Why Hi res - an updated view 

I'm sure I speak for quite a few others as well, when I say that we really appreciate your technical breakdowns. They are informative, entertaining, and helpful in providing an understanding of what and how we're hearing. They also help when my friends have questions about how my various purchases aid in my love and appreciation for music, and movies for that matter. Thank you for all you do, and I pray you keep doing it for a long while. Bless you and stay safe. 🙏🏿

Absolutely detailed explanation of Hi-Res complexity

Your technical explanations are always so clear, thanks for this.

Its always pleasure to watch your content. Thank you :D

This was truly excellent, Hans. Thank you.

Thank you for everything you did for us

Hello Hans. Thank you very much for this detailed information.

Many thanks once again, Hans. As always with you, there is much food for thought.

Thank you Hans...i was always confussed about all the topics you have covered in this video.....made everything clear to me..cant thank you enough

This is the best explanation I've heard. Thank you.

Very well explained. Thank you for making this video, you are making us all smarter with each video.

Dank voor je uitleg. Niet alleen leerzaam, maar ook gewoon leuk om te horen. Zo begrijp ik meer en meer wat, en vooral waarom ik het op een bepaalde manier hoor mijn installatie.

Another great review Mr. Hans.

Great stuff as always 👍🏻

F Thank you, sir. This kind of honest, intelligent conversation is the reason I subscribe to your channel.

Outstanding as usual.

Awesome Video, thank you Hans! Many things have been said before but you have also made some new points which are very interesting. I was longing for such a Video where “the state of the art” digital processing and everything what has to be considered in digital audio in summarized for quite a long time. I really think it helps some of the people who still have an open mind about HiRes and Digital audio in general to get a better understanding (at least I do) and maybe some even overcome their dogmas (bits are bits and more than 20kHz is useless).👏

Hey Hans, it is always a pleasure to watch your videos, I addressed the same topic a few days ago on my channel (in German only) and came to a very similar result but it is always very nice how you are deconstructing the technology behind it. Thumbs up!

Thanks for another great video Hans! I have recently come to the realization after many years of trying fancy oversampling and upsampling DAC’s, MQA decoders, 192khz etc that I actually prefer 16 bit 44.1 kHz especially if the music was originally mastered to sound good on CD. Just sounds more natural to my ears for long listening sessions. I do like well recorded hi-res music, but most of the music that I enjoy was created before “hi res” was a thing.

Your conclusion make so much sense 🎉

Hans, I know this video will help me really understand the matter in hires audio, but I need to digest it for a moment :-). I wonder what would happen if you were consulted for a DAC chip development. Your knowledge is practical, theoretical, scientifically sound (pun intended), drowned in first-person experience and therefore priceless. Keep on debunking the marketing crap thrown at us which I took for granted, despite my own electronics and software background. Thank you (again)!

Excellent video. Thanks a lot!

Concise explanation as to the issues of chasing 'higher and bigger (#s) is better.' Hifi audio has been mincing engineering principles for quite some time now. Great insight as to the steepness of the LPF as to why a better DAC will tend to 'resolve' better regardless of the source content! This was a great revelation for me.

Thank you Doctor Audio

Thank You Sir!

Thank you very much

Thanks Hans. I have this video saved so I don't know how often I have watched it. Like a "Haynes Manual" at first you need to make sense of the terms used, then you have to remember what it says and finally it's part of your knowledge, so it's different from just remembering. That the real advantage of Hi-res is in the fact that you can have a less steep attenuation to the signal. (Unless I have misunderstood ?)

You're 100% right! There's nothing to add.

Köszönjük!

Thanks!

Sir you are the real deal 👍

Well said, Hans. You know your stuff. :)

Thanks for your explanation. Very informative. I have always thought higher sample rates in music studios are used for capturing the best possible recording and for mixing/monitoring. I have also heard it helps combat aliasing introduced by digital processors/plugins in the mixing stage. Although I really have no idea.

Awesome.

Thanks Hans for a very clear explanation of the differences. I'm more than happy with 16 / 44.1 - it meets the good enough bar in my view.

