Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

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drock
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Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by drock » Thu Apr 17, 2014 11:08 am

Found this really interesting. I wonder what affects it'll have on the music industry/labels and also us here using Auria and audio interfaces. Watch the video, its great. I cant wait to hear the difference.
192kHz/24 bit seems finally doable within the near future.

They funded it via kickstarter and have almost 20,000 backers. With a goal of $800,000, they're currently at $6,225,354. It seems that people want this. Hopefully this becomes the new standard.

http://www.ponomusic.com/#home

rayetheridge
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by rayetheridge » Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:21 pm

Higher Resolution requires more hardware resources with an application and we are already limited enough with RAM and CPU. I am not sure this is ideal even with the new iPad Air with its A7.

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Tarekith
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by Tarekith » Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:25 pm

iPads have been able to play 24/96 music since the very first one came out.

Checkrath
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by Checkrath » Thu Apr 17, 2014 3:59 pm

I'm a bit skeptical of these very high sample rates. I doubt any human can tell the difference between a sample rate of 96 and 192. I believe that even 44 is honestly good enough for the pickiest ears.

It smells a bit like snake oil and gold plated cables to me :)

Checkrath
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by Checkrath » Thu Apr 17, 2014 4:18 pm

Ok, after checking out the video and the site I'm more clear on what this is.. I probably should have done that before before commenting :oops:

It seem like Pono has many aspects including lossless compression formats and very high quality DAC. These are things I can certainly get excited about.

Still dubious that the 192khz sampling rate will make any difference

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Tarekith
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by Tarekith » Thu Apr 17, 2014 7:47 pm

There's very little scientific evidence that 192kHz is better, in fact it's actually probably a lot LESS accurate than 96kHz. Most of the research I read these days suggests that around 60kHz would be ideal, but count me in the group that still uses 44.1 until that gets more popular.

instinctive
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by instinctive » Fri Apr 18, 2014 5:58 am

As if pure science wasn't enough proof, there has been a heap of double-blind tests, and not in a single one of those was anyone able to tell the difference between 44.1kHz / 16 bits, and ANYTHING higher.

This is another attempt to waste resources and pull the money out of peoples' pockets.

I'm not saying that for usage during the EDITING PIPELINE, 48 or maybe 96 kHz and 24 bits don't make sense, but for the final product, it's nonsense.

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richardyot
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by richardyot » Fri Apr 18, 2014 6:13 am

There was an interesting double-blind test conducted by a German audio magazine about a decade ago where they gathered some hi-fi experts (writers for audio magazines etc) and used some extremely expensive equipment, including Sennheiser Orpheus headphones and high-end speakers to compare LAME encoded mp3s (at 256kb/s) against CDs.

None of the experts could tell the difference between the MP3s and the CDs. Interestingly there was one person in the test who could, because he had damaged hearing and couldn't hear the higher frequencies, so the flanging effect from the MP3s was clearly audible to him, but not to all the experts with normal healthy hearing.

That's not to say that the Pono might not be interesting, it's always worth keeping an open mind, but it's also worth bearing in mind that a lot of this stuff is purely psychological - it's so easy to convince yourself you are hearing something "better" when in fact your judgement is affected by other factors, such as price or reputation etc...

I like Neil Young though, and obviously I've never been in a situation where I have been able to compare his master tapes against commercial CDs, so it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

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richardyot
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Re: Ultra-high resolution audio coming soon

Post by richardyot » Fri Apr 18, 2014 6:17 am

Sadly the original links to the test on the internet are now all dead, but there is reference to this test in this link:

Audiokarma discussion

At the bottom of the post there is a list of the equipment used to carry out the test.

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