I twattered this, but I’m looking for some discussion here after all the discussion over at Come The Revolution and some conversations: 16 bit, 44.1KHz audio (CD Audio, basically) is all you need, so me lamenting the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio really doesn’t matter a hoot. We’ll leave the analogue/vinyl (warmth) argument for another time.
24/192 Music Downloads…and why they make no sense
presents the argument well, and scientifically, and I found the authors comments on MP3 codecs and on Loudness Wars fascinating. 24/192 is being touted as audiophile quality downloadable music.
One must remember that the audio world is prone to bollocks: £500 cat 5 leads audiophile mains cables and sockets, but also that some people can’t hear quite significant audio problems: it’s subjective- I know people that would not consider the difference between a £30 mini system and £600 of seperates significant.
Interestingly, I claimed that FLAC wasn’t practical in the comments on Come the Revolution, and have proved myself wrong: A Sandisk Sansa MP3 player will happily handle FLAC, and a big Micro-SD card copes with the filesizes. For the record, with good headphones, it’s indistinguishable from CD to me, so that Minidisc player may get retired, finally.
As someone who used to design very expensive car audio systems in the 80’s, I find oxygen free cable quite laughable, especially the price.
Now the thing here is that I could believe cable making a difference in the analogue chain- so speaker cables, phono interconnects etc, but mains cables? After the power has passed through miles of crap cable and tansformers, fuses, MCBs?
Even worse: expensive HDMI cables? Until the signal degrades to the point of transmission error, it’s not going to make a difference.