Hello Hans, very interesting! It's an intriguing subject to me because I've always struggled to hear the difference, even between a good bitrate AAC/Vorbis/Opus and a PCM file (though it is audible). I take it neither my ears or gear are good enough for these subtle details. I'm also aware of how psychologic factors can affect our hearing. Things tend to sound better when we think they will. That's why a lot of people prefer the sound of vinyl: even though it's objectively worse than even lossy formats used for streaming, a physical piece of music has stronger emotional affect on people (and we tend to get used to the nice distortion and frequency response it has). Not to say I don't believe your experience, as your ears, knowledge and gear are obviously far superior to mine. But I'm curious if there has been tests conducted in a "blind" environment proving that Hi-res actually sounds better for some people. Something else I'm thinking a lot about is the inefficiency of 24 bit when it comes to lossless compression. More and more streaming subscriptions give lossless as an option, and I think it's dumb to give 24 bit quality as a default. Lossless encoding struggles a lot more with 24 bit, resulting in often twice the bandwidth for no audible benefit (in my experience). Apple Music doesn't have an option to stream 16 bit and will always use the highest available bit depth, and I think it's just bad for accessibility, optimisation and carbon emissions. I'd be very interested to know your thoughts about all of this!

I thing your logo what is on display behind you is brilliant.People can see HiFi or HB and that everything in EQ look 👍 Good Job.Thank you for explanation in this video.What about MQA ? Maybe we get also updated video about that?

Thanks much for explaining something that i was struggling with the past year. Not understanding way 192 or 96 did not always sounder better than 44 KHz. Had already came to a conclusion 44 KHz sounded more balanced and had my preference ween recorded well

Good video. Undoubtedly the big difference is in the way the sound was recorded. Then there's the capacity of each hifi system and the acoustics in the room where that system is. True high dynamics must be very complicated, but recordings should have the best, most suitable dynamics possible for each format. High dynamics helps in the perception of sharpness and 3D. (left right front and back)

Great explanation of the sense and non-sense of Hi-Res!

good video Hans - but since nearly all pop and rock 24/96+ HR on sale all use 'remasters' , remasters which have been dynamically crushed since the loundess wars since 1993 ish - the point of HiRes fed in to expensive equipment is almost moot. There are notable exceptions. Pink Floyd HR are not dynamically crushed. Green Day took out the brickwalling of American Idiot for the HR 2012 release. But just about everything else is - the latest Bowie , Queen, Prince etc etc etc HiRes are brickwalled horror stories in the wave form. They are fatiguing beyond belief to listen to. They are LOUD-IN-ALL-PLACES-ALL-THE-TIME. They are Sound Formely Known As Music. Much of the vinyl revivial has surely been a search for music with dynamic range... So Hi-Res technicals are almost meaningless when the vast majority of source material is more juiced than the East German Olympics team. Original CD pressings before 1993 are going to be the Rosetta Stones of digital music (no vinyl snap/crackle/pop and pink noise friction soothing swhoosh for me) ..... pre 93 CDs are going to go (in a small way) the way of current vinyl mania - because they are the clearest representation of the mastertape that you can get (short of reel copies). And are ever likely to get. Because gatekeeping music streaming services use remasters, and music rights are being bought in bulk by hedge funds, and the brain is evolutionarily wired to like louder. Going back is not an option. Now "even quieter and louder than before" aint going to sell... It's the only case where technology has made playback fidelity worse. 1080p & 4k allow you a better experience than the whole cinema going public pre 2010, when the film has been restored, on reasonable priced kit. But the loudness wars have destroyed much of music reproduction. And the "ONE LOUDER THAN 10 "shift has impacted directly on the downgrading of chord complexity in music - with a brickwalled backing track only being able to be ridden against by a nursery rhyme like melody. Cue just about anything after 2002. Check out Vinyl guru Michael Fremer YT video about testifying at the Quincy Jones / Jackson royalties trial. And having to explain to the jury that every CD since the 1987 original of Bad had been dynamically 'crushed' leading to the 25th anniversary brickwalled debacle. The loudeness wars were a first order of magnitude crime against human culture. Ongoing....

Agreed More you can do with the data. dose not sound better though to my ears. I personaly Dont care about super res audio and dont plan on testing it outside of a large speaker setup not that I could hear a difference Im a little bit deaf at this point in my life. Love the topic of the video. Thank you for the content Best regards.

I concen myself with what I can hear, not what others say they can hear, or what machines say I could possibly hear. More than anything I enjoy music.

