Why the consumer audio is stuck with this shit FROM THE FUCKING '80s?

So it is a non-issue if I don't plan to spend money on more expensive audio equipment?

undithered, it's 96dB, around 120dB with shaped dither
and that's plenty

see pic related, at a rock concert, could you hear someone whisper next to you? that's a delta of ~90dB. no, you can't hear shit. with an undithered range of 90dB, turning up your amp so the loudest sounds were literal rock concert levels, the noise floor would be literally as loud as a whisper.. and that's /undithered/

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>16 bits merely provide 90db dynamics, which is insufficient for say orchestra recordings
As said, you don't really want to use the entire volume range of the human ear. Plus keep in mind our ears take a while to adapt to quieter or louder environments. If you go straight from silence to a 120dB sound, you're going to hear only distortion.
>Sampling frequencies above 44100Hz are quite unanimously found to sound better, even if in theory you shouldn't be able to ear anything above 20KHz.
I am genuinely interested in knowing more about this. Got any links?
>You can't tell a CD from a 128Kb mp3 on what 90% of ppl use to listen to music
Maybe you can't, but I can tell 128kbps mp3s apart from a CD on literally any headphone or speaker with a "hi-fi" frequency range. I've been able to tell them apart on $2 chink earbuds. You must have some serious hearing deficiency if you need that much equipment to tell them apart.

>You can't tell a CD from a 128Kb mp3
oh you absolutely can you baiting retard
mp3 is really trash on lower bitrates

You forgot to mention that not many home systems can do 120 dB.

>You can't tell a CD from a 128Kb mp3
Is this trolling? You will hear a 15-16khz cut-off unless your headphones are complete shit or bass-boosted nigger cans which is pretty much the same thing.

Sure. I'm an foh sound engineer and when a client wants a certain playlist on between sets I like to demo whatever they have with some of the properly ripped audio I have and often even the people well into their 60s can tell. So we use that audio.
But it's not about whether they can hear the difference, it's whether they care enough about it to pay for everything required to play it at home. And they really don't. I don't care when I'm at home. Sure, I can hear if someone's playing a low-bitrate track barely a few seconds in but you just have to let it go.

sure, though that is besides the point (the point is simply, "we don't need higher specs than what CD offers")

CD is decent enough except for 80min play time.

And far fewer still can do 120dB over the noise floor.

>Why are operating systems stuck with shit FROM THE FUCKING '70s?
Same deal.

You don't need a particularly good setup to hear 128 kbps fuck up a song.

rock concerts are the most plebeian type of live music ever
>I am genuinely interested in knowing more about this. Got any links?
Just use google plenty of shit will pop out. Especially ppl who work in recording studios, it's pretty unanimous that 24/96 sounds better than 16/44.1
The point is ok most of us don't need more than CD quality, but heck if I got a quality setup I literally can't walk in a store and buy anything above that. And it's 35yo old digital technology, and the means to put out a better media for quality music are out there since at least 15 years ago (a fucking single layer DVD).
Master records are stored in medias with higher quality than CDs, but even if it would be possible you can't easily access that quality.

Didn't some try other formats but they failed? Like hell we had DVD Audio for a short time.

>Common sounds
>Gunshot
America confirmed for third world shithole

Well, i can hear the difference with cheap in ears and a budget smartphone playing WAV and a shitty ripped 128 kbps mp3 file.
But you need a much better setup to hear the difference between 320 kbps mp3's and a WAV file.

>44.1hz, 16bit, stereo
the reebok standard is technically superior to all hires placebo & hipster vinyl.

the cd is still around kicking it, because of two things (A) it offers most bang for your bucks in terms of price and quality (B) it's more flexible as a physical format than both lp and sacd.

>The point is ok most of us don't need more than CD quality
/humans/ don't need more than CD quality, the literally cover the practical limitations of human hearing at worst (that is, compared to perfect, young ears)
>it's 35yo old digital technology
sure, it's really unusual for something like this to hold up, but they didn't take any shortcuts, the basic specs cover human limits, it's in stereo, it's small*, cheap, easy to use, holds enough for albums*.
the things in asterisks could be improved, the physical size is fine for all but mobile devices, which have gotten very popular, so that's a clear mark against CD.
and the play time, while fine for songs and albums, is a bit small for full discographies or other very demanding collections
but then what's the ideal format? microsd cards? expensive to make, easy to lose, people still probably won't want to insert them into a mobile device, no, the ideal format isn't a physical media at all, it's downloads/streams...
and we're literally already there.

Who cares about CDs when they will physically degrade just like vinyls (though vinyls exhibit that in use)?

> ... but even if it would be possible you can't easily access that quality.
Most recordings these days are compessed to the max and are just like a noise carpet sounding shitty.
A really good recording on CD is way ahead of everything most people have heard their entire life.

and it will stay this way, because the humans ear won't be "updated" to higher listening levels soon.
It all depends on the recording.
Those who say that a CD sounds shitty and that there are better formats, have never listened to good CD recordings.

Only audiofools think that higher than 16bit/44.1kHz matters for playback.

Get educated: people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Sacd would've easily replaced it if there were more multichannel setups. And if ut was easy to pirate.

