191–200 of 326 posts
One thing I don't see addressed is the experience of feeling frequencies that can't directly be heard. There was a study done with a particular piece of classical music, with and without a particular inaudible component to it. The presence of the inaudible component drastically changed the listeners perception of the music. They described it as more dark or creepy (perhaps not the actual words used, but it matches th…
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…
I agree. It should be about the performance, not the sonics. There are plenty of old Motown and even Beatles recordings with distorted vocals, bad edits, etc. Your brain passes right over them because of the emotional content of the music.
>While Motown shortened song to fit into radio time, the company also produced records specifically with car radio audio quality in mind. Motown recording engineers set up car speakers in the studio so that they could simulate and perfect how a song would sound emanating from a car radio
- what's the point of engineering things to a set of conditions virtually none of your target audience possesses?
Even without debating the science and signal processing arguments raised... In any test where a listener can tell two choices apart via any means apart from listening, the results will usually be what the listener expected in advance; this is called confirmation bias and it's similar to the placebo effect. It means people 'hear' differences because of subconscious cues and preferences that have nothing to do with the…
Well, if we accept that argument, then just about any means of signalling "this sounds better!" will work. How about we choose something that doesn't waste bandwidth?
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What if you want to sample the song later? That's one thing I find concerning with the move to digital. With analog media, you can go back, re-record and get an improved result (provided the source is good) but District 9 (which was shot on Red One) will never have improved quality other than resampling because the source is set to a particular digital format with associated data quality.
There seems to be some strange idea that analogue means 'infinite detail'. In this particular case, there's no significant difference between being limited by the original digital recording resolution and the grain size of a film recording. "[...] provided the source is good" is begging the question; it's no different from saying "District 9 could be better if they hadn't recorded in 4k (or whatever the Red One was u…
While I have no doubt that digital will eventually catch up and surpass film, there inevitably is going to be a transition period where quality films were recorded (let's just say at 2k) where the input is constrained and extrapolation be the only available option.
4k is the current state of the art. It will not be so forever and because it's recorded at 4k, we can't go back and extract more dynamic range due to the limitation of the sensor. Whereas you can go back, redigitize an IMAX film (say Chronos shot in 1985) that is in good condition and get way more info than something shot on 4k yesterday.
TL;DR IMO input still absolutely matters. 35mm is not the upper limit. We went through this with photography and am now doing the same with video/film.
EDIT: After thinking more about it, here's a more extreme example. I purchased a Kodak DC20 back in the 90s (early adopter yay!), even if the camera had decent glass, there's no way I can go back to an image captured by that camera and magically get the equivalent of 22mp 5D camera by resampling. If I had used a film camera, I can get a much improved scan.
EDIT2: Here's a good example. Slumdog Millionaire was mostly shot on a SI-2K which recorded at 2k. You can't go back and get 4k output on the digital portions. So generations later, we will be stuck enjoying an Academy Award winning film at that level of quality.
http://www.siliconimaging.com/DigitalCinema/News/PR_01_31_09...
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Heh, it's funny to see this late-nineties debate get re-hashed here. Also kind of fun. If it were true that there's no audible difference between 16 and 24 bit, companies like Alesis, Otari, ProTools, etc. wouldn't have spent the last 15 years ditching 16 bit like an old pair of smelly sneakers. (better metaphors welcome). Seriously, anyone who has sat down in a real listening environment for 5 minutes A/Bing 16 vs 2…
Yes, and anyone who has ever sat down infront of an LCD flatscreen watching their favorite movie on DVD/BD using gold-plated $200 HDMI cable instead of $4.99 Walmart HDMI cable see the extra sharpness immediately. This is why non-gold plated non-OFC HDMI cables are down to $4.99 a piece from their original $49.99 during introduction.