Thanks for the lucid explanations. The mechanism you explained in the latter part of the video on how a higher res music file can sound better on a DAC should be objectively testable since it's not a subjective perception but rather about a measurable loss in sound quality, right? There are many tests measuring how transparent are different DACs, and some of the cheap modern DACs do score very well. I also don't know how much of these differences are audible to an average listener.

I had been upsampling to 192kHz in Roon and felt I could hear a very small improvement in separation and detail retrieval. It was so small as to make me think I might be imagining it. Then I tried upsampling to DSD512 and heard the soundstage, layering and refinement make a major leap forward. My take away is that pushing the compute-intensive delta sigma modulation to the PC and bypassing it in a cheap chip DAC (with native DSD) may be a good strategy to get much better performance out of inexpensive hardware.

Recording in Flac gives all the information. Like a camera uses Raw rather than Jpg or JPEG

5:40 I tried explaining this just a few days ago. Was told dynamic range is irrelevant to listening and background noise levels. Smh ☺

I have a Qobuz subscription being used through a BluSound node. But I have streamed several newer albums from this service in quoted Hi Res audio. I admit my ears are probably not the best, but to me some of these didn’t sound as good/ great to similar at CD quality. I often put this down to way it was mixed. I have also tried so called Hi Res on albums originally recorded back in the 1970‘s and obviously to digitise it would have been re mastered definitely don’t sound great to my ears, rather just used CD’s quality on these…

It has been a long time since I encountered 20 bit audio, but where it comes to 24 bit and DSD there does seem to be something that is still mysterious or unknown. I always notice that reverb tails are better resolved at 24 bit than 16 bit, and essentially perfectly resolved at DSD. Yet, objectively those reverb tails are well above even a 16 bit noise floor. Neil Young commented on this too. Somehow, it appears to me that more digital resolution is required to avoid masking well above the noise floor, and DSD manages to sidestep this problem altogether. I will say critically, I use a high end DSD 16x upsampling DAC and I can still hear a difference between sample rates, though it is indeed much smaller. Any upsampler/oversampling also has to use steep DSP filters, which also cannot be perfect even if they avoid the problems of an analog brickwall filter.

Thank you Hans! I know you like the MScaler and Roon. I would be very interested to hear your view on Roon and HQ-player. As you say, many Dacs lack refined upsampling due to Hw limitations. A modern PC is very powerful. If you use this to upsample and stream through a quality streamer I wonder if you could get really good upsampling for less. Is this something you are interested in reviewing? It could bring good quality for the masses.

I no longer worry about hi res. The quality of the recording makes the difference. Plus Dac are delta sigma decoders, far from PCM whatever.

I was hoping for some thoughts on DSD, I use a March DAC, anything below 88Khz PCM, I convert to DSD256, using Roon. I am more than happy with my aural experiences. DSD is coming very close to my LP sound quality, if not bettering it in some cases.

Well these sampling rates have mostly sense in recording/mixing phase as you are in DAW processing whole project with various of effects, but final mixdown higher than 44.1khz will appreciate only people with DACs, amps and speakers of exceptional quality, and definitely not people listening music with Bluetooth wireless ear plugs with brutal lossy compression. Or, if you have one of that "fantastic" players with hardwired 48khz, then 96/2=48, so at least music will play somehow normal and frequencies will not be screwed up 😀

Great explanation, though I may have not understood everything you said. Does that mean that if I rip a cd and the software would oversample properly lets say to 96KHz that the result should be superior to a CD on a normal CD player? Software doesn’t require an expensive chip, it may require computing power. Thats no more a problem these days

@hans, I would think 16 bits is 15*6dB dynamic range. 15 bits for the positive amplitude, 15 for the negative.

