331–340 of 443 posts
That being said, the author makes the error to assume that we experience music only with our ears. But your body can feel e.g. the sound of a drum.
I call for a double bling test with loud enough speakers capable of reproducing the spectrum in question.
I highly doubt there will be an effect from 24/192 but then we will know for sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
assuming a signal is played at "normal" listening volume after first being attenuated by 1/8 digitally (samples shifted 3bits down) and then passed through a high quality dac and amplified, are you saying the difference between 16 and 24 bit streams would be inaudible or nearly so? That to me sounds surprising. That seems to imply that the difference to playing the 16 bit stream unscaled (No digital attenuation and 8…
Well, depending on the gain of the monitors, it will not matter With low enough gain you will have enough headroom, with high gain you run into hissing from the source. At a high gain the hissing from the DAC's noisefloor will be dominant, making the loss of bits a thing of minor conern. In any case, with powered monitors you need an analog volume control at the end of the chain, that's the correct practice if you ca…
The ideal solution would be a digital format where desired attenuation is passed along to the amp, but I don't think eg Toslink does that.
So yes if you want single device (phone) control over volume then you attenuate and amplify a noisier signal only for the convenience of not having to use dual volume controls. It's less than optimal, but like I said, I think there aren't any good digital audio standard with attn.?
So while you do amplify noise, surely you don't want to also lose range? Even if the noise dominates, the DR can easily be avoided!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, no. Bit-perfect ripping is trivial and routine, and tools like the AccurateRip DB (which has checksums for around three million different titles you can use to verify the checksums on your own rips) and the CUEtools database (which has recovery records you can use to correct bit errors on your own rips) prove it. I routinely get bit-accurate single-pass high-speed rips--no "paranoid" settings or re-reads--of disc…
Oh sure, your rips may be perfect at the bit level, but how do you know that they're free of sub-bit quantization that isn't detectable by electronic circuits but can be heard by the human ear? This sub-bit jitter and interference can travel along with a digital file and sneak right past your ordinary bit-level error detection and correction, no matter how lossless you make it. That's because these errors aren't visi…
Same file -> same playback.
If you hear the same sound file twice (or two identical files) and hear something different, you software is broken or you're imagining things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I watched, and I'm confused. How exactly does DAC recreate a band limited signal without having an infinite lookahead? Honest question. Any pointers?
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker%E2%80%93Shannon_inter... . "The Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula or sinc interpolation is a method to construct a continuous-time bandlimited function from a sequence of real numbers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_filter has a less mathematical explanation, but, as Monty mentions in the video, be wary of the sentence "in practice, the output…
Practical filters have non-flat frequency or phase
response in the pass band and incomplete suppression
of the signal elsewhere. The ideal sinc waveform [..]
would require infinite delay.
That is, if I'm mastering, say, for 44.1kHz, what is the recomended antialiasing filter?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd probably make the bet that there exist certain 24-bit sound files that certain listeners can discern from the same sound file that has been downsampled to 16-bit. I would take you up on that bet. This has been tried before, and no difference was found, even when dithering wasn't used! The noise floor on 16 bit audio is around -96dB. There are very few HiFi systems that can manage that. Even in the highly unlike…
I probably should have written 16/44.1 vs 24/192, since I was thinking mostly of the waveform 'beat' interactions as shown in the linked video. Do you feel those are also indistinguishable? I can't afford an actual bet on it, but I'm interested enough to explore a bit and see what I can find.
Besides, if a combination of sounds outside the audible spectrum DID combine to produce audible sounds (maths says they don't, but maybe non-ideal properties of air etc mean they might?), the resultant audible sounds would be picked up by the recording equipment anyway! So you'd never need to record the inaudible source sounds, just the resultant audible bit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh sure, your rips may be perfect at the bit level, but how do you know that they're free of sub-bit quantization that isn't detectable by electronic circuits but can be heard by the human ear? This sub-bit jitter and interference can travel along with a digital file and sneak right past your ordinary bit-level error detection and correction, no matter how lossless you make it. That's because these errors aren't visi…
The decoder/player doesn't know how to read between the bits. Same file -> same playback. If you hear the same sound file twice (or two identical files) and hear something different, you software is broken or you're imagining things.
Can you turn this into mere "bits"? Of course not!
That's why it is so important to protect against sub-bit quantization errors, and this can only be done with proper interconnects. Ordinary cables allow the bits to travel willy-nilly until they jam up against each other creating a brittle, edgy soundstage. Quality interconnects are tuned, aligned, and harmonically shielded to keep those precious bits - and the all-important spaces between them - in a smooth flow.
And then, we can hear all of the things that make us human.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC? I'm sorry but either you're deaf or your equipment is very poor. Bad example.
I keep FLAC copies just so that I have lossless versions that I can convert into the lossy format du jour, but for actually listening, I mass-convert to lossy. I've listened to FLAC and properly encoded MP3 files (@192 and 160) on $50,000 audio equipment, and I can't tell the difference.
It's the most overlooked part of the listening chain, and is in fact the most important part. In fact it always shocks me how many "audiophiles" will pump tens of thousands into audio equipment for their reflective, untreated, boxy listening space. A $1000 pair of speakers in a room with $5000 in room treatment will totally blow away $20,000 pair of speaker in a room with $0 in room treatment. Every time.
http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
That is how you do a presentation!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say being a data compression geek makes anyone a master of DSP or of psychoacoustics. The basic issue with 16-bit is that low level details like reverb tails and hall ambiences or very quiet musical passages get the equivalent of 14-bit (f) 12-bit (mf) to 8-bit (ppp) sampling. This sounds noticeably grainy and digital. It's not about total dynamic range or sine waves, it's about the fact that human ears ca…
If this is so relevant and obvious, why not put up two files: one 192/24 and one 48/16 and allow people to run their own double-blind test as he notes in the article? If you could produce a repeatable test where some number of people can tell that one is better, that would be a powerful argument. He's argued that people have done this test over and over, and nobody can ever tell the difference.
What you need to do is get those files, and send people down to a professional mix studio. Then AB them in there. Get people to sit in the sweet spot. Then you'll have a decent result.
Thing is, people have done this very test in professional listening spaces. And the results are always fascinating (and some people can tell!). In fact it's one of the most fun aspects of a professional facility! Audio shootouts!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait until he gets some of'em Shakti Stones! [1] One reviewer [2] notes: " The effect of the first few Shakti products was not as apparent as when the effect became compounded. Each built on the others' ability to eliminate EMI in the component on or under which it was placed. Music became more relaxed, with greater clarity. Space and ambience increased. The soundfield became considerably more open and defined. At a…
A perfect example of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
It could still be parody though, even though they actually sell this stuff... :P
[1]: http://www.thecableco.com/Manufacturer/Shakti-Innovations