24-bit 192kHz Audio

You'll need either a good pair of headphones and or a dac/amp combo to really see any difference. Some ears will hear a difference but if you really want to hear any sort of difference, it comes down to your gear.

Its a nice feature but you are unlikely to hear anything different than you would from a very well recorded track at 16/44.1, 24/48, 24/96, 24/192. Lots of testing and comparisons have been done, very few people can actually hear any differences and describe what they are. The 16 bit word length is deep enough to cover the full range of volume for nearly everyone, and few people can hear anything above or below the 20khz/20hz range -- the choice of 16/44/1 for Redbook CD wasn't arbitrary. The quality of the master recording and the digital transfer is the main factor, along with the reproduction path, DAC, amp, speakers/headphones. I cannot truly tell any difference between WAV, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis VBR 192kbps versions of most tracks, and if I think I hear a difference on one occasion, I don't hear it again the next time. How good are your headphones - a huge factor listening through the phone. Try a true audiophile over-the-ear headphone or in-ear phone and you will be quite surprised at the difference. They aren't that expensive - one of my favorites is the Grado SR-60i, under $80, read the reviews, you'll see why.

There really seems to be a lot of misinformation out there about high resolution audio and I hope to give people some real answers here. I'm a recording engineer and I recently bought the G2 for its ability to play high def music.

Does higher than cd quality make a difference? What is the difference?

Think about an HD tv for a minute. Whats the difference between standard definition and high definition on a TV? Its the same kind of thing with audio, more detail. No one has better than 20/20 vision, does that mean hd tv is useless? HD audio doesn't require you to hear above or below the normal range of human hearing either.

HD tv doesn't make that much of a difference when you are watching netflix on your laptop, but it definitely looks nice on a big screen home theater system. Not only that, but some movies look better in HD and show off that technology better than others.

In the same way, if you are listening to music on a casual level in your car, or at a party, or as some kind of background, hd doesn't make much of a difference. But if you are sitting down to really listen to music on some nice speakers or headphones, then it makes a difference (although I do hear a difference even on those ipod earbuds). And some recordings sound better in HD than others.

Here is what I hear as the difference between mp3, cd quality (44.1/16 lossless) and hd (96k or 192k and 24 bit) : More detail in quieter background sounds. The decay of reverb is smoother. The overall sound is wider and has more depth. The higher frequencies are more defined sounding. Overall, everything sounds more real as if the singer were right in front of me. Lower quality such as mp3s sound fuzzy and blurry in comparison.

But again, think hd tv vs standard definition. SD is still fine for most things. Its not like we are comparing HD tv to Black and white tv with bad reception. The differences are subtle and you probably won't notice unless you are really focusing on listening to music.

That said, a few specific things about the LG G2 that I've noticed:

The built in music player is the only player that will actually give you high def output. its the one that is just called " music", and it will show a "hi fi" logo when you play something higher than cd quality. Other music players will down sample and convert back down to 16 bit 44.1k cd quality even though they are able to play the hi def files. They just aren't coming out at hi def. From what I understand, Android doesn't support higher bit depth and sampling rates very well but the built in music player somehow works around this. I'm hoping that now that this phone supports this technology other apps will get updated and be able to take advantage of this, but they don't yet as far as I know.

One other annoying thing is that all hd resolutions seem to be supported except 44.1/24 bit. This is kind of a pain and I hope they fix this soon because 44.1/24 bit is pretty much the industry standard resolution for recording right now. And HDtracks.com is releasing new music at mostly that resolution.

I hope this helps. For those with a little more knowledge of how digital recording works. Here is my thinking behind hd audio. The nyquist theorem is flawed because it assumes that whatever you are recording will be exactly in phase with your A/D converter when recording. In reality, higher frequencies could end up being sampled at zero crossings or other points slightly out of phase with the sound you are recording. Higher sample rates minimize this.

Thanks Geeztown. Good explanation, mine would have been 3 x longer...
The Grado SR 60i are a great pair on really good Inexpensive headphones that have been around for many years. Try them, they will make a huge difference.

GeeztownPro said:

For those with a little more knowledge of how digital recording works. Here is my thinking behind hd audio. The nyquist theorem is flawed because it assumes that whatever you are recording will be exactly in phase with your A/D converter when recording. In reality, higher frequencies could end up being sampled at zero crossings or other points slightly out of phase with the sound you are recording. Higher sample rates minimize this.

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It is not flawed. The exact frequency fs/2 is known as the critical frequency, and you only lose information about its original phase. This is the only case where you would have the aliasing problems you describe, and nowhere in the proof is made any assumption on the signal's phase. The sampling theorem only provides a lower bound for the sampling frequency that would allow perfect reconstruction, and as long as the Nyquist frequency in your system is not exactly the highest frequency present in the signal there are no problems.

The maximum frequency present in the signal is what defines the Nyquist frequency, but for practical purposes is chosen arbitrarily (meaning that the criteria to chose sampling frequency for audio material have nothing to do with the signal itself but with properties of the human hearing) , and the signal is adapted to fulfill the requirements for the validity of the theorem.

About playing audio at 96 kHz (or higher samplerates) and 24 bits, the most important factor is the bit depht (number of bits), but can only be appreciated in most cases with signals containing a lot of instruments or very complex harmonic content, such as orchestral recordings. The sampling frequency difference might not be even perceibed. The real difference comes when you have to somehow process the track (mix it with other tracks or add effects to it, in particular pitch shifting since higher sampling rates reduces interpolation error), since higher precision will reduce the rounding errors. Another technical reason for preferring higher sample rates is that.in practise most DAC's don't attempt "perfect" or "sinc" interpolation. Instead they generate a sequence of rectangular pulses and low-pass the output to remove the spurious frequency content added by this reconstruction process (known as aliasing).

If this phone can also record with that quality I want one!

DP