131–140 of 445 posts
I've said it before, this video demo is one of the very best I've ever seen. https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml So well prepared, so well presented, so little that could be removed without ruining it. I aspire to do such good demos but always fall so short.
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What about transhumans? I'm looking forward to my HiFi Cochleatron 9000(tm) when my hearing starts to go. Then I'll be mighty glad we made all these high-res recordings.
That makes for some genuinely interesting thought experiments. What if, this actually becomes possible, but we discover that because we previously couldn't hear these frequencies, our instruments and equipment are HORRIBLY mis-tuned and sound terrible? We may end up having to re-record tons of stuff. Something something premature optimization. And part of me is glad that the art of hand-making instruments is not yet…
There's another effect that comes into play, though. There's a minimum pitch separation between simultaneous notes that we expect, and when notes are closer than that, they clash. That separation is usually around a minor third (~300 cents) in most of the human hearing range, but in the bass it's a lot wider, and in the high treble it's smaller. That's why you can play two notes a major second apart (~200 cents) on a piano in the high treble and it sounds okay, but down in the low bass it sounds muddy if they're closer than about a major third or perfect fourth (~400-500 cents). So, if we extrapolate into higher frequency ranges, then it's not unreasonable to expect that we would be able to interpret musical intervals that are a lot closer than 200 cents as consonant.
It's also possible that the minimum note separation thing is just an artifact of how our ears physically work, and that an artificial ear would have no such limitation. Which could open the possibility of enjoying kinds of music that we can't currently imagine as pleasant with our normal ears.
What about for non-humans? Consider a dog that lives with a musician who plays, for example, trumpet. The musician plays the trumpet at home to practice, and also records his practices to review. A trumpet produces significant acoustic energy out to about 100 KHz [1]. When the musician plays live the dog hears a rich musical instrument. When the musician plays back his recordings, half the frequency range that the do…
Both those huge efforts has gone into controlling the humanly audible part of the sound. Whatever sound is accidentally produced in other frequencies is probably at best aesthetically neutral, but more likely distracting.
Though my guess trumpeting is just noise to dogs either way.
However, all musicians I know use these high-rez formats internally. The reason for that, when you apply audio effects, especially complex VST ones, these discretization artifacts noticeably decrease the result quality.
Maybe, the musicians who distribute their music in 24/192 format expect their music to be mixed and otherwise processed.
Kind of a side topic, but does anyone know what's up with Sirius XM satellite radio? Whenever I listen to that in my wife's car, I find the sound quality to be obnoxiously bad, to the point that I choose to listen to plain old FM if I'm driving her car. The higher frequencies (hi hats for example) are mushy and sound like they are warbling, and the sound just generally has a lack of depth. What is the explanation for…
Bandwidth allocation is per channel, talk only channels are even worse and some words are barely comprehensible.
Off topic, but I've noticed in the gym, sometimes the music playing from the instructor's iPhone through one of those cheap Ion Block Rocker bluetooth speakers (big boxy one, looks like a guitar amp) has very very noticeable pitch sag in various parts of various songs. It's via bluetooth, and the source is Pandora. I even googled Pandora and pitch change, and found some forums with folks discussing bluetooth causing…
Many Bluetooth speakers are not loseless. Cheaper ones are likely going to support MP3 and that's it (or even worse, just the minimum required SBC).
Pandora is already compressed, if your instructor doesn't know to flip the "HQ sound" toggle (which is turned off by default on Mobile, even with a paid subscription!), then 128kbit MP3 recompressed to MP3 yet again, is going to sound pretty atrocious.
Not sure if one of the other codecs used for A2DP can cause pitch changes though.
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It's not that much different to think of than 480p vs 4K/2160p -- dramatically higher resolution, increasing the width and length of the 'grid' that sound is recorded into -- except that in the case of audio fidelity, quality after a certain point causes problems with playback systems, resulting in audible artifacts and distortion.
That analogy works if you modify it: - 480p vs 2160p is measuring the resolution of your cell phone propped up on a pillow at the other end of your living room - experimental evidence shows that your eyesight is not good enough to pick up on the increased resolution, you've maxed out your sensory perception - Your phone stutters trying to stream at 4k so the playback might actually be worse.
as engineers we will never solve this problem as long as the "44.1kHz is good enough" dogma is perpetuated.
here's a question. why are frequency and bit depth the only two variables under discussion here? how does the human ear locate a sound in space? suppose I place a series of 20kHz tone generators along a wall (and that I can still hear 20kHz :) and trigger them at different times, and record the session in stereo at 44.1kHz with a standard X-Y mic setup. will I be able to reconstruct the performance?
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Basically, the sampling theorem says you can reconstruct the exact waveform with a certain number of samples. Adding a bunch more samples bulks up the file, but you didn't need them to restore the exact waveform. However, the unnecessary samples are in the file between you and the next sample you do need. At high enough levels of waste this creates an I/O bottleneck that hampers performance. Another way to look at is…
> Increasing the data rate does not continue to make the waveform more and more detailed to human auditory perception in the way that raising the pixel density does for human visual perception. Early low data rate codecs - such as the one used for GSM mobiles - are obviously inferior, but still functional. I think a better analogy is that an iPhone 7 has a 1 megapixel screen, so there's no difference between a 1 mega…