High Definition iTunes Music Downloads May Be on the Horizon

[visualanté]

To be clear: we are insisting that people can not tell the difference because, scientifically speaking, it has been proven that people can not tell the difference. Not even 1%. People, as a whole, can not.

Sony spent s HUGE amount of money in the early 2000s funding research in this area, with the express aim of proving that the higher bit rates mattered to some people. Large company, practically unlimited research funds, some of the best audio engineers on the planet to assist in setting up A/B comparisons. Came up empty.

I am not impressed that you claim to have super-human ears. You might do well, if that is actually true, to contact Sony and see if they will fund some research into your hearing. Might make a pretty dime, there. But, in the end, I have to say there is a 99.999% probability you have simply fooled yourself into thinking you hear a difference (either purely psychological, or because you are listening to different mixes as many folks on this board have described). A lot of people swear by homeopathy and acupuncture and faith healing and you name it as well. When something (1) has no plausible physical mechanism, (2) disappears under scientific tests (and the more precisely controlled the tests the less any potential effect shows), and this despite (3) a large research budget directed by a multi-billion-dollar industry with a massive stake in showing that effect exists ... then that thing is just not scientifically sound.

I am sorry to tell you this. And I know you won't believe me. But maybe it can stop others from believing you.

I am unsure where your sony claims come from but sony has F886 Walkman and HAP-S1 released for HD Audio and HAP-Z1ES Music Player System....if your claim is accurate then they would not be producing these products.

http://www.cnet.com/news/sony-gets-serious-about-high-resolution-audio-again/

 

[bsolar]

I am unsure where your sony claims come from but sony has F886 Walkman and HAP-S1 released for HD Audio and HAP-Z1ES Music Player System....if your claim is accurate then they would not be producing these products.

Why not? They most likely expect misinformed consumers to buy them no matter the technical merits.

 

[nt5672]

It is my understanding that when you hear bad low resolution uncompressed playback it is usually caused by poor filters. It turns out that good filters in the analog payback circuit are really expensive and your laptop or $100 CD player will never have them. What is interesting about high resolution (96k etc) is that it does not require as high of quality filters so it is easier (less expensive) to get better reproduction from the whole audio playback circuit.

So the specs of the DAC are not the whole story and arguing about 44.1 versus 88.2 versus 96 etc. is pointless. On most intermediate quality systems (speakers and receiver cost more then $2500) doubling the sample rate will make a hearable difference to anyone that knows the music they are listening to.

On the iDevices, no difference, on standard computers, no difference. But if you want to know the real difference, try listening for 4 or 8 hours and you'll find that, at reasonable volumes, higher resolution music is more relaxing than low resolution. The theory does not yet explain why. You will also find in some, but not all, higher resolution music that more care went into the conversion process. However, right now higher resolution music is like buying snake oil, a lot of record companies have literally converted their 16 bit, 44.1k CD master to 24 bit, 96k and it sounds like it.

Quality comes from the process to convert and the process to play back, not the specs on the delivered audio. The problem I have with HDTracks for example is that they are just sellers and they sell whatever the music companies push on them. I've talked with them several times and even got one album pulled from sale because the HD versions was just 44.1 up sampled which you can tell with signal analysis on the waveform.

 

[iSunrise]

I am actually very excited about this and I am looking forward to this move for quite some time already.

Since Apple should already have access to the uncompressed masters (in whatever quality they were made available to them when they licenced it) they would only need to finally offer them as ALACs as well as the already existing and sold AAC iTunes Plus versions.

AAC would still be needed to keep them compatible with e.x. integrated devices like in cars (some cars like mine only play MP3, AAC and WMA when fed digitally).

Making the higher quality sources available via iTunes Match would be the icing on the cake.

However, I am pretty sure that in the case of >16bit and >48KHz Airplay would need an update (iOS 8). Even though AFAIK the DACs themselves already are perfectly able to play 24bit and up to 48KHz sources without problems.

Let's hope Apple finally reinvents themselves again when it comes to music, because they lost a lot of ground in that particular area.

 

[visualanté]

Why not? They most likely expect misinformed consumers to buy them no matter the technical merits.

so they put a lot of money into a product that they know is no different in sound..if the previous poster believed sony refused the idea because of no benefit but now you say sony's pulling a lie.....it doesn't make sense. Fact is HD Audio is like 4k video, it is a better noticeable difference.

