Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

Did analog recording or broadcast go up beyond 20,000 cps? My stereo's HF horns go from 2,000 to 25,000. On the other edn, I'm learning mixing & mastering and have learned that anything below 40 cps is just "rumble" and, musically, should be treated with the HP filter rolling 40 and below off


      From: Steve the Fiddle <[email protected]>
 To: Discussion list for Audacity users <[email protected]> 
 Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2017 6:30 AM
 Subject: Re: [Audacity-users] Why bother with lossy encoding?
   
Just a quick technical point: Increasing the sample rate of
("upsampling") a recording, does not and can not improved the quality
of the encoded sound. Once the sound has been recorded in digital
format, that is "it", that data contains specific audio information,
and any subtle musical nuances that are missing are gone forever. It
is physically impossible to magically restore audio information that
is missing from the original.

The difference that sample rate makes, is that it limits the maximum
frequency that can be represented by the data. Uncompressed PCM data
has an absolute limit to the frequencies that it can represent. The
limit is half the sample rate (known as the "Nyquist frequency"). So
for audio CDs, (sample rate 44100 Hz), audio frequencies must be below
22050 Hz. The only difference that a higher sample rate makes is that
it could theoretically represent frequencies above 22050 Hz, but if
the original recording is on CD, then there are no audio frequencies
above 22050 Hz, and upsampling cannot change that, (other than by
adding distortion).

Steve

On 15 March 2017 at 07:16, Stephane Ascoet
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Le 14/03/2017 18:11, Roger a écrit :
>>
>> Ditto here, as I consider myself to have good ears for classical music.
>>
>> Extracted all of my CD's into PCM WAV avoiding the lossy compression codecs,
>> but still noticing the metallic/tin type sound reminiscent of CD grade audio,
>> even with a 5.1 home stereo grade DAC.  I seem to prefer the 24-bit 48kHz
>> sampling, but am no where near being rich to upgrade my entire music
>> collection.  Can still recall the days of Tape and LP, where music was less
>> tinny sounding.  But then that's also getting back to the days where tubes were
>> also more common.
>>
>> I've also tried upsampling the CD audio to 24-bit 48kHz sampling, while using
>> an ALSA LP filter, helps but not significantly enough.  Shrugs, maybe my ears
>> are just getting too old and too tired.
>>
> Hi, I've got a Sony 3000 ES expanding them to 96 khz at playing, results
> are incredibly impressive with some CDs. With some others, that has been
> very poorly engineered, there's no difference, the sound remains tiny.
>
> --
> Sincerely, Stephane Ascoet
>
>
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