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

Trust your ears and decide. What I have in 24/96 or 24/192 blows away the 16/44.1 versions most of the time. It's all about the mastering.

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.