He waited for my blinks to make audible sounds (due to the apparent hollowness of my head), then he asked &quot;and how many channels of audio do we listen to?&quot;<p>He watched me stand there, like a doofus, for what seemed to me like several minutes (probably 5-10 seconds), then he went back to coding.<p>It didn&#x27;t hit me until weeks later, and I didn&#x27;t really internalize until <i>years</i> later, that he was hinting at inter-ear phasing the <i>other</i> facilities of our auditory systems besides frequency response.  Years later, I read up on Georg von Békésy&#x27;s incredible work (including positional acuity), and I worked as a tech lead at Digidesign on the first-generation Venue live sound system which operated at 48KHz but with <i>incredibly low latency</i> (processing steps were 1, 2, or 16 samples) due to the requirements of, for instance, vocalists using in-ear monitors.<p>Along the way, I ran across Microsoft engineers who thought that ~10-20ms inter-channel timing consistency would be okay in Windows Vista (it wasn&#x27;t), conducted blind tests between 96KHz and 44.1KHz audio (for people who were <i>shocked</i> to immediately notice differences), came across plenty of hot-shot kids who said exactly the same kind of stuff I&#x27;d said, and saw postings from xiph making a mix of valid and grossly sophistic arguments ranging from &quot;here&#x27;s how waveform reconstruction from regularized samples work&quot; (good) to &quot;audio equipment can&#x27;t even capture signals beyond this range&quot; (dumb).  At times, I thought about setting up refutation articles, then I realized, like many, that I had actual work to do.<p>Von Békésy&#x27;s work points to positional inter-ear phase fidelity of roughly 10µs.  What&#x27;s the sampling interval at 44.1KHz?  &gt;22µs?  Good luck rebuilding that stereo field at 44.1...<p>The trick is that there is a really serious diminishing return on audio sampling rate.  4KHz to 8KHz is enormous...  8KHz to 16KHz is transformative...  16KHz to 32KHz is eye-opening...  32KHz to 48KHz is appreciable...  48KHz to 96KHz is.... pretty minor, especially in the age of crappy $30 earbuds, streaming services delivering heavily compressed audio that will be crammed into a BT headset that may or may not be connected with additional compression, and all of the convenience that those changes bring.  You may detect it in some audio if you&#x27;re really listening, if you know what to listen for, and it may present advantages in system design (converters, processing, etc).  From a data-rate perspective, the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.<p>But people who smugly say that there is &quot;no difference&quot;, that audiophiles are buying &quot;snake oil&quot;, are letting their ignorance show, and that&#x27;s including that kid that I was, 16 years ago.<p>I&#x27;ve since moved out of pure pro media to consumer devices, where precision takes a back seat to the big picture a lot of the time.  When discussing an audio fidelity multi-channel problem with a possible vendor last year, I expressed my concern about the inter-channel timing assurance slipping from 1µs to 50µs in product generations.  &quot;Depending on the sampling rate, that&#x27;s several samples of audio&quot;, I said.<p>A very senior engineer on our side (Director equivalent) quickly admonished me, saying &quot;it&#x27;s <i>microseconds</i>, not <i>milliseconds</i>&quot;, to which I said &quot;I know...  Which is why it&#x27;s several samples, not several thousand...&quot;<p>From the look on his face, I&#x27;m 100% sure that he didn&#x27;t understand me at the time, but I hope he put it together eventually.<p>In the end, the industry has moved in the opposite direction of 24&#x2F;192 for a long time.  If we can get back to normalization of CD quality audio, I&#x27;ll be happy.