There is not a human on this planet that tell the difference between 48/96KHz. It doesn't matter how many audio crystals you buy. You will never be able to tell the difference.
people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

DSD sounds better than PCM. More natural sound

Jeez I made a conservative statement, don't nail me on the cross for that. Take 192 or 256, whatever you find suitable as threshold.
For start, I'll explain why 16bits aren't enough.
As the intensity of the sound (amplitude of the waveform) decreases, quantization noise increases because less bits are used for representing it. Very soft sounds can end up being chewed by 6 bits or less.
So you in theory have 96Db of dynamics, but practically you have much less than that if you want to avoid things sounding bad. Therefore, 24bits are regarded as a a must, and it would only take 1.5x more capacity in raw data.
Frequency wise things start to get less scientific and less provable by reasoning alone, but let me tell you this: it's better to start with more because a lot of things start to affect what's coming out: circuitry, cables, DAC, amplifier, cable, speakers. You will inevitably lose both dynamic range and frequency range going down the path, and that's why I think "oversized" source's specs deliver a better sound even if in theory they shouldn't.

Let me tell you, that whole article is junk.
You should listen to sound engineers that have access to and experience with recording equipment, not to a faggot musician and a consumer electronics salesman.

>Jeez I made a retarded statement, don't you dare correcting my retardation. Take these couple values I just shat out of my ass, one of them might actually be reasonable.

If that's the case then surely you can produce a single individual who can verifiably A/B 48/96KHz audio. I'll be waiting.

I thought CDs were the same quality as FLAC WTF

Because nothing is actually recorded/mastered at 96KHz/24bit. It's a format that doesn't exist. Every single "96KHz/24bit" piece you think you hear is upsampled.

Most people are listening to music through the shitty earbuds that came with their phones, or some Bluetooth garbage. There's no demand for Hi-Fi, especially with the piss-poor mastering of today's albums.

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Because it's good enough quality, everything better is basically imperceptible. It doesn't need replacing unless recordings with more than 2 channels were to become common or something, which isn't happening.

Your ears can't do 96Khz.
The best they can do is 20Khz, which requires 40Khz to encode thanks to the nyquist limits.
The higher frequency is only useful for audio editing and shit, so you can avoid certain kinds of aliasing when you do certain operations.

Now this, this cannot continue.

No, you really don't lose anything from the frequency response range. Any decent audio device is going to respond perfectly flat in the 20Hz-20kHz range, what you hear will depend on the speaker. At that point the digital recording doesn't matter at all.

There's the fact that compression will reduce quality regardless of what sample rate its at but there isn't some magic sample rate improvement you can pull with audio by the nature of how audio works and a 44khz uncompressed wav is like 99% of human hearing

I'm sure there is plenty of shit recorded at 96khz/24bit literally any bit of commercial studio equipment is at the very least capable of 96khz/24bit
I'm sure mastering is a different story since if your only mastering to CD it's only going to be 44.1khz
Ironically most of your ultra high sample rate stuff is actually going to come from digitized magnetic tapes and doing that in even 24bit/192khz is not hard

Yes yes, but i was talking more about shit like altering pitch of voices, adding effects etc..
Higher sample rate guarantees the final result will always peak at 44Khz.

99% of people can't hear the difference between CD quality and something better. The next logical step in audio tech was standardizing a lossless 5 channel format for musical recordings. Instead we have been progressively moving backwards with lossy 2 channel audio and now lossy transmission to wireless headphones. That 80's tech is actually better than what mainstream consumers are using almost 40 years later.

Bluray music albums exist, but the format really doesn't matter since zoomer music producers are literally retarded faggots who make their garbage "beats" on macbooks.

But Redbook is shit for other reasons too, like a complete lack of support for embedded metadata.

>it's pretty unanimous that 24/96 sounds better than 16/44.1
People say a lot of stupid shit, but there are still no blind test results that would prove that.

In theory you could produce music with a huge dynamic range, that would make 16 bit sound noisier. But music like that would almost certainly be unpleasant to listen to.

Higher frequencies are more irrelevant than bit depth, although I'm sure there are a few people who can actually hear above 20kHz.

>when will you ever want to play it back at the literal volume of a gunshot?
Do cinemas do that? Gunshots in movies still sound kinda average and similar to the volume of the rest of the film, I wonder though what a movie with 100% accurate sounds would be like? Probably shit, especially for dialogue.

This is actually somewhat true if you think about it.
In the 80's there was no real such thing as lossy
When a CD (which was lossless) was played on a traditional hi-fi system it went from digital on a CD to an analog signal that stayed that way all the way to your speakers
Compare that to today where you have a digital source that is already lossy which might go trough a DSP from your player app and then is reencoded to be sent to your bluetooth headphones once they reach there you might go through another DSP then finally to the DAC in your headphones

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Yes, 99% of listeners are fucking zoomers that want everything wireless without even understanding the technology beyond it and stream music from youtube. But, in general, the 99% of consumers always had shitty audio equipment, either from lack of money or from lack of knowledge.
The run of the mill 80s/90s hi-fi equipment (with some rare exception) is laughable by today's standards. The amps and the speakers were abysmal compared to what you can get with the same money today.

96KHz/24bit recording is standard practice since like 2001, you retard.

Mastertapes are done and kept in hi res, then downsampled with SCR hardware or software. The equipment used in big studios just for this seemingly simple operation can be quite esoteric to the profane's eyes.

I know right. These poorfags don't even use audiophile cables, man. Then they have the nerve to talk about how they can't hear 192kHz. Fucking plebs.

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There's not enough demand for it to justify making suitable hardware. Most people are fine with smart phone/computer audio.