Hi-Res Music: Did it make sense?
By: Mirza Miftahul Fadillah
Tags: Audio, High Resolution Audio, Headphones, Music

Im not an audiophile, I don’t have those golden ears. This article is mainly intended to improve my understanding about high resolution digital music format, and secondary goal is to inform others who is interested to invest or experience high resolution audio. There is chance of inaccuracies and personal bias.

Honestly, I just i want write something, and this topic seems very interesting to me. Enjoy.

My Music Preferences

Mainly, I listened to j-pop and hardstyle. Occasionally, high bpm rock to substitute jpop, beats from deadmau5, binaural folk tracks from Chesky Records, random instrumental jazz and hiphop albums, drone metal artists like Earth and Sunn O, lately Im invested to math rock.

I listen on headphones. I love full boost at 3Khz sounds, like diffuse field tuned headphones or iems. I hate peaks in trebles, and I tolerate high level of bass boost as long those boost didn’t bleed to mid.

Definition of “Hi-Res”

In this article, I should limit the definition of Hi-Res or high resolution audio as lossless format that has atleast 24bit of audio bit depth and atleast 96Khz sampling rate. I’ll be comparing it to CD-Digital Audio or Red Book speficiation as of having 16bit depth and 44.1Khz sampling rate.

Most music format today is lossy from, like from iTunes or streaming service like Spotify. If your ear are not familiar with lossless music, try this:

See if you can hear the difference between common lossy format like mp3 and aac/m4a to losssless format like FLAC or CD.

So, did it make sense?

Short answer: No, it didn’t. I think right now I should stick to CD quality audio or it’s lossy equivalent. The high resolution audio didn’t give me any mind blowing listening experience or those “nuances”. Except for those nice placebo forcing me to critically listen.

Long answer:

File size. The most “mendokusai” factor why I didn’t like high resolution audio. I don’t want 200% or more bitrate for something I can’t hear (more on this later). It just seems, weird.

The hardware. Especially the DAC and player. This one, I talk about audio bit depth, beacause I have confidence that is most DAC are capable to produce high frequency ultrasonics.

top of SINAD Graph as of first April of 2019, audiosciencereview.com

Recently I discovered audiosciencereview.com for it’s measurements of consumer DAC and player. One thing they measure is how loud the music or audio being played compared to distortion and noise. This is directly affect the dynamic range of music being played. It is called : Signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SINAD) in electronic/communication terms . It’s not far from Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and for easy read, I will interchangeably use these abbreviations.

From the graph, it’s clear that nothing of those tested products are over 120 dB in SINAD, that’s mean those products has less of 20bit depth. While high resolution audio is needed to be atleast 24bit of audio depth, or it’s around 144dB SNR.

Simply, top performers DAC or player can’t even properly play the such wide dynamic range of high resolution music format.

Most music these days and age is dynamically compressed. Im not referring to lossy music format like m4a/aac or mp3, but the actual music itself. The loudest part is softer, and softer part sounds louder, by the wat this short video will explain it better.

the Loudness War

And the problem is, if most music is dynamically compressed, it’s didn’t make sense to use high resolution audio’s wide bit depth to store those information. And ironically some (if not most) of hi-res release vs cd-quality release has the same dynamic range. But, releases with minimal to no dynamic compression like fom Chesky Records is sounds amazing and immersive, even in lossy format like mp3.

(Actually I quite like compressed music, it make music easier to listen at low levels)

Practical hearing level. Most of the time, I listen on headphones and iems. My rough estimate I listen at 60dB SPL most of the time. I live far from the streets, I think my environment noise level is about 20dB SPL after being reduced by closed back headphones or iems.

So I got around 40dB loudest part of my music to enjoy before the noise drowning off the softer sounding part and that is enough for me. Also I listen at 80 dB ish for wider dynamic tracks.

At this point, CD quality audio that has 90dB dynamic range from it’s 16bit depth is overkill.

To experience the full 140dB dynamic range of Hi-Res’ 24bit, you must raise your listening level to 140dB+your environment noise. This is impractical and dangerous, and sure way to get yourself deaf.

For Hi-Fi system listening on that loud, you’ll getting noise complains from your neighbor.

And again, there is no point spending extra bits for more harmful effect instead positive one.

Im not a dolphin. I can comfortably and consciously hear bass at 25Hz and upper region at 15Khz. So, it’s no no for me listening to sonic content above 20Khz, even some Hi-Res release has sampling rate to 192Khz ( it’s up to 96Khz vibration in second)

How about ultrasonic effect?

I don’t know, simply can’t hear it, can’t enjoy it. What I understand is ultrasound is possibly dangerous to human at high SPL.

Stairsteps?

From my understanding, that’s not how a DAC works.

Even if the stairsteps is exactly become a square wave at 20kHz with 44.1kHz sampling rate, to make square wave you need multiple odds harmonics of sine wave. The fundamental wave is at 20kHz, to make it a square wave you need another harmonics at 60kHz, 100kHz, 140kHz, 180kHz, …other odd harmonic (the more you add, the more square it become).

Then, if you can’t hear anything above 20kHz to make it a square wave, “stairstep” will perceived as a nice, smooth sine wave.

nice square and sine wave demonstration

Closing

Trust your ear.

Be aware that our hearing system can be easily fooled, placebo effect, and marketing bias is still there.

Further reading

(the article that made me/inspired me to write my opinion on hires audio)