 

[iSunrise]

Why not? They most likely expect misinformed consumers to buy them no matter the technical merits.

Such niche products are made for people that typically want to play back their masters without degradation. It doesn't really matter if you can hear it or not. If you master something in 24bit 96kHz and you have the choice, everyone would choose the native 24bit 96kHz.

A lot of DTS-HD Master Audio tracks are in 24bit 48kHz (96kHz isn't that common) format. Take a guess why exactly that is.

 

[bsolar]

so they put a lot of money into a product that they know is no different in sound..if the previous poster believed sony refused the idea because of no benefit but now you say sony's pulling a lie.....it doesn't make sense.

No, the previous poster believed Sony tried to find scientific arguments to feed the marketing for HD audio. Even if they found none it doesn't mean they won't try to sell it anyway, after all that works for a lot of products: e.g. homeopathy has no scientific plausibility and has been demonstrated not to have any effect excluding placebo. It still sells.

Fact is HD Audio is like 4k video, it is a better noticeable difference.

Then why scientific studies say otherwise?

Empirical evidence from listening tests backs up the assertion that 44.1kHz/16 bit provides highest-possible fidelity playback. There are numerous controlled tests confirming this, but I'll plug a recent paper, Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback, done by local folks here at the Boston Audio Society.

This paper presented listeners with a choice between high-rate DVD-A/SACD content, chosen by high-definition audio advocates to show off high-def's superiority, and that same content resampled on the spot down to 16-bit / 44.1kHz Compact Disc rate. The listeners were challenged to identify any difference whatsoever between the two using an ABX methodology. BAS conducted the test using high-end professional equipment in noise-isolated studio listening environments with both amateur and trained professional listeners.

In 554 trials, listeners chose correctly 49.8% of the time. In other words, they were guessing. Not one listener throughout the entire test was able to identify which was 16/44.1 and which was high rate [15], and the 16-bit signal wasn't even dithered!

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Such niche products are made for people that typically want to play back their masters without degradation. It doesn't really matter if you can hear it or not. If you master something in 24bit 96kHz and you have the choice, everyone would choose the native 24bit 96kHz.

The point is that you can convert them to 16/44.1 with no perceivable degradation (see above).

 

[visualanté]

No, the previous poster believed Sony tried to find scientific arguments to feed the marketing for HD audio. Even if they found none it doesn't mean they won't try to sell it anyway, after all that works for a lot of products: e.g. homeopathy has no scientific plausibility and has been demonstrated not to have any effect excluding placebo. It still sells.


Then why scientific studies say otherwise?



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The point is that you can convert them to 16/44.1 with no perceivable degradation (see above).

i get what your saying but heres what i think:
The blind tests are subjective to opinion and then opinions are gathered scientifically. they use human as test equipment. Science shows us 24bit is much more information 1.35 megabit/second for 16bit and 4.39mbps for 24bit. More audio information smooths the curve steps out as we know digital audio curves are stepped. Thats scientific proof I thought. That article posted confuses me i'm gonna read it over it.

check
http://www.tested.com/tech/1905-the-real-differences-between-16-bit-and-24-bit-audio/

I do think there is a law of diminishing returns where the higher you go it gets less notable but the audio is better

 

[crispy98007]

You people should read this.

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html#toc_intermod

 

[Basic75]

Please everybody, upping the bitrate does not help as long as the mastering sucks!

And seeing how the mastering sucks on must CDs, i.e we are usually not close to the max quality possible with 16/44.1...

...I see no reason why that would change with 24/96, it just seems like a cheap way for them to pretend to be upping the quality.

 

[iSunrise]

...The point is that you can convert them to 16/44.1 with no perceivable degradation (see above).

I was able to hear to about 22kHz when I was 18 years old, now I can barely make out a 18kHz tone.

The point is not to make alterations to your source when you don't need to, irregardless of whether people perceive them or not. And if you're not dithering at all (like in the article you were quoting) you are introducing further errors into the equation. And higher quality devices just give you the option to not be restricted to CD-quality audio. If all mobile devices had a perfect output stage, 16bit would probably be enough for everyone, but that's not how it is.

And quoting listening tests where usually the majority or all of people present are of higher age (our hearing takes a big hit at the higher frequencies over time and you can count me in on that, as my hearing degraded a lot in the last 10 years) is not really proof that 16bit 44.1 kHz is the ultimate experience.

