Question: Is "Hi-Res Audio" just snake oil or is there any Science behind it?
Technical answers please.
A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
311–320 of 367 posts
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
MP3 is not monolithic, and has changed drastically since it was released. You're going to get a pretty terrible experience with MP3 128kbps, whereas modern variable bit rate schemes can actually be quite decent. Personally I prefer to always go lossless, but for most people on most systems, the difference isn't noticeable. (Moreso the better the system gets, ofc)
> Personally I prefer to always go lossless Oh? Why's that?
While I likely wouldn't notice the difference, digital space is so cheap now that it costs me very little to store everything I want as lossless copies. Even if the difference is negligible, there's little reason not to get the best quality I can.
The main reasons why not would be streaming (currently Qobuz is the only one I know of that does it properly, and services like Roon + Qobuz can get pricey) and bluetooth (which doesn't support lossless at all).
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#313Afaict the cool thing about MoFi pressings (at least, ones from back in the day) is they were done at half speed. So, when the lacquer is cut from the master tape, they'd do it at half playback speed rather than full playback speed, which allowed the physical cutting head to track the high frequencies more accurately. I can say that this absolutely does make a difference during playback; my MoFi copy of Aja sounds ve…
>I can say that this absolutely does make a difference during playback Any logs from a double-blind, level matched, comparison session with enough trials for statistical significance to prove that assertion?
No, because it's vinyl vs vinyl, and it's nearly impossible to control for other factors affecting playback.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#314Afaict the cool thing about MoFi pressings (at least, ones from back in the day) is they were done at half speed. So, when the lacquer is cut from the master tape, they'd do it at half playback speed rather than full playback speed, which allowed the physical cutting head to track the high frequencies more accurately. I can say that this absolutely does make a difference during playback; my MoFi copy of Aja sounds ve…
I'm genuinely really curious, what kinds of recordings remain inaccessible in digital formats? How do you find out about them? And where do you procure them from? Do you mind sharing a couple examples?
Biggest one was country. Lots of impossible to find stuff from the 50s thru the 70s. I'd learn about it by digging at the record shop near where I went to college. There's not much of an audience for it anymore, so the labels have no incentive to dig through their catalogs.
Here's a country album I've never find a proper digital version of, only bad vinyl rips: https://www.discogs.com/master/402577-Mike-Auldridge-Dobro
In a completely different direction, 80s Japanese pop (city pop). I would listen to compilations, look up my favorite tracks on discogs to find the album it came from, and then... No dice. Often they're available on both CD and vinyl, but the vinyl version is often cheaper (because they made more original pressings than CD reissues). Sometimes they never get reissued on CD and vinyl is the only option.
Here's a random example I found while digging around at a record store in Japan: https://www.discogs.com/release/20947423-%E7%9B%B8%E9%A6%AC%...
Last case is dance music, which comes in 12" singles rather than albums. To find that stuff, I used to go to a used junk store that devoted its entire basement to records. Again, a lot of 80s and even 90s material never made it to digital.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
if your DAC is a DAC, truly (that is not a high bar) then the audio that comes out of it is a perfect reproduction of the audio that went into the ADC that produced the digital audio, provided it is a true ADC (also not a high bar at all). Nyquist theory proves it. The Ogg people have a fantastic video explaining this. Technology Connections on YouTube has a video about it as well (the Ogg video explains things bette…
I used to believe this, based on the mathematical proof referred to. But every proof relies on assumptions, treated as axioms, ideally (but rarely) all noted. This particular proof assumes that the clock is perfect, with no jitter or delay between one place it is used and another. There are more ways for a clock and uses of it to vary than you probably imagine possible. It also assumes the A/D and D/A converters prod…
it's almost always far more than good enough for human ears.
audiophiles' continuous search for "perfection" is pointless because human ears are not perfect. not by a long shot. I don't care who you are.
just like how your eyes lie to you, so do your ears.
48kHz is not a difficult clock rate to maintain perfectly. at all.
all you need is a DAC of regular every day commodity quality, and an equalizer if you think "warmth" is a quality of vibrating air.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always a threshold though. Proof by contradiction: if there's no threshold, then sound fidelity can in theory be infinitely precise. But nature does not work that way - at Planck length distance breaks down, at the width of a carbon atom the resolution of a vinyl surface ends, etc.
Audiophiles talking about quantum fluctuations in their analog recordings :-)
I'm not an audiophile, actually. There's no point, IMHO the most limited component of the system (with the highest actual threshold) would be my ears, and I know why: lots of exposure to loud music of various kinds over several decades.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
if your DAC is a DAC, truly (that is not a high bar) then the audio that comes out of it is a perfect reproduction of the audio that went into the ADC that produced the digital audio, provided it is a true ADC (also not a high bar at all). Nyquist theory proves it. The Ogg people have a fantastic video explaining this. Technology Connections on YouTube has a video about it as well (the Ogg video explains things bette…
> Nyquist theory proves it. Only if your signal is infinitely repeating in time, with no start or end. Otherwise, it's spectrum is not band limited. Is your ADC input such a signal?
The input of every competent ADC process is always a well-designed multipole lowpass analog filter below the Nyquist frequency, so yes.
EDIT: This also applies to sigma-delta sampling. Although there you can often get away with a simpler single-pole input filter.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did the same as you but iTunes Match for $25 per year is my ‘vault’. It’s very convenient especially now that lossless is an option.
I have a few songs ripped from CDs over the years that I’ll be very unhappy to lose if iTunes Match ever goes away, since I’ve lost the CDs and as far as I know they simply aren’t online. Such a great service.
Same. A couple of the cds ‘rusted’ and no longer play. Others lost in moves etc.
I hope we get plenty of warning before they axe it. Imagine that being a google service?!
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nyquist theory proves it. Only if your signal is infinitely repeating in time, with no start or end. Otherwise, it's spectrum is not band limited. Is your ADC input such a signal?
The input of every competent ADC process is always a well-designed multipole lowpass analog filter below the Nyquist frequency, so yes. EDIT: This also applies to sigma-delta sampling. Although there you can often get away with a simpler single-pole input filter.
So you could claim to be able to reconstruct output of that filter. Which still is not the case — you cannot have signal to be both aperiodic and band-limited: either in time domain or in frequency domain signal will be periodic.
So no real (that is, finite) signal satisfies requirements of Nyquist theorem.
Not only that, your DAC needs to have infinite lookahead to reproduce the same input that was passed to ADC.
Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.
I still think that "warmth" is a way to describe not actually hearing the separate digital samples subconsciously, and just hearing the sounds gliss into each other. I also think it's an anachronism that comes from way back when the digital sample rate was often a lot lower (and people would insist that their live digital effects sounded as good as analog, when you could sometimes even consciously hear the samples ju…
as the other poster noted, it’s not possible to hear each sample individually.
what is bassy reverb?