Hi Hans, awesome Video as always. There are two things I find hard to follow: 1. You speak about the bad sound of steep filters, but then mostly about playback. But isn't the damage done on the recording side? As the steep filter has to be applied before the D-A process to avoid aliasing in the sampling process? So how can oversampling in any (mega-ecpensive) dac fix that issue? Since the damage has already been done. 2. How does it take a super expensive dac to do oversampling properly? It should be a mathematically a rather simple process, that a modern CPU should be able to handle below 1% of load. When I playback a CD file from my PC and the audio-link to the USB dac is set to 192kb/s isn't windows upsampling on the fly anyways?🤔 According to Shannon/Nyquist the Waveform of a CD file should be perfectly defined and adding in 3 more samples should really be a pretty trivial task for a computer in my humble opinion🤔. As far as I know, most DACs have a native Sampling rate anyways and all incoming signals are internally upsampled to that rate anyways, no?🤔 Just my two cents

One thing rarely mentioned when discussing higher sampling rates is how the analog part of the reproducer system will handle the higher frequencies. Is it fair to say that most power amplifiers and loudspeakers are designed with a 20 Hz to 20 kHz range in mind? Then what happens with the higher frequency content potentially output by a 96 kHz or 192 kHz DAC? Will it be filtered out (lost), or worse, will it create all sorts of lower frequency harmonics due to unexpected vibration modes in the speaker or the enclosure etc.? HiFi speakers are not ultrasonic transducers so unless the whole system is designed to reproduce a larger frequency range, pushing the frequency response of the source might actually be detrimental to sound quality.

Great video. People are seduced by "newer, bigger & better". A similar comparison would be modern TVs that boast thousands of colours- far more than the human eye can actually see- what's the point? It's mostly advertising and marketing. Another is the 70 million tracks available on your streaming service.... I wonder how many tracks the average subscriber accesses?

I’m confused by the offerings on Apple Music. The most common format available above CD is 24/44.1. Why is this? It’s almost a settled standard for some reason. The most unusual thing I’ve seen lately is the sampling frequencies on the latest Madonna releases. 176.4kHz. Why would they choose this?

I have done testing on my frequency response with my Topping E50 DAC and HifiMan Edition XS headphones that can reproduce sound in 8-50 000 Hz range with an online tone generator. I and my brother could hear around to 12 Hz and up to 23 KHz. We did repeated tests and same conclusion. This made me look deeper into the topic, and I got confirmation of the 20 Hz - 20 KHz myth, and how it was made the standard based on limited research. This myth cannot be the truth as I am not the only one that has experienced this. I often hear sounds that other people do not hear, especially high frequencies.

Nice vid. I am stuck at 44.1 basically. None of my music will ever be recorded at hires. I have thought about upsampling the files in a computer and playing those files but what a time investment that would be for little gain. I have hardware that will do 192k but havent heard a big difference with upsampled files. Have an old dac that upsamples everything to 192k. I will hook it up and see if it makes a diff. But the new dac is probably better anyhow.

Thank u 😊

Hey Hans, what's your take on HQPlayer? Is it okay to use Volume Leveling in Roon, will it affect the dynamic range or sound quality in any way?

If a human could be described as "reference", you Sir are it.

Good stuff. I run my RME at 192 works great because I can keep the daw at whatever, usually 44.1, yet my RME DAC stays at 192, so in effect it is upsampling before reaching my ears ;)

Totally agree with your story Hans, on a good rig a 44.1/16 (and well recorded) sounds wonderful, but DSD is glorious. When you listen on the player in the car, the kitchen or the bathroom, HiRes sounds better…

Hello Hans, thank you very much!, I have a very quick question, my DAC only shows the sample rate without the bit depth of the file that it is processing, does this mean that it does not take into account if it is 16 or 24 bits?, or does it run with some calculation and modify the sample rate thats is showing?, thanks again.

For editing, 24bit or higher is likely important. 16bit 44.1khz FLAC for consumers is fine. I have a question, though. Imagine we have one song encoded in wav, 16bit and 32bit maybe flac. Open the wave file. Find the third sample, for example. What's the number stored and way? Open the 16bit file. Find the third sample. 16bit. What is the number and why? Open the 32bit file. Find the third sample. What's the 32bit number and why? After you have the binary numbers, then what is dynamic range, bit depth etc. And how the two binary numbers, one 16 and the other 32, are both lossless. Not one youtube video explains any of this, so I am still confused.

Should you use an audio normalization or not? I'm genuinely curious as I'm just getting into audio and high res audio

So, for me, what this means is that the AudioQuest Dragonfly Cobalt would be good enough for streaming from my PC, since I'm 67 years old and my upper limit hearing max's out at around 12000khz.... would that be correct? Greetings from Ontario Canada!

