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Originally Posted by JSWolf
I'm not say 16/44.1 is lousy. It's perfect for audiobooks & loudness wars victims.
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16/44.1 is also more than good enough for a well-mastered CD. You see, as a CD is 16/44.1 already, ripping it at any higher resolution doesn't improve the sound quality.
The ONLY way you can benefit from a higher resolution (if you have the hearing to hear it, and the equipment to play it), is when your music comes straight from the master.
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What I don't get is why ruin good recordings by remastering them to be flat?
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Do you know what a 'hot' LP is?
That's vinyl which has been cut to be as loud as possible. You can only go so far, because otherwise you'd damage the record. On a CD, you can push much further. First, you raise the loudest parts as far as they'll go. That's officially 89 dB on a CD (when running on a calibrated reference system), but with tricks, you can get up to 99-100 dB. If that's not loud enough, you start raising the quieter parts as high as they'll go, and then you get the tell-tale 'brick wall' mastering.
This image shows brick wall mastering
The top part is correctly mastered. The bottom part is brick walled, especially on the right, where the waveform almost fills the entire spectrum.
The peaks in the top waveform are the louder parts: bass, drums, beats, riffs, fill-ins, that sort of thing. They stand out. That's why they're peaks. You can only have loud sounds if you also have quiet sounds. Brick wall mastering destroys bass, drums, and beats and such because it removes all the peaks. It makes your penny whistle the same loudness as a church organ, and an acoustic guitar will be just as loud as a Bösendorfer grand piano. (And that is one loud m***f***, lemme tell ya.)
And the entire point of this is to try and be louder than everyone else.