The Resolution Wars

MP3’s are dying, thank god. MP3 is a transitionary technology that has overstayed it’s welcome.

256px-Lichtenstein_jpeg_difference — Visual representation of “lossy”. These pixels are what is lost when this image is compressed using mpeg.

If you believe lossy MP3 is all you need for music, goodbye. Come back when you want to listen. Yes 320k is better than 192k or 128k. Yes it’s getting close to CD quality.

It’s still less than half the data of a CD file, not to mention CD is 37 year old digital technology!

MP3/MP4/AAC is just the lowest common denominator. It has no place in a discussion about quality. CD quality is 600-1400k so you can just get CD quality these days, even streaming with Tidal.

Once you leave the world of lossy and get to real resolutions, you won’t go back.

Confused with all the combinations of bit depth and sample frequencies available: 16/44, 24/44, 16/48, 24/96, etc.?

So what do you need? Avoid buying expensive 16 bit. Don’t pay new prices for it, unless it’s the best that material ever hopes to be released at.

Demand 24 bit versions and pay full price for 24 bit versions.

24/44 is awesome enough for The Beatles and The Cars, two amazing bands
24/88 and 24/96 are the emerging standards for hi-res audio
24/192 is the highest resolution anyone works at and is starting to become popular

I haven’t heard 16/48 in 20 years but I can assure you that 16/44 is not able to deliver the full audio signal -if- the material is from higher resolutions or analog masters.

31-14_static — One part of one inner ear – the most amazing vibration detector I can imagine. Every component does multiple tasks with such detail and subtlety that some of our finest machines could only hope to match it some day.

To spell out audio resolutions in human terms: you need at least 18bits of space to store the data and you need about 30k of undamaged samples per second.

If they had a format of 20/60 it would have been perfect for CD, but they didn’t, so we have to overshoot a bit since the format is just the container. The music is the content and you don’t want the container smaller than the content.

In 1977-78 when the CD was being designed, this was a necessary compromise for reasons that have long since expired.

This 18/60 threshold is about the total of what we can detect as humans, so to me, 24 bit is the indicator of true high-resolution audio. Higher sample rates might give you slightly more detail and audio data, but to my ears 24 bit is the primary upgrade.

There's a lot going on inside your ears. — At a micron level inside of the human inner ear. There are thousands of these tiny hairs positioned into arrays at multiple depths, each able to detect certain frequencies and timbres.

Inside the human ear there are thousands of microscopic hairs. Each hair sways, the entire mechanism can also move, and opposite this area there is a mysterious fluid that appears to defy physics while it adjusts it’s location and density based on the sound.

Some researchers believe this fluid performs a liquid-based form of compression/limiting/expansion as well as EQ and is controlled by still unknown forces.

That’s serious resolution right there – self-organizing liquids and moveable micron-microphone arrays? 320k/sec is not holding that, nor is 1400k/sec.