24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

I must say I get rather irritated when people spend time worrying about dubious 'tweaker' methods to improve their audio, when the most under-performing component of most people's sound equipment also has the lowest-hanging fruit: The room itself. When people ask me where they should spend money to improve the quality of their hi-fi or home theater system, in nearly every case my response will be something like "get a thicker rug" or "put something on this wall to absorb…

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

They do make sense provided they are real master recording stems (not upsampled) to do mixing or mastering. For listening by people, they don't. You'd really do not want that much accuracy in your hearing, it would drive you totally mad.

I don't even have to read this to agree, and point out that the problem with popular music today is that it has all been destroyed with DYNAMIC compression. The harm caused by this despicable trend exceeds that caused by lossy data compression.