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Comment by BoingBoomTschak | Hacker News Reader

>And this is the one big argument in favor of Hi Res audio

It's really not. For redbook, fs/2 is 22 kHz and while human hearing maxes at 20 kHz, it's not a hard cutoff: combine our low sensibility to high frequencies (cf ISO 226), the average listener's hearing not going much further than 18 in reality and frequency masking by other simultaneous notes and the small aliasing/imaging issues near fs/2 aren't a real problem.

But the real important factor rarely mentioned is material: the amount of music with meaningful content at a meaningful volume at those frequencies is statistically negligible.

Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period.

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"Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period."

The "period" is unwarranted, because there are too important caveats. Firstly, it has been extremely common for albums to be sold with very compressed dynamic range, assuming the average consumer will be listening in noisy environments etc. However, the mastering supplied to Hi Res shops sometimes lacks that compression, so that is where you can hear the album with room to breathe.

Secondly, the SACD format allowed adding a layer for 5.1 surround sound. In classical music, this is especially important for works where the performers are spread out around the hall, not just all on stage in front of the listeners.

So, with Hi Res the higher frequencies and 24 bit depth are snake oil, but the ancillary benefits are audible to anyone with a good listening environment.

> However, the mastering supplied to Hi Res shops sometimes lacks that compression, so that is where you can hear the album with room to breathe.

I've almost never heard of Hi Res with a totally new master that wouldn't have been previously available as CD, to be honest. This isn't common, right?

> the SACD format allowed adding a layer for 5.1 surround sound

Well, yeah. Too bad I don't have a PS3 to rip the SACD layer =)

"I've almost never heard of Hi Res with a totally new master that wouldn't have been previously available as CD, to be honest. This isn't common, right?"

It has been a few years now since I did all this collecting, but I do remember instances where the CD was brickwalled, but both the Hi Res downloads and the vinyl release got a mastering with more dynamic range.

Well, if you add vinyl, yeah. I had Celtic Frost's Monotheist in that situation, and I bought the horrible CD first.

> Firstly, it has been extremely common for albums to be sold with very compressed dynamic range, assuming the average consumer will be listening in noisy environments etc. However, the mastering supplied to Hi Res shops sometimes lacks that compression, so that is where you can hear the album with room to breathe

I had a friend who was extolling the virtues of Hi Res for the pop music he was buying so I asked him to send me a track, and it had the same brick compression as the standard iTunes version and sounded just as flat (I was hoping that even if it was compressed the same, the extra resolution meant that you could recover the detail, but there wasn't an audible improvement).

If that's what they want to sell, they need to create an actual term for that, like the audio version of "Director's Cut", not just sneak it into some random Hi Res releases and hope you find "the good ones" while the rest are snake oil.

> Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period

There's a karaoke bar I go to with "Hi Res" logos on the speakers. These are basically MIDI files, in a loud bar atmosphere, who is going to hear the difference, haha.

And for higher price too.

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