A HDCAM-SR master tape will always me more true to the source than a Blu-Ray or a digital H.264/H.265 encoding. Whether you can see the differences is subjective, but the differences are clearly there, since the HDCAM-SR is the source of your recording.

And now, back to the topic:

If Apple offers lossless 16bit 44.1kHz sources, I would already be satisfied. The dithering methods of today are of such high quality that the output stage quality of your device becomes far more important than anything else. Yet, very few sources are actually handled with such great care and they don't even reach CD-quality today. Which is one of the reasons why Neil Young kickstarted the Pono, because the music industry nowadays is driven by mass-compatibility, but not sound quality, anymore.

 

[Yumbo]

Couldn't agree more.


However the point is to THEM it sounds better. :/ and to everyone else, its better with the right equipment.

However Z+ music app on the app store fir iPhone, suppose to prove otherwise.

If people can tell the difference with that app, then maybe the higher bit rate could be true "in theory". Anything is possible *in theory*

Z+ is marketing at its worst.
The ONLY decent track is the contrived demo.

And I'm the Zinfo head.

 

[Yumbo]

Unless they're say classical movements, ripping entire CDs is hardly being picky - that's just plain old hoarding - not much thought in that.

There are collectors.
Currently 23,000 tracks after 23 years, and PICKY.

The new iMacs sound pretty decent.
The new EarPods have good high end.
The new MacBooks sound better.

iTunes Match needs to allow sync.
Re downloading after a restore on 64GB is not fun.

Love my Audio Technica cans.

 

[bsolar]

If Apple offers lossless 16bit 44.1kHz sources, I would already be satisfied. The dithering methods of today are of such high quality that the output stage quality of your device becomes far more important than anything else. Yet, very few sources are actually handled with such great care and they don't even reach CD-quality today. Which is one of the reasons why Neil Young kickstarted the Pono, because the music industry nowadays is driven by mass-compatibility, but not sound quality, anymore.

That's actually the most annoying part: even the original paper, after the conclusion that 16/44.1 is not discernible from hi-def, points out that the conclusion is surprising because high definition recordings do sound better. It turns out that the reason is that these recordings are made with greater care compared to normal CDs but could be released at 16/44.1 with no audible difference.

Basically the problem is not having more bits and samples, is having quality production in the first place.

 

[jettredmont]

I've taught people what to listen for in higher quality recordings and once you start noticing things like drums and the "air" around notes of acoustic instruments, you start noticing the lack of quality in lossy formats quickly.

Up to this point, I agree. Especially with poorly-mastered and poorly-processed MP3 or AAC files, lossy compression does introduce artifacts. And, I agree, some people notice those artifacts naturally, and others "train" themselves to listen for them (why? I have no idea).

It doesn't necessarily make the lossy formats unlistenable, but I absolutely believe that many can and will come to appreciate the benefits higher-resolution audio formats bring to the table.

And then you went non-sequitor, at least if by "higher-resolution" you are talking about the sampling rate as the rest of the board has been. The sampling rate and looseness have nothing to do with one another. You can have 44.1k sampling rate lossy or lossless compression (or uncompressed). You can have 192kHz lossy or lossless compression (or uncompressed).

If lossy compression bothers you, you don't have to go from 44.1k-based AAC to 192k-based lossless; you can also just go to 44.1k-based lossless flac or a lac compression.

In this day and age, we can have it all. We can have a system that sends the optimal file (or user-definied files) to specific devices based on the needs and abilities of the device. There's just no technological reason not to have an HD audio option in this mix. It doesn't need to be an argument. It doesn't need to be the only way. It doesn't need to utterly and completely replace anything. It just needs to be an option, and one that works seamlessly with all the other options. This is incredibly possible at this point, and again, there's no good reason for an adaptive option not to exist in 2014.

Options, options, options. First, in this day and age a large music library will not fit on the largest iPhone even with 256kbps AAC compression. Lossless compression divides the size of that largest-which-can-fit library a few times over, and 192k sampling alone would divide it by another 4.4x (and 24-bit over 16-bit will divide it another 1.5x, so the 24-bit 192k sampled audio will likely be about 6.6x as large and hence a little over 1.7th of the music will fit on your device).

