There are many reasons to want better than CD. First, if you're talking about ripping real physical CDs (nuts!), quality of those rips varies wildly. So just looking for higher res files will save you from awful experience of listening to CD read errors (happened to me a few times).
Then there is the fact that LOUDNESS WARS were a thing, and many CDs (nuts!) suffer from that. Avoiding CD rips or CD quality rips can also save you from this.
That last part is also the reason why many buy vinyl instead of physical CDs when preferring physical media.
Also, there is this special kind of schizophrenics who just encode various shit into upper frequencies for lulz. If you know Aphex Twin, he's among them. This is the real sonogram of a real Aphex Twin track.
@lanodan@volpeon oh... sure, for distribution and casual listening 16bit/44.1kHz (or 48kHz) is enough. 24bit will make it more than plenty.
However, some dudes are picky and wanna be sure that their music came straight from the mastering table.
Now, if you wanna really have a good laugh, torrent trackers are full of 192kHz/24bit _VINYL_ rips. Afaik vinyl can give you maximum range of around 72dB, which translates to roughly 10-12bits of sample size necessary. Why would someone do this? For shits and giggles, I guess.
First, the reason why CD Audio used 44.1kHz instead of plain 40kHz is because low-pass filters fucking eat shit. You just can't cut out >20kHz frequencies in analogue, so there's some space to work with.
Second, aliasing is actually a thing. E.g. when you sample sound at 44.1kHz rate (or 48kHz if you're classy), higher frequencies might alias into the audible range and you will get shit instead of the sound you wanted to record. More on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing).
Third, oversampling leads to higher sound quality because it allows dithering to remove sampling noise (aka quantisation error). There are several tricks that allow pushing most of that noise into the upper inaudible frequencies, leaving stuff below 20kHz more or less noise-free. Also, more on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither).
Fourth, going back to DACs, higher resolution DACs work basically with the same principle but in reverse, allowing to reproduce signals closer to the original. Btw they aren't even 384kHz PCM. Most ADCs and DACs today are DSM (like in DSD format) and operate at 2.8224MHz or a multiple of that with 1-bit sample size. Again, more on damn stupid Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation).
TL;DR you probably should think about hi-res audio not as a means to listen to bat sonar or dolphin orgasm screams or whatever but as a form of anti-aliasing. Sorta similar to MSAA for graphics.
There, you made me do this. I hope you're happy now.
@lanodan@volpeon dammit i wrote an explanation here a few times why hi-res audio makes sense. Don't wanna look it up, but trust me, it kinda does make sense.
@warmbeverageenjoyer@vidister@lanodan you should use only audiophile graded ethernet cables to prevent distortions from those torrents. Also, make sure your seedbox only seed classical music. Having Taylor Swift on the same ethernet link would ruin your sound forever!
@lanodan@vidister I wonder how filesystem affects audio quality. Because hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media. I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.