Audio Application Notes
The Audio Path in Consumer-Grade Audio Products
Explore the Differences Between Consumer and Professional Audio Products
Consumer products are usually packed with features but they often fall short when it comes to audio quality. These products deliver a level of performance that is acceptable to most consumers, and they do so at very affordable prices. Nevertheless there is often a large performance difference between consumer and professional audio products.
Jeff's teardown analysis is a bit technical, but I know that some of our readers will appreciate the detail. For the rest of our readers, let me summarize by saying that there are real differences between consumer products and high-end professional audio products.
- John Siau (introduction), Jeff Switzer (content)
Creating a High-Resolution 5.1 Music Server
Blu-ray disks often contain high-resolution audio formats. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD are two Blu-ray audio encoding formats that support lossless high-resolution audio. These systems support up to 8 channels of 24-bit, 96kHz audio, or up to 6 channels of 24-bit 192 kHz audio.
Blu-ray disks may seem like an ideal solution for the distribution of high-resolution audio, but there are problems. It is not easy to gain access to the high-resolution audio stored on these disks.
Our solution was to set up a PC-based music (and video) server. We used a Blu-ray equipped PC running Windows 7 and the JRiver MediaCenter software.
This application note provides a guide for setting up a music server that can play the lossless high-resolution audio tracks found on DVD and Blu-ray disks.
- John Siau
High-Resolution Audio - Sample Rate
Sample Rate
Digital audio systems take instantaneous snapshots or "samples" of an analog audio signal and then store each of these samples as numeric values. The digital samples can be stored and transmitted without any loss of quality, but these samples must be used to reconstruct an analog signal before we can listen to the audio. The sample rate places very specific limitations ...
- John Siau
High-Resolution Audio - Bit Depth
Bit Depth
We now have 16-bit CDs and 24-bit high-resolution recordings available to us. What are the advantages of a 24-bit word length? Are 24-bit recordings better? How many bits do we really need?
Bit depth (also known as word length) indicates how many bits are used to represent each sample in a digital sampling system. Each sample is a snapshot of a signal or voltage at an instant in time. The CD uses 16 bits to represent the voltage of an audio waveform at each instant in time. Other digital audio systems use different bit depths ranging from 1 to 64 bits. It is important to understand the relationship between bit depth and audio quality. The bit depth sets ...
- John Siau
What High-Resolution Audio is NOT
"Low-Resolution Hardware Cannot Deliver High-Resolution Audio"
The music industry is struggling to define High-Resolution Audio or "HRA". In doing so, most have focused on the delivery formats - analog vs. digital, 24-bits vs. 16-bits, 1X vs. 2X and 4X sample rates, PCM vs. DSD, uncompressed vs. compressed.
But, High-Resolution Audio is much more than the delivery format ...
"High-Resolution Audio Requires High-Resolution Performance at all Stages of the Recording and Playback Chain"
- John Siau
Audio Myth - "24-bit Audio Has More Resolution Than 16-bit Audio"
This myth goes something like this:
"Analog audio has infinite amplitude resolution."
"Digital audio is limited to a finite number of steps."
"24-bit audio has more resolution than 16-bit audio."
While it is true that digital systems quantize the amplitude of the audio signal to the nearest step in the digital encoding system, this does not necessarily mean that digital systems cannot have infinite resolution. Contrary to popular belief, digital systems can provide infinite amplitude resolution if they are properly dithered.
- John Siau