Looking good hans, looks like u lost stone.

For equipment like headphones or all-analog receivers, does the hi-res logo matter?

can someone list the points in sound quality that hi-res tracks sound better at?

It will always amaze me how far ahead and future proof the CD was in 1982. Not before the year 2000 did people have PCs in their home that could hold more than a handful of full quality CDs, and even then storage was at such a premium that we got this mess with mp3 that we are in. Meaning that most people make due now with quality audibly worse then CD, of not on their device, then what reaches their Bluetooth ear buds. With SACD the industry completely botched it by pushing the hardware prices way too far out of consumers reach. You can't have the CD be the standard and then it's successor moves back to cutting edge prices that were asked in the early 80s. DVD and BluRay did it right, SA CD did not need to fail. It's a real shame too, the mainstream consumer may never experience high res audio.

Well I thought the true benefit of higher sampling rate was the higher sampling rate and not the added frequency bandwidth. Added resolution, if you will. Since the analog to digital and digital to analog conversion would have smaller steps, the differences in the frequency changes would be more smooth. It's like skiing down a slope rather than down the stairs. I thought that was the true benefit. But since you didn't mention this at all, did I misunderstand something? Or did you?

I've heard God, no sarcasm. WOW!

I like my tda1541

Hi Hans, in this video, you said you doubt that 24-bit and higher sampling frequencies contain more relevant information. I understand your explanation about bit depth but on the higher sampling frequency, you mentioned filters and how they are a problematic issue with lower sampling rates. In your earlier video "MQA part 1; Why 24 bit 192 kHz" audio? you have talked about how choosing a higher sampling rate does increase the resolution in time and that is correlated with our hearing system (since the 44.1 gives a time resolution of 22.7 microseconds and our auditory time resolution is about 7 microseconds.) And only 192khz offers sufficient time resolution for our auditory system. So my question here is, do you still consider this point relevant, and is that still one of the important factors in choosing 192khz over lower sampling rates in your opinion. Thank you

i want to buy ifi zen hi res audio bluetooth reciever can i get the benefit of hi res audio using android if the music source is from youtube?

Hello, a slimmer and fitter version of Hans! 🙂 Everything you've said seems to make sense, except that from what I know the most advanced filter that Chord uses (Dave + Chord MScaler) is pretty much a brick filter, i.e. a very intensive/steep attenuation at/near to the Nyquist frequency. If one of the main benefits of oversampling is that it allows for filters to be less steep, this is certainly not the case here, yet the Dave appears to be your choice of digital to audio conversion done right. What am I missing here?

On the subject of bit depth and dynamic range, you mention about the extremities of the ranges for different bit depths, but I've often wondered if higher bit depths allow the capture of more detail in subtle sounds. Would higher bit depths give you more steps in the sound level resulting in higher accuracy to the subtle sounds. I'm thinking of quiet sounds such as musician breathing or subtle background noises. Any thoughts on this?.

Hi Hans, please forgive me but you seem to have lost lots of weight, I pray your health is good and this was a conscious decision

96 kHz is more than enough for me.

So is it wrong to think that a high res file has more density of information in the audible spectrum ? Because some people say high frequencies can be felt but not listened to and to me this is no sense

I liked Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, Queen, Beck - Sea Change, and Blade Runner soundtrack in DSD. I've heard some samples of tracks recorded in actual dsd. Just not a big enough catalog in the music i like to care about it. Upsampling my entire library to high res pcm or dsd made no difference for me. Most of my 96k or 192k was simply not that special for me to care anymore so i let it all go. I'm not into classical or jazz and i'm not listening to "audiophile" music all day. CD redbook is enough for all the music i like.

How do Radio Paradise manages to sound better then almost all streaming services ?

I prefer listening to 24/48 or 32bit DXD. Those two offer a good balance between the directional expanse and faded depth & cohesion of the sound image. 24/92 requires crossfeed to sound decent in my opinion, at least with headphones.

In my setup, curiously 16/44 sounds almost always better than 24bit audio, which is softer, I would even say "blurrier" (we're speaking of small differences actually). 16bit is faster, more dynamic, clearer. Maybe what I listen to in 24bit is not native and is interpolated? Anyway, cd playback in my various setups succeeded in the years has and still is a step way above in sound quality to playing files, no matter if standard or hires, so this erases any supposed advantage of hires files (again, this is my experience).