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> two band limited pulse signals with different onset times, no matter how arbitrarily close, will result in different sampled signals. This is true, but different than what I am arguing. You're saying that a listener over time will be able to tell that the two signals differ. I am saying that a listener will be able to determine this at fractional wavelengths. It's similar to dithering a high dynamic range signal on…
I'm not sure what you're getting at. As a thought experiment, let's consider a pulse that has been band-limited to 20kHz. Are you arguing that the analog output of a (filtered, idealized) DAC would look different depending on whether the dac was running at 44.1kHz vs 192kHz? If so, I don't think many people would agree with you. Any difference in the "timing" of the output wave would have to come from energy that fal…
No. I'm arguing this: take a 44.1kHz signal and upsample it to 192. It's the same signal, same bandwidth and everything. Duplicate the stream and add a 1 sample delay to one of the channels. When you hit play, that delay would be there. If you downsampled the 44.1kHz signals after applying the delay to one of the channels, you would almost hear the same thing. The difference is that you could not detect the difference between the signals until after a few samples. With the 192kHz stream it would be unambiguous after 2.
Remember, Nyquist-Shannon holds if you have an infinite number of samples. If your ears could look into the future then what you say is perfectly correct, but they need time to collect enough samples to identify any timing discrepancies.
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[edited: I was wrong]
This is completely incorrect, by shannon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samplin... ). The sampling frequency determines the maximum frequency that can be captured, not the temporal resolution. That said, a transient containing higher frequencies will be sharper than a transient that doesn't, but its onset time resolution will not be determined at all by the sample rate. Said another way, two b…
Even without debating the science and signal processing arguments raised... In any test where a listener can tell two choices apart via any means apart from listening, the results will usually be what the listener expected in advance; this is called confirmation bias and it's similar to the placebo effect. It means people 'hear' differences because of subconscious cues and preferences that have nothing to do with the…
Ultimately, sure. The world is full of products and services which only add value in this weak sense.
If the same wine tastes better if it's priced higher, then it still tastes better. But I think it's only honest that the consumer be aware that the increased utility from being priced higher is due solely to the fact of it being priced higher. Beyond that, I don't care.
One thing we can all agree on is that music is much more enjoyable if you think you're listening to it through good equipment or from a good source. Ultimately it's only the `thinking' part that matters. So I would make two points:
1. One point he's making is that playing audio sampled at 192khz through regular equipement actively distorts the music in negative ways. So now if you know this now you should enjoy that music _less_.
2. If you're adept metacognition (maybe that's not the right word), you'll realize a) you can get most of the enjoyment by buying equipment that's `pretty decent', and then not worry about it too much. b) you're probably fooling yourself by spending so much time/money worrying about having the best equipment, so you're probably not getting the maximum utility from the experience anyway. Or maybe it's the experience of trying to get the best equipment it self that's enjoyable, not necessarily the increased audio fidelity.
Specifically because CD-quality 16/44 audio has midrange distortion present during complex passages that is completely eliminated and non-present in 24/96 sources.
Listen to "Us and Them" off a 16/44 CD version of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. When it kicks into the chorus, it becomes totally distorted and everything in the midrange bleeds into each other. It's a mess.
Then, try listening to the 24/96 Immersion box set copy or a vinyl-sourced 24/96 rip and you'll find it's gone. When the song gets complex and loud, everything remains totally clear, each instrument stands on it's own, it doesn't become an awful distorted jumble.
You could argue that it's just the quality of the master that makes the difference; but if you take a copy of the original transcoded to 16/44 and compare it again with the 24/96 copy you can hear the same effect.
Why would anyone argue against high-resolution audio anyway? Sure, most everyone will probably just continue downloading 16/44 MP3s, but at least give us the option to have 24bit FLACs of the stuff we really like. Please and thank you.
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Regarding remixing. Artists usually don't "pay" each other, but return the favor - if it's the right term to say. E.g. artist A remixes a song of artist B and artist B in turn does the same for artist A. Or if they are all on the same record label artist A does a remix for artist B and later B makes a collaboration with A. I've noticed this in electronica/edm music artists at least. And another important remark: some…
True. I still think point 2 stands though. If your idol or another artist you respect, asks to remix your song, you may be fine with that. But if every person that buys (or pirates) your song can remix it you might be less happy about it. I write music and have considered releasing separate tracks so people can freely remix it but I prefer just having mixes that are controlled by me. Allowing another artist you know…
Why do you need that control? Someone creating something new with your work, doesn't seem to damage your work in any way.