combatentropyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?”
Monty Montgomery's explanation of digital audio might be the best explanatory video I have ever witnessed, link to this video
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#digitalaudio#sampling#nyquist-shannon
D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org)
FL Studio
798K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 15 people: 15 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2026.
- Presented by Monty Montgomery, creator of Ogg Vorbis
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
646K views13 years ago15 recommendations
HardwareSystems programmingAudio and DSPElectronicsComputation and complexity
Monty Montgomery demonstrates the realities of digital audio sampling, quantization, and dither using analog and digital test equipment.
Original Video: xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml Why you don't need 24 Bit 192 kHz listening formats - people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html More videos in this series: xiph.org/video/ Get the software - wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell Monty at Xiph presents a well thought out and explained, real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit-depth, and dither on real audio equipment using both modern digital analysis and vintage analog bench equipment. This video has been reproduced with permission of Monty @ xipg.org and in accordance with Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Further reading: Audio Myths & DAW Wars - image-line.com/support/FLHelp/html/app_audio.htm This is a video about the digital vs analog audio quality debate. It explains, with examples, why analog audio within the accepted limits of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz) can be reproduced with perfect fidelity using a 44.1 kHz 16 Bit digital signal.Why it's here
15 people recommend thisWhat people say. Widely recommended as the absolute best and clearest visual explanation of digital audio sampling and Nyquist-Shannon theorem.
mhh__on Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]”
link The talk link to this video <-- Youtube backup in case it doesn't work (YMMV) I wish I could force any audiophiles to watch it before they waste their money on snake oil. I think a similar point can be made about analogue synthesis, e.g. You pay Moog £1500 for what is ultimately a fancy box for a relatively simple analogue circuit.
SeanLukeon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why Cassettes?”
…e or really most people to hear. This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video. link to this video…
sramsayon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Sampling: What Nyquist didn't say, and what to do about it (2018) [pdf]”
This is the most lucid explanation of aliasing I think I've ever read. I mostly deal with this stuff in the realm of audio where the matter of analog vs digital rages regularly. The reason one hears "Nyquist says" so often from people defending digital audio is that the pro-analog people are imagining stair-stepped signals in which the information that is "lost" results in a noticeable degradation in sound quality. This (11-year-old) video is the gold standard for addressing this concern: link to this video Curiously, no one ever seems to mention the actual problems (like aliasing).
hackingonemptyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense”
@xiphmont also made an amazing video response to the many responses he received to this article. Using analog equipment he busts a bunch of myths and demonstrates what really happens with digital audio. link or on YT if you can't play it link to this video
olauon Hacker News • Recommends
On “24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)”
Try watching this video (hope I found the right one): link to this video I think you're right that recording equipment has a long way to go, though; regardless of format I think people can relatively easily distinguish real acoustical instruments from recordings.
louthyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A 1970s Teenager's Bedroom (1998)”
…P3 then you can often hear the top end frequency sounds (like cymbals) becoming 'mushy'. To the vast majority of people once you get to 192 kbps it's inaudible, and then above that most people with 'perfect ears' would struggle. And that's with a lossy format, never mind the lossless formats of CDs, WAV or FLAC which is the discussion at hand. 1 link to this video…
mc32on Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Vast Re-Education Program of the Superbowl Ads”
Exactly. I like Monty Montgomery from Xiph's explanation video1 on Sine waves, sampling and digital stairsteps. 1 link to this video
benji-yorkon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music”
Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: link to this video Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.
shawnzon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]”
A great video which touches on this idea, but mostly in the context of audio: link to this video (relevant part around 8 minutes)
bchon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Lou Ottens, inventor of cassette tape, has died”
Let Monty Montgomery of xiph.org provide an illuminating tear down of “digital can’t really produce...”: link to this video Edit: fix auto-incorrected xiph.org domain
colejohnson66on Hacker News • Recommends
On “FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio”
Nyquist-Shannon simply says that you need 2x the sample rate of the highest frequency to perfectly recreate something. So, to recreate a 20 kHz wave that was sampled at 16 bits, you'd need 40 kHz sample rate. Bump that up to 22.05 kHz (for anti-aliasing) and you get CD audio. The bit depth, OTOH, is your signal-noise ratio (noise floor) when sampling/quantizing said audio. It's unrelated to Nyquist-Shannon. More bits gives you less noise when reproducing it. For CD audio, 16 bits was chosen to give an acceptable SNR of 96 dB. Monty Montgomery (of xipf.org) has a nice YouTube video related to this: link to this video
ZoomZoomZoomon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Is there anyone here making music?”
…a primer for digital audio as a form. Steve Albini has been putting out some very solid and entertaining videos on recording lately 2. There's also of course a few hyped (but deservedly so) channels such as @DanWorrall, @Producelikeapro or @ProductionAdvice. Nothing I can suggest for courses as I haven't been interested in them for a while. 1 link to this video 2 link…
wwalexanderon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Apple Music Classical”
There is no system high-end enough to allow your ears to magically hear 96kHz, or even 48kHz. Unless you’re very young with golden ears it’s extremely doubtful that you can hear a 24kHz tone. It is absolutely snake oil. link is an overview by the creator of Ogg and Vorbis explaining exactly, scientifically, why these inflated sampling rates are snake oil. link to this video is a longer video by the same person that debunks a lot of digital audio myths.
everfrustratedon Hacker News • Recommends
On “How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?”
Changing the sample rate of audio only affects the frequency range. All audio signal is _perfectly_ represented in a digital form. I am ashamed to admit this took me a long time to properly understand. For further reading I'd recommend: link link to this video
toprankson Hacker News • Mentions
On “50% of vinyl buyers don't own a record player”
This is simply not true. Nyquist’s sampling theorem tells us that sound sampled at 44kHz will reproduce all frequencies in the range of human hearing. There is no “quantization”. link to this video Further the act of mastering and creating the record, and playback using a needle, will inevitably affect the sound somewhat. In the scenario you describe the music is likely to sound very good, but it will never be identical to a CD.