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

Even better than hirez formats are recordings produced correctly. If you want to hear great stuff listen to movie soundtracks. Somehow they almost always get it right. Even old stuff from the 50s can sound incredible, yet the music business can't seem to do the same with the same music. It seems the movie industry cares enough to get great sound while the music industry (whose job it should be to get music right) just does not care in general about sound quality. Maybe this is why there are so few new audiophiles today, because music is recorded and produced so poorly and sounds so bad that most never hear any need for something better than MP3s? I believe that the music industry is responsible for there own woes.

The benefit over 24/96 is usually subtle, but can be interesting in complex classical or female vocals. I have some 2L classical that is 24/192 and very nice indeed. The 192 titles are so sparse that its not really a requirement, only a nice to have in my book.

Some DACs however will sound a lot better due to the digital filtering automatically being pushed out beyond audibility with 192. I manually control this on my DAC, so I can do it even with 44.1, and I do. Sounds a lot better than a brick-wall filter at 20kHz.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Based on the article, I'm convinced and satisfied that there is no intrinsic benefit to hi-rez sampling rate. Although the quality of the recording, as always, plays a significant role in the quality of the audio files, its still independnet of the question of the resolution of the file. If/when I upgrade my DAC, I'll be looking for the best redbook dac. Such a shame that all the most 'up-to-date' fare will be contending with upping the sampling rate or other stuff that either has no audio benefit or just adds to or amplifies distortion.

I'm surpsied at some of the comments above suggesting that some of you guys still adhere to some benefit with hi-rez formats. I know the article is just one article, but I found it to be utterly convincing that there is no benefit.

I read that artical explaining why theroretically we can not hear anything above redbook. I think the key is to keep improving coding and decoding of this standard. It would seam that the team that developed the CD standard where no idiots knew exactly what the standard needed to be for the human ear. I just got a Metrum Octave last night and I must say it takes another (huge) step forward in extracting amazing sound from redbook recordings. Also, recordings have gotten vastly better in the the past 30 years. I now have sound quality that I believe truly rivals analog, and it only took 30 years to get it. he he

Earl

I agree with the comments above that embrace the view that the biggest problem is engineering and mastering. I've posted a number of "heads-up" comments in other threads when I came across a particulary good sounding red book CD. Same goes for vinyl. This is an industry problem and my concern is that the music industry will go after market share and demographics. Let's face it folks, the kids love those ear bud thingys and could care less about real music fidelity. Us "gray hairs" are a shrinking market niche. What's an audiophile to do??