There's also the analog loopback, which for audio, has way less signal degradation than the compression consumers readily accept. For video, they already tried to restrict any analog outputs with DRM, but for audio, that would hurt much more.
Digital audio, no matter how high quality and how many channels, uses vastly less bandwidth than even the lowest quality video signal these days. At absolute best, lossless audio with 16 channels is still less total bandwidth than even USB2.0 speeds. It’s just not fast.
Although signal integrity matters, signal integrity in digital signals is almost always not silent degradation. And often is extremely obvious degradation. So if your cable has problems, you know almost immediately (or, when it happens you know). Unlike analog audio, it either works or it doesn’t. In the marginal case you don’t just get worse sounding audio… you just don’t have audio periodically which sounds super obvious to the ear.
Wait until they find out that audio can be reproduced with little or no generational loss, because there is always an analog signal (since that's the point of audio).
>'Most people' can't distinguish 1080p from 4k from 6 ft away
6ft away (and screen size) being key. From up close, everyone can and the difference is obvious. Whereas with lossy audio, a well encoded track will sound transparent to ~99% of people, no matter how they listen or what equipment they use.
Digital audio is pretty much a solved problem in terms of transparent encoding. Consumer digital video still has a long way to go.
(That said, I do support the use of FLAC, just for that extra safety and because it doesn't really cost too much.)
Analog headphones are lossy, I trust compression algorithms to improve more than I believe manufacturers will use more expensive, higher quality materials and connections at the same price point.
The bigger the system is, the noticeable the difference is. It's the same as displaying jpgs versus analog images on a large projector. The difference is much more noticeable with the audio! But yeah, this is a more of an analog versus digital debate, rather than comparing digital formats. However lossless is called lossless for a reason.
>To me, hundred high-quality audio channels with lossless compression sounds not "INSANE" but "still less than the video".
Well, 100 audio channels 50% lossless compressed files would go about 60 GB for a 2-hour movie. So not really "less than the video".
And that's for 16/44.1 lossless. For 24/96 adjust accordingly.
(Of course not all 100 channels will have sound playing all the time -- except if we're talking for a musical or rock concert video. But it gives a taste of the max storage requirements).
Not really. Even though you can get excellent quality h.265 encodes, it seems the MP3 generation's hearing is so impaired that compressing the hell out of audio and losing tons of audio quality is too common.
What's the point of a beautiful 2500 kbps h.265 video if they're going to kill the audio quality by squashing it to 128 kbps?
But this still doesn't solve the original issue: if I buy music, it should be me who packs the files if I need to lose some information and I should own the original copies lossless. And as I also said, bandwidth and storage space are super cheap nowadays, so I really don't see so many reasons to use lossy codecs.
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