I don’t understand why people don’t just get the 24/96. Example. I have 1 terabyte ssd dedicated to music. Even 2 terabyte hard drive are so cheap these days. I had my music in 16/44. Which meant I had 350gb of music. So 650gb of wasted space Now with most music in 24/96 I still use the same drive. Didn’t spend a single dollar to upgrade and the driver still has 100gb free Moral of the story. For no money at all I get to stop worrying about it. Doesn’t matter if I can hear the difference or not. All my devices play these files. It would have made sense 20 years ago even drivers were expensive One thing this gentleman forgets to mention. The biggest reason for hires is not if you can hear or not. It’s the mastering. Old albums get new mastering. Sure a lot of álbuns get remastered on cd too but most don’t.

I remember reading that higher res files are better at reproducing the interaural time differences humans are so sensitive to. In other words, humans are capable of discerning ITD as low as 7-10 micro seconds, but 44.1 is only capable of ITD of about 22 microseconds. Therefore, higher res should be able to reproduce things like: soundstage, imaging, ambience, spatial cues better, since those things are so dependent on reproducing lower ITD, i.e., as low as we are capable of hearing.

Hi Hans, as usual I like your video and topic. However I think I disagree with the physics - please correct me if I go wrong somewhere. Sound is just air that is moved Sample rate indicates the number of samples you take per second Bit depth represents the amplitude of the air being moved. So therefore both a higher bitrate and sample rate get you closer to the original. Yes, you need a higher bit depth to get to a low noise floor, but you also benefit from smaller intervals at louder passages. Similar with the sample rate - you take more measurements in a given time interval, so on average you will get closer to the original. Looking forward to your reply.

I find that concerts and films that are too loud essentially lost their dynamic range and sound compressed.

I find 24/96 more smoother but it didnt change my life.

At 96KHz the difference is on treble frequencies above 10KHz (more detail and brilliance) - at 44.1KHz the treble frequencies are muffle (especially at 16KHz range)

long story short...if you are NOT an audio geek (an audiophile doesn't count as audio geek because an audio geek actually knows how science and physics works) that knows how every record that plays is recorded and know how the signal path of the recorded instrument is processed and affects the sound until the master...stick to 44100 or 48000, no point to go higher than that, specially with music done, recorded and mastered entirely in the digital domain this days. Only reason to go higher is if you work with audio or dj where further audio processing and high SPL is applied....BUT in the other side if you are an audio geek that knows how to hear and knows how the records are recorded, then will be easier to choose the right high sampling rate audio that will sound VERY good in the giving listening system and strike...AUDIO NIRVANA!!!

I don't know about all the technical stuff. And you do make a lot of sense when talking about dynamic range. But all I know is there are CLEAR differences with each quality level. MP3's at 128 have become virtually unlistenable to me. MP3's at 320 is what I would call the bare minimum threshold for quality music. And when listening to 16bit or 24bit I can tell a bit of difference. I like to explain my experience as....the more bits there are the more "space" there is for the instruments to play in. There seems to be very little muddying of the instruments. The guitars have their range, the bass is in it's range and rarely do the 2 ever get muddied together. Anyway, that's just been my experience with updating my music library to hi-res. And the better the quality the easier it is for me to separate the instruments from each other.

In your video and even more in the comments I find a lot of simplifications, which are incorrect. E.g. The dynamic range you mention is measured broadband , maybe with A-Filter, but that does not tell us too much about the ability of hearing. In my advanced age ( I am V 7.0 already) , the limit for pure tones is lower than 10 kHz. BUT due to a life long experience at listening carefully, my ability of listening into details is still very good. AND to decipher room information we need much higher resolution than 48 kHz. As always people forget the time and concentrate on static frequency diagrams. Our ear/brain system is capable of so much more than the mentioned measurements tell us. Think about a very low violin tone and its overtones in the background of a room. To hear that including its correct position, needs a lot if HighRes.

The 44.1khz track says "thump up" but 192khz rate says "thumb up." 192khz is better.

Is bitperfect real? I listen to you and I begin to discover filters and manipulations even below my bed

We love to pretend we can hear beyond 20/20 but the truth of the matter is we don't have bat's ears... ;-)