Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 367 posts

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#61

Post by masklinn »

TylerE wrote: post #51
doix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off…

Yes, i hate when people talk about Nyquist as if its some Panacea. Its vwry “spherical cow”. It assumes all your filters, DACs, are perfect, and that time is infinite.

The exact same spherical cow issue applies, with worse effects, when you increase your sampling rate unnecessarily.

And you can use oversampling to correct for the filtering issues. That's pretty standard in modern DACs and ADCs.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#62

Post by AlbertCory »

egypturnash wrote: post #27

Syd Schwartz, Mobile Fidelity’s chief marketing officer, made an apology. “Mobile Fidelity makes great records, the best-sounding records that you can buy,” he said. “There had been choices made over the years and choices in marketing that have led to confusion and anger and a lot of questions, and there were narratives that had been propagating for a while that were untrue or false or myths. We were wrong not to hav…

Heavy use of the passive voice -- the dead giveaway for BS.

It's interesting whether "digital is better than analog" but hardly relevant here. There are people who believe it's not true, and MoFi lied to them.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#63

Post by thih9 »

> “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”

But was there an album without DSD to compare to and hear the difference? I guess most people heard just the album with DSD (that admittedly sounded great).

What would happen if there was also a One Press version without DSD? Would people with “golden ears” be able to recognize it in a blind test?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#65

Post by ultrarunner »

bitcurious wrote: post #17
wrycoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I miss with the Apple audio chain is a user-controlled equalizer. With my hearing issues, I really need to boost treble, and I prefer to boost bass. I haven't yet discovered a way to do that. Apple thinks that flat is best, and so should you, apparently.

On iOS, settings>music>EQ has some presets you could try. Not quite the same as custom eq but might be better than flat.

And it's insane that this hasn't changed for at least a decade! Apple's own PowerBeats Pro sound like garbage without bumping up the low frequencies, but with an equalizer they sound great. Or maybe this is just subjective and you can file it under "accessibility".

I was jailbroken on iOS 14 for the longest time solely for a system-wide equalizer for Apple Music. With a new phone it's a major step back, and I've switched to Spotify for their (worse) equalizer and somewhat worse overall experience (Spotify doesn't even have an equalizer on desktop!)

It's really unfortunate that such a straightforward feature is so limited on Apple platforms, and for no discernible reason.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#66

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

doix wrote: post #33
jrajav wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headro…

So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off…

[ EDIT: contents of this post were factually incorrect. What Kazinator wrote in response is correct, and I don't want to leave incorrect ideas floating around. ]

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#67

Post by kstrauser »

egypturnash wrote: post #36
wrycoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I miss with the Apple audio chain is a user-controlled equalizer. With my hearing issues, I really need to boost treble, and I prefer to boost bass. I haven't yet discovered a way to do that. Apple thinks that flat is best, and so should you, apparently.

On OSX Music, window>equalizer. You can also grab Rogue Amoeba’s “SoundSource” to have volume controls for every noise-generating app on the computer, and apply effects chains to them, including EQ.

I love SoundSource so much. I bought it so I could use the volume keys on my keyboard to adjust the system volume on my HDMI monitor. I was blown away when I found out I could plug my collection of VSTs into the output pipeline.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#68

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

kazinator wrote: post #41
doix wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off…

You are correct; with a 96 kHz sampling rate, you don't need such a brick wall filter. But then you dohn't have to actually keep the data at 96 kHz; it can be reduced to 44, this time using a digital filter. A sharply cutting off analog filter is expensive to produce. It has multiple stages to create the multiple poles. High precision resistors and capacitors have to be used to get all those circuit stages to line up…

> with a 96 kHz sampling rate, you don't need such a brick wall filter.

This is incorrect. See my comment above/below.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#69

Post by criddell »

isatty wrote: post #32
aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #8

Audiophools got played yet again.

Audiophile here - if they were using a proper master, minimally a true lossless file I don’t really see the problem. On the other hand, it seems to me like I meet more people who are just into buying new gear rather than enjoying the music, which is what the hobby is to me. Don’t even get me started on snake oil like cables.

Can you reliably hear a difference between a lossless file and a modern high bit rate MP3 (or other lossy format)?

I can't, but then I have tinnitus...

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#70

Post by radicaldreamer »

It's likely these records are still better than anything else out there because DSD is an extraordinary format for audio and they were still pulling directly from the masters (if anyone trusts that clarification of the story at this point).
Post reply on HN