Funny that the author says we haven't found any such people in the past 100 years of testing with truly exceptional hearing, such as a greatly extended hearing range, so they probably don't exist, yet I was tested at around 13 as having 33KHz upper range, which allowed me to hear a beetle walking over leaves and grass in a basement window sill at about 20 feet away...
Unfortunately I lost a lot of hearing through concerts, headphones, and traffic, but I can still tell the difference between an MP3 and CD-quality music much of the time.
The loudness war seems to have been a temporary problem, prevalent mostly because music was primarily listened as downloads of individual files or small collections of files. Music streaming services have since become a very important music listening medium. Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music and others do normalization of these loudness levels. This neutralizes the loudness wars as it makes loudness wars treatment o…
The loudness war was great. I totally appreciate the extremes it reached and the new music production techniques that were developed in response. Some utterly squashed, distorted albums like The Prodigy's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned are masterpieces. Same goes for some 10-15 year old Mr. Oizo, SebastiAn albums. Over-compression can be very aesthetic. Dynamic range is overrated...
I agree that loud albums can still be amazing. Multiple albums on Wikipedia's 'loud' albums list [1] belong to my favorite albums of all time.
Good points in the article, but it has some flaws. The problem whenever somebody writes about digital audio, is that it is very tempting to hold on to sampling theory (Nyquist limit, etc) and totally discard the problems of implementing an actual Analog-Digital and Digital-Analog chain that works perfectly at 44100Hz sample rate. I agree with the assesment that 16 bit depth is good enough; even 14 bit is good enough…
the other thing that is always overlooked in this discussion is that sampling theory only guarantees frequency content reproduction, not phase. The closer you get to the Nyquist rate, the less phase information is recoverable. For that reason alone, a higher sampling rate is appropriate even if you intend to lowpass filter to around 20khz. So, is phase audible or necessary? Some will argue it, but I guarantee the phase of a live instrument is not altered, why shouldn't reproduced sound have the same phase info? And the 20khz range is only an estimate, humans do react to higher frequencies even if they don't 'hear' it. I don't have a link, but studies have demonstrated that people will react to dog-whistle ranges of sound even though they don't report 'hearing' it. That's not snake oil, there are two subsystems to our sound sense: the physical and the 'processing circuitry' in the brain. The article covers the anatomy of the ear pretty well, but ignores the other part. The same way a skilled artist may pick up on color changes or a designer notices balance of white space, etc, the 'golden ear' phenomenon is much more about training and practice than anatomical anomalies. Totally off the cuff, id argue that 30-40khz is not unreasonable to shoot for for a reproduction system. It's not harmful, at the least, as long as your system is designed for that bandwidth. And to give some overhead and encode phase, 192k sampling isn't egregious. Maybe 96k is sufficient. 24 bit depth is probably harder to justify, as far as encoding JND of human hearing, but it does allow for greater dybamic range without dithering, and it doesn't have any even theoretical drawbacks (other than data rate, that is). So no, 24/192 is not crazy to shoot for. Maybe something more like 20/96 would be just nearly as good with a much lower bitrate. But, as mentioned elsewhere, most recordings don't even use the 16 bits of CDs properly, so there is a whole social issue layered onto that. Btw, I'm an electrical engineer with a background in acoustics and signal processing, my opinion is informed on this topic.
Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynam…
> Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dyn…
This. Once the "master" is treated with the maximizing limiters that are used in the loudness war the files are just rendered into their separate file formats.
If the SA cd promised that they reloaded the source tape/protools/whatever DAW was used and remixed/ remastered the songs to actually have dynamic range then I would be interested. As far as I am aware this isn't happening, and is implausible for any record of considered a classic
Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynam…
the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynamic range. Yeah, this is often true. Some of Green Day's (a band I've never previously been into) albums were released in 24/192 or 24/96 a few years back and they actually sounded really great, with real dynamic range. Also true? The completely absurd fact that sometimes a vinyl rip of an album will actually have the highest…
> Yeah, this is often true. Some of Green Day's (a band I've never previously been into) albums were released in 24/192 or 24/96 a few years back and they actually sounded really great, with real dynamic range.
Back in the day you'd occasionally see remastered "gold" discs released. The advertising made a big deal about the disc material. Those probably sounded different too (they managed to sell them at a great premium) but with those, they sounded better because of the newer remastering, not the disc technology.
It's certainly possible this is the case with some of those releases remastered for SACD as well. The label probably didn't give Green Day a huge amount of money for production when they made Dookie, for example, but it eventually sold 20 million copies and additional production made sense. If it sounds better to the listener it's a real benefit, too, but it is quite likely not down to the playback technology.
Two oddball things I've noticed about remasters in the last couple of years: there's some agreement out there that the newest remaster of Hendrix's records is not the best. And King Crimson, who has an audiophile following and decorates their catalog with remasters with alarming regularity, removed a little dynamic range (an oversimplification) from the newest remaster of Larks Tongues in Aspic when remastering the CD and mastering for DVD/A because people very understandably complained about the (technically very good) previous version being too quiet. Audiophiles say they want dynamic range, but...
You ought to have read the rest of this thread before leaving this comment. I’d be very happy with 24/96 or 24/48 if I could get recordings at that bitrate that aren't given a loudness wars treatment. Since I often can't, I have to go for 24/192 or SACD even if all that extra room is completely superfluous, just because that format was decently mastered. > Most music producers use samples... Most people interested in…
"some classical labels are now giving loudness-wars treatment" That's depressing.
Haha, at least classical IS usually recorded well, being an audiophile metal-head these days is depressing. If I use my normal setup almost everything clips badly.
Perhaps this is a silly question but the explanations mostly make perfect sense to me but in the case of sample rate, what happens when two waves with very different frequencies overlap? Say I've got an 18kHz wave and a 9kHz wave and the 9kHz wave is ever so slightly out of phase. Then imagine there are 10 different waves under 20kHz all interfering with each other in different wages. Is it still possible to reproduc…
With regards to the first part of your question - as long as the signal is bandlimited the Nyquist-Shannon theorem applies. If all of the waves are under 20kHz, regardless of how they're interfering with each other, the signal can be reconstructed perfectly with a 40kHz sample rate.
Minor niggle: we can see ultraviolet just a little because it makes various bits of our eyes glow. Perceptually this shows up to us as a little bit of fuzziness near a UV source. But no, we can't see it with anything like the resolution we see visible light.
I've heard (and it passes the smell test) that even if your ears can't resonate at frequencies higher than human hearing, the space you are in can, and your ears are sensitive to the differences in arrival time that are smaller than the pitches we can't hear. So at least in high sample rate music the imaging could potentially be cleaner. Assuming super great everything else.
That's one of those things that sounds true without putting thought into it but is ultimately false. A 44.1kHz sampled sounds can encode phases with offsets smaller than 22µs (1/44.1k). How much smaller? I'm not exactly sure, but I believe it's dependent on your sample size. My guess is 1/2^16 (assuming sample resolution of 16 bits), but I might be off by a factor of 2 (or indeed 100% wrong) there. Caveat emptor. If…
The formula, as far as I could find, is:
1 / (2 * pi * bandwidth * 2 ^ bitdepth)
So for full scale 44/16 signal it is about 0.1 nanosecond.
More here [1]. There are also some sample files for ABX tests there.
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.
This reminds me, class D amplifiers are effectively using only 1-bit sampling (!!), the trick being it uses a high sample rate. And these are some of the best amplifiers around.