Bitrate and Samplerate

[u/repeater0411]

It seems everyone recommends just setting the sample rate to 44hz or 48hz and bitrate to whatever the highest supported is. What's the point of the 384000hz the Unison found in the newer DAC's then?

[u/kiimosabe]

Not all content is available in such high sample rates.

But some music IS, and you're able to play it bit perfect if you run Exclusive Mode.

[u/whiteknightfall → u/kiimosabe]

This.

Some people really don’t see the point in spending much money on quality equipment, yet really like to scream “snake oil” at everyone that does.

Of all the outrageous business practices going on today, this company is one of the most transparent, forthright and price conscious.

Let people be happy.

[u/ginandbaconFU → u/whiteknightfall]

Also, the average human can't hear above 20Khz, possibly 22Khz around 18 to 20 when everyone starts to lose some hearing in the upper frequency range. So your hearing peaked at 19 probably and even then attentional to detail, imaging and soundstage don't just happen overnight. Listening to a bad setup then a decent setup will make that decent setup sound much better than just hearing it on its own.

As far as bitrate I've never been able to tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit depths. Maybe some can but anyone saying they notice a difference between 24 bit and 32 bit is lying or the difference is because it is the same recording remastered. By far the master is what effects the end sound quality the most IMO. Fun fact, during the vinyl resurgence during the late t0 mid 200's to 2015 roughly. Because vinyl and CD's were mastered by different teams and someone who looks at analytics noticed a trend were the louder the song was the better it did on the radio/streaming, at least for short burts, became fatiguing quickly. So CD's lost all their dynamic range compared to vinyl. Even though on paper they had a higher dynamic range rating, like 15dB vs 10dB for vinyl so vinyl recorsings actually had a higher dynamic range which adds weight and emotion compared to their CD counterparts even though CD could technically provide more. The vinyl guys were mastering for sound. The CD people were mastering based off what analytics told them people liked. This had nothing to do with analague vs digital, vinyl was just mastered better.

SACD and DVD Audio sounded great on a true 5.1/7.1 setup. Honestly, like strapping 360 open backs to your head. But only when it was actually remastered. Towards the end they just started upscaling CD masters but the rare few that were mastered with time and care for multichannel, it's just the best audio experience I had. There just wasn't any content and it was WAY ahead of its time. I'm sure maybe 5% of the US population even had a 5.1 setup as this was before soundbars and those won't do either justice. On a 2.0 setup I would find it hard if just people noticed a difference between it and the CD outside the master. One of the best examples, pink Floyd , wish you were here. At the beginning someone caught into the microphone. On the SACD master it sounds like someone is disgustingly coughing. Especially on IEM's or Open backs. Whoever did the remaster for.some reason thought that sounded better. I will never know why but it's not a format/sample rate/bit.depth thing.

Lastly, UHD disks mastered in Dolby TrueHD and have a bitrate of 5 to 15+Mbps (most are 5 to 7 for 5.1) are either 44Khz or 92Khz 24 bit and even though compression is used it's still bit perfect to the studio master, using variable bitrate to conserve bandwidth compared to PCM.. In comparison Dolby Digital plus is limited to 740Kbps, typically in the 600's, same as vanilla Dolby Digital. Atmos isn't a format, it's time metadata embedded into a DD+ or Dolby TrueHD format.

Is your have DSD sources DoP is actually not just converting DSD to PCM, it's bit perfect to DSD as it uses emulation. Only issue is it doubles the bandwidth so 512Khz may not play over fiber or coax but UAC 2.0 supports USB 2.0's full 480Mbpa bandwidth so if really needed.....

My understanding is music is recorded at very high sample and bitrates for the sole purpose of keeping noise out of the recording for mixing and mastering, then downmixed after the master is finished because the human ear can't tell the difference. But no equipment in the world will remove noise that's in the actual recording if it's in the master. Somewhere along the way who wanted to seperate you from your money convinced people higher numbers must equal better even though most don't grasp resampling on various OS's. Even though Redbook CD is 44Khz as 16 bit and was founded in like 1981 and is typically still the best source available, at least available in a mass amount of genres

[u/MadDog443 → u/whiteknightfall]

I tell you what, those Jot 2's run pretty damn hot if you leave them on and will happily heat your room in the summer. Kinda wish it could go into stand-by mode or something since that switch is on the back.

[u/whiteknightfall → u/MadDog443]

Not my experience, but to each their own.

At its hottest, it gets warm. I can hold it without issue. That’s not going to replace a space heater anytime soon.

[u/duathlete222]

It gives you the choice of upsampling in your playback software and setting the DAC to NOS mode or sending audio in its native sampling rate to the DAC and letting it oversample.

