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by TacticalCoder
1254 days ago
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> ... made me think what a fascinating artefact a compact disc is too. They are! And compact disc have a great thing going for them: 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is basically where it's at. Sure some are going to say you need 88.2 / 24 bit or whatever but IMO the creation of the CD audio format in the late seventies / early eighties was a stroke of genius. 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is my endgame. I'm totally fine with it since my first "portable" CD player (was weighting a ton) in the late eighties up until today. And it's going to be sufficient until my last days. I don't need "more" than that. Nowadays I don't listen to my CD directly: I rip them to FLAC and listen mostly to my FLAC files (my car takes WAV or mp3, not FLAC though, so I convert my FLAC to mp3 for the car) and, rarely, I listen to a CD (weirdly enough my car still has a CD player). I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing. And I don't care if they start failing: I legally own bitperfect archives. I love to own my music. I still cannot believe that the first documents describing the CD format came out in 1980... That's 43 years ago. |
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> I don't need "more" than that.
> I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing
I'm with you regarding CDs, but 16 bit 44.1 kHz is only sufficient if you have good playback hardware (like a good DAC).
If not, a lower-end DAC can give more accurate audio reproduction just by throwing more data at the problem. For people who don't own/store their music but just rent/stream it, going to higher that 16 bit 44.1 kHz makes sense.
Think like screen resolution and text: displaying text shouldn't be that different in 1080p vs 4k. However, due to the algorithms use for scaling that also smooth the pixels at the border of each letter like ClearType (https://www.howtogeek.com/28790/tweak-cleartype-in-windows-7...), the higher resolutions get an advantage unless you use an old fixed-size font.
It's roughly the same with audio: if you use CDs as a source for your FLACs, get hardware a good DAC and the difference is unlikely to be perceptible. Use your ears and experimentation.