elijahg

rundhvid said:

elijahg said:

mike_galloway said:

randominternetperson said:

sirdir said:

mike1 said:

rundhvid said:

Apple says this supports up to 96kHz, and means users "can enjoy high-fidelity, full-resolution audio."

—except ’s own Hi-Res Lossless in 192 kHz ߑట䭦lt;/div>

Soooo???? You're saying they therefore shouldn't have improved it all then?

Probably that you can't call something 'full resolution' if you yourself deliver a much higher resolution. 

The average human can detect sound in the 20Hz to 20 kHZ.  96kHz is way outside the range of human hearing.

96kHz is not upper frequency response - it is the encoding bite rate - higher = better resolution but 192kHz is more than necessary to do the job but that's audiophiles for you

Neither of you are right. It's not the maximum frequency that can be produced, nor is it the encoding bit rate. It's the sample rate. Completely different and entirely unrelated to the encoding bit rate. It's the number of times per second that the audio signal is sampled; sampled meaning a measurement or snapshot of the frequency at that exact moment is taken (or generated in the case of audio out).

Now where this does relate to human hearing's maximum frequency, is the fact that humans can't generally hear more than 20kHz. Sampling at double that rate means there will be no aliasing errors in the audio - where parts of the audio could be "missed" essentially, as the samples might fall on two sides of a frequency peak. This is known as the Nyquist rate. The sound between the samples is effectively interpolated (averaged), and of course the higher sample rates mean there's less averaging going on. Audiophiles claim they can hear this, but double blind tests have shown that almost no one can actually tell the difference. And the Nyquist rate says 44kHz is plenty high enough to accurately reconstruct a 20kHz signal, proving that high sample rates are pointless.

The bit rate is inversely related to how much of the original audio is thrown away, and how much the MP3/AAC/whatever decoder has to "guess" to reconstruct the audio.

Excellent written explanation 👍👍👍

Regarding audio quality and this 192 kHz sample rate: earlier this year,  announced immediate availability of ’s music catalog in 192 kHz/24 bit Hi-Res Lossless format (although limited to a subset of the catalog at first)—at no extra cost!!

What is mind-boggling is that ’s hardware is limited to 96 kHz—why?
—my antique +20 year old Denon AV-receiver happily supports uncompressed multi-channel audio in 192 kHz, but neither my  TV 4K 2nd gen., nor my Mac mini M1 is able to take advantage of  Music’s reference-class format! AFAIK, there is no technical reason for this HDMI-output buzz kill 🤒

Thanks! 

mike_galloway said:

randominternetperson said:

sirdir said:

mike1 said:

rundhvid said:

Apple says this supports up to 96kHz, and means users "can enjoy high-fidelity, full-resolution audio."

—except ’s own Hi-Res Lossless in 192 kHz ߑట䭦lt;/div>

Soooo???? You're saying they therefore shouldn't have improved it all then?

Probably that you can't call something 'full resolution' if you yourself deliver a much higher resolution. 

The average human can detect sound in the 20Hz to 20 kHZ.  96kHz is way outside the range of human hearing.

96kHz is not upper frequency response - it is the encoding bite rate - higher = better resolution but 192kHz is more than necessary to do the job but that's audiophiles for you

Neither of you are right. It's not the maximum frequency that can be produced, nor is it the encoding bit rate. It's the sample rate. Completely different and entirely unrelated to the encoding bit rate. It's the number of times per second that the audio signal is sampled; sampled meaning a measurement or snapshot of the frequency at that exact moment is taken (or generated in the case of audio out).

Now where this does relate to human hearing's maximum frequency, is the fact that humans can't generally hear more than 20kHz. Sampling at double that rate means there will be no aliasing errors in the audio - where parts of the audio could be "missed" essentially, as the samples might fall on two sides of a frequency peak. This is known as the Nyquist rate. The sound between the samples is effectively interpolated (averaged), and of course the higher sample rates mean there's less averaging going on. Audiophiles claim they can hear this, but double blind tests have shown that almost no one can actually tell the difference. And the Nyquist rate says 44kHz is plenty high enough to accurately reconstruct a 20kHz signal, proving that high sample rates are pointless.

The bit rate is inversely related to how much of the original audio is thrown away, and how much the MP3/AAC/whatever decoder has to "guess" to reconstruct the audio.

AppleInsider said:

...the new 3.5mm headphone jack features "a built-in digital-to-analog converter." 

You'll find, William, that "a built-in digital-to-analog converter" is "featured" in all 3.5mm headphone jacks, right back to the Apple //gs. It wouldn't be a headphone jack without an ADC, since human ears can't interpret digital audio too well.

96kHz isn't of note really either, my 2019 iMac has 96kHz sample rate support both for audio in and audio out - and pretty sure my 2015 MBP has 96kHz too. The notable point is solely that the jack can support high-impedance headphones.

Come on guys, this is supposed to be a tech blog and you obviously don't understand what you're writing about, this is pretty basic stuff.

This is the second weird article by William Gallagher, the other being “No, Apple is not making better products because Jony Ive left”. Following this article’s logic, my Intel iMac will be obsolete some day so I should bin it now. What ridiculous logic. 

Sorry for the stupidly large font, fighting this abysmal forum software especially on mobile isn’t worth it. How many more years until it’s fixed? 

I’m just hoping it doesn’t break half the unix tools I use as every major version of late has done. Apple insists on moving, changing, deprecating and generally fiddling with core components for every release. They included an ancient version of Python 3 with Big Sur which wouldn’t work with USB-serial converters anymore, because their own USB-serial drivers were incompatible with it. The drivers worked fine as kernel extensions, but apparently we’re all too dumb and irresponsible to be allowed to use kexts so Apple gifted us half-finished driver extensions instead.