"But why not give me an option to buy this?" You have that option. There are already "HD" music sellers out there. There is even an "HD" music player coming out. You have options. What you want with Apple doing it is for it to become mainstream. Which I oppose, because it is a huge waste of resources and money. Apple doesn't do "options". They do "past" and "future", with a mono directional progression from the former to the latter. If they deem 24bit/192k to be "the future", we'll be paying for that for the rest of our lives.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

iTunes needs tabs!

Safari has tabs, the Finder has tabs, ...

 

[jettredmont]

I'd like to see the breakdown for each individual user.

Feel free to contact the authors of the study. As they noted, one (1) individual scored outside the margin of error on one test, but on subsequent retests they we back at average (which is what you expect with a normal distribution of error; 5% should be outside MoE, which would be 2.5% above, which is 1.5 individuals out of 60).

 

[ZipZapRap]

this is the only thing that'd get me to reinstall the bloatware that is iTunes

 

[AppleScruff1]

Neil Young said Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/31/tech/web/neil-young-apple-high-def-music/

 

[Thunderbird]

No, no you can't heard the difference between SACD and redbook.

Yes, yes, I can heard [sic] it.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=57406

for one. don't kid yourself. when engineers record, most of the time they still monitor through hs50ms....'the way its meant to be heard' is overblown.

btw i was specifically talking about 256kbps vbr aac (iTunes plus) vs red book standard. and yeah numerous people have done lots of tests on that subject. hydrogen audio forums that i linked above, head-fi (yikes! i know...), gearslutz etc etc

Yes, the 2007 Meyer/Moran paper is about the only well done study I've read on the subject. There are not "countless studies" as claimed.

You aren't hearing a difference due to the format, you are hearing the differences in the mastering process. SACD releases are nearly always remastered.

Wrong. I've a/b'd remastered SACD hybrids, and I can tell the difference.

If nobody could tell the difference with statistical significance, it wouldn't matter if one user was at 65% or whatever you might like to see. All it means is that one person had slightly different results from their guessing, not that they can hear better than someone who was at 50%



You don't have any idea what bit depth means, do you?

Another thing folks, as one of you who likes his gear, and has a setup worth more than many entry-level cars, what I found when I went through the double blind tests for myself years ago was that their was virtually no correlation to the quality of ones gear and the ability to tell the difference. It only takes gear of marginal quality (ie. a set of Sony MDR-7506's or better) and better gear doesn't improve your results. The few people who could reliably tell 256Kb from the higher res files freely admit that it's not because the higher res files sound better, but because they have been taught exactly which artifacts to listen for. The take-away is that you should find music you like and listen to it, and let your gear fade into the background.

I love how self-proclaimed experts can tell what someone else is actually hearing better than what the other person can. It's almost psychic.

 

[AppleScruff1]

I love how self-proclaimed experts can tell what someone else is actually hearing better than what the other person can. It's almost psychic.

Especially the ones that didn't participate in the study or have never done a comparison test but keep telling everyone else what they can hear or not hear.

 

[subsonix]

Science shows us 24bit is much more information 1.35 megabit/second for 16bit and 4.39mbps for 24bit. More audio information smooths the curve steps out as we know digital audio curves are stepped.

A 24bit sample is exactly 50% more than 16bit, how much that is per second depends on sample rate. Bit depth relates to dynamic range, sample rate to frequency response. The output is always a smooth curve as the DAC reconstruct an analog signal from the samples. Lower sample rates has the effect of a low pass filter according to the Nyquist theorem. Since it takes exatly two samples to represent a cycle, the highest frequency is half the sample rate, so 22050Hz for 44100 samples/second.

 

[Thunderbird]

Especially the ones that didn't participate in the study or have never done a comparison test but keep telling everyone else what they can hear or not hear.

Except I'm not claiming to be an expert or using other's expert credentials to tell other people what they are or are not really hearing, for them.

 

[bernuli]

You are right that the pennies win, but wrong that audio quality has gotten worse with every format since CD. DVD-A and SACD are the spiritual predecessors of today's high res audio (many of the high res masters used were made for these formats).

Yeah, those formats are real available.

B

 

[AppleScruff1]

Except I'm not claiming to be an expert or using other's expert credentials to tell other people what they are or are not really hearing, for them.

I wasn't referring to you. Sorry.