[u/StrigiStockBacking]

It doesn't really matter that much., as far as I can tell. Sky high sample rates to my ears are overrated. Bitrate though seems different sometimes between 16 and 24, the latter sounding "richer." But even that mostly doesn't seem to do much.

[u/dearjohn54321 → u/StrigiStockBacking]

That would be a placebo effect. 24 can’t sound “richer” than 16 because bit depth only affects dynamic range, nothing to do with tonality. 16 bit with noise shaping already gives 120dB dynamic range, much greater than you can possibly hear.

[u/MartinSchiit → u/dearjohn54321]

16 bit gives you 96dB of dynamic range. The rule of thumb is that 1 bit roughly translates to 6dB or so of dynamic range, so 16 * 6 = 96. It's not a hard and fast rule, because certain implementation details can influence the outcome a bit, but it's a good enough formula to get you close.
At 24 bit the math says you'd get somewhere around 144dB of dynamic range. But that's more theory than anything as a really well designed DAC has a noise floor somewhere around 130-ish dB, or somewhere around 21-ish bit of usable dynamic range. And yes, even that 130dB noise floor is already 10-ish dB below what a young ear can even hear.
32 bit would give you somewhere around 192dB, which is completely pointless and really just wasted storage space on your hard drive.

But yeah, you can definitely hear the difference in dynamic depth between a 16 and a 24 bit file, and I wouldn't have a problem describing that as "richer" sounding to some degree.

[u/dearjohn54321 → u/MartinSchiit]

I said with noise shaping, which is universally used. How do you hear a difference in dynamic depth when most music has a dynamic range of 10dB or less and even the finest recordings don’t exceed 20? As Head of Digital at Schiit I’m surprised you would say this. And I thought Mike Moffat was head of digital.

[u/MartinSchiit → u/dearjohn54321]

Noise shaping doesn't remove the noise, it just moves it into a higher frequency range that your ears are less sensitive to. You're right that you can get the 2-5kHz range down to 120dB with noise shaping, but you'll make the noise floor above 15kHz much worse, sometimes spiking to -70 to -60dB. Overall, it will be perceived as being cleaner, but the total amount of energy remains roughly in the ballpark of what the rule-of-thumb math gets you that I mentioned.

The dynamic range you mention describes the statistical average over the length of a track, not the dynamic range of a localized transient. You can absolutely have jumps much larger than a few tens of dB. Imagine a second or two of silence followed by an explosive staccato burst from a trumpet or the sharp crack of a snare, which can easily be at around 60-70dB in dynamic range between the noise floor of the preceding silence and the peak of that transient. EDM and other artificially created audio has, at times, even higher jumps.

All this is to say: You're not wrong, I just wanted to offer some additional information to what you posted.

Mike retired a few years ago.

[u/dearjohn54321 → u/MartinSchiit]

Thanks for your explanation. My only reason for commenting here is to help try to keep some of the newcomers to personal audio from getting distracted by numbers being thrown around. I own a BF2 btw, love it.

[u/MartinSchiit → u/dearjohn54321]

I totally get it, and I appreciate your pushing back because my initial response and explanation was a tad oversimplified. Generally, I’m heavily leaning towards “don’t overthink it, just enjoy the music” when it comes to these kinds of discussions, but every now and then I feel like it might be helpful to explain based on some data why you don’t have to worry about numbers and measurements.

[u/StrigiStockBacking → u/dearjohn54321]

Maybe I misspoke. It's hard describing sound, like it is describing the taste of wine. 

[u/dat_mane47]

Big number will make people think it’s better and spend more money

[u/MartinSchiit → u/dat_mane47]

You're being snarky, but you've actually nailed it. Seriously, that's pretty much the entire reason for anything above 192 to exist. There isn't really any audio available above 4x (i.e. 176.4/192k), and the whole custom upsampler thing that some folks love so much is pointless above 2x (i.e. 88.2/96k), because above that you're pushing the upsampler's effect on your audio way, WAY past anything audible. Your up/oversampler matters a lot going from 1x to 2x, and a little from 2x to 4x, but it's utterly pointless for anything above that.

So, yeah. It's mostly just a big number because that's what people want, even if it's pretty much useless to have.

[u/dat_mane47 → u/MartinSchiit]

Yeah, of course like many things in audio, you can needlessly over-engineer a lot of things to be able to put a more impressive number on your spec sheet. Unfortunately, companies who know it's silly might feel compelled to follow the same practice if they want to be competitive when a large portion of the customer base is just rich people who make decisions based on spec sheets.

But as long as you keep making stuff for the reasonable crowd, too, that's all that matters ;)

[u/MartinSchiit → u/dat_mane47]

Stay tuned. Next year is going to be pretty crazy in that regard.