24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
I challenge y'all to take two copies of the same professionally mastered track, 16 vs 24 bit... and phase invert one, and put them on top of each other. What you can then hear is basically like an auditory diff.<p>Do you not hear anything? Yeah... all that sound is what amounts to lost fidelity when you down-sample. You can't just argue on bit-rates alone... It's about having head room in the mix and room for more fidelity. Sure, if you mix shit badly, you can't hear the difference, but that's missing the point entirely.<p>It's not nearly as bad as the time someone tried to tell me that Opus was an adequate audio file format for music, but still... frustrating.<p>I know I don't have super-human hearing, and I can easily hear the difference. Just because everyone can't hear the difference, or can't tell that they can hear the difference, doesn't negate the fidelity loss of lower bitrates.<p>Further, given a large enough speaker stack, it's not about what you can hear any more, it's about what you can feel.<p>And never-mind the benefits of a 24bit DAW pipeline... Hello, low latency?