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Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#631

Post by marcan_42 »

nitrogen wrote: post #545
andybak wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is not possible to say it is indistinguishable for all samples, present and future. Are there likely to be real-world cases where this happens - and the effect is detrimental enough to actually matter to anyone? Surely we're debating "when is it good enough for anyone sane and reasonable?" not "when could a hypothetical oracle be fooled 100%"?

I've commented in the past about a song that is annoyingly altered in 320k MP3: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Do you have a FLAC of that around or know where I can buy one? I'm quite curious to try it myself, and see if I can figure out what happened. I wonder if it's an encoder bug, a real format limitation, or a problem with the original song (e.g. a clipping ISP issue, which would be solved by slightly reducing the volume before encoding).

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#632

Post by Dylan16807 »

threeseed wrote: post #620
marcan_42 wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pure tone. At 110 dB SPL. On one study. Yes, if you blast humans with enough energy in any form they will eventually notice. This is not a relevant result for music.

By all means provide an alternate study that shows 20Khz is the limit for human hearing. Because from all accounts it is a myth.

If they can only hear it way above the threshold of physical damage, that's a good anecdote but it's definitely not relevant to music playback.

Sensitivity to audio falls off a cliff as you approach 20KHz.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#633

Post by jorvi »

foo_barrio wrote: post #376
jorvi wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, biology is also against them. Somewhere between 25-30 years of age, your hearing already dips 17KHz.

I am almost 40 and can easily hear pure ones over 17khz but can't differentiate pure noise with or without anything above 13khz. Right around 18.5khz there's a sharp falloff on pure tones no matter how much I pump the volume. I use a loudness meter that shows me the freq spectrum to confirm that my speakers and headphones are producing a pure constant tone. On the tests at: " https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_fre…

I can't tell you anything except that you have exceptional frequency reach for your age. ISO has actually standardized age-related hearing loss (yes, really), and they point to the same 17KHz point for even young adults. It actually makes me quite envious of you. I have sensitive ears - I can pick up very faint electrical circuitry sounds in screens or the delivery driver scootering into the beginning of our street despite our windows being closed, but I'd happily trade that away for higher frequency range.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#634

Post by connorlay »

I've been in the high-end audio world for over ten years now and I gotta say: it's really cool to see Apple finally offering lossless audio! I wonder if this will finally push Spotify and others to offer lossless streaming?

Spatial audio looks... gimmicky? Surround sound recordings have been available to consumers for over fifty years, yet they remain niche. I'm biased though as I've only purchased high-end stereo headphones.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#635

Post by snvzz »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

>even 320kbps MP3

Not "even" as if that was any good. MP3 320kbps is a very low bar.

OPUS vbr averaging 128kbps is much harder than mp3 320kbps to ABX against FLAC.

MP3 simply is a really bad codec by current standards.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#636

Post by Seb-C »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #38
cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

I run what I consider to be "good high-end gear" and am surprised that I cannot even tell the difference between 128kbps and 320 kbps, let alone lossless...

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#637

Post by snvzz »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #191
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…

I've done blind tests and I can tell if I try really hard but I wouldn't even say that the mp3 sounds worse, just different. I focus on hi hats. I do collect lossless audio for archival reasons and the ability to convert from a non lossy source. I believe that high bitrate audio is entirely bullshit though- as Chris Montgomery has shown: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

>I wouldn't even say that the mp3 sounds worse, just different.

If you're comparing against lossless, sounding different means sounding worse.

The goal is transparency: Preserving the qualities of the original audio that you can actually hear, while occupying less space.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#638

Post by foo_barrio »

jorvi wrote: post #633
foo_barrio wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am almost 40 and can easily hear pure ones over 17khz but can't differentiate pure noise with or without anything above 13khz. Right around 18.5khz there's a sharp falloff on pure tones no matter how much I pump the volume. I use a loudness meter that shows me the freq spectrum to confirm that my speakers and headphones are producing a pure constant tone. On the tests at: " https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_fre…

I can't tell you anything except that you have exceptional frequency reach for your age. ISO has actually standardized age-related hearing loss (yes, really), and they point to the same 17KHz point for even young adults. It actually makes me quite envious of you. I have sensitive ears - I can pick up very faint electrical circuitry sounds in screens or the delivery driver scootering into the beginning of our street d…

Ha! I literally just sat at my PC and saw your response at 3m old. Yea I've noticed I tend to test pretty well on all the official charts but really can't hear a difference in a lot of "audiophile" stuff people claim night/day differences. I had a beat up, 10+ year old pair of sennheizer hd600's that I never got tired of listening to. I finally had them refurbished and they don't sound as "easy" to listen to.

One thing is I suffer from tinnitus or something because at night I am always aware of a constant noise or "roar" in my hearing as well as my visual noise in my eyesight. I have pretty terrible eyesight so my hearing circuitry may have just amped the volume a bit to compensate (like upping iso on a camera).

In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people. I think my brain has just had a lot of practice. I've always loved music, practiced classical piano hours a day when I was younger, and cut my teeth programming learning DSP algos for audio processing. I recently did a hobby project involving reproducing NES music from ROMs and that involved just listening to raw square/triangle waves and literally just following intuition to get everything to sound right. I'm willing to bet my case is one more of training than raw ability.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#639

Post by bstar77 »

cies wrote: post #23

From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…

I might not be able to hear those frequencies, but I can sure as hell hear the artifacts. All I need to do is use my $300 B&O headphones.

Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

#640

Post by [deleted] »

unfamiliar wrote: post #268
sbaildon wrote: post #249

Apple can add feature after feature, but if Music continues to split albums without warning, it's close to useless. I can't curate a music library when I can't rely on my music not being jumbled around. Dropping music for licensing issues is one thing, but messing with metadata is beyond frustrating. For arbitrary reasons, Apple Music will: remove songs from albums and re-add them to your library as the "single" or "…

> Apple can add feature after feature, but if Music continues to [random issue most people have never encountered], it's close to useless. I've started to feel like "Apple Music as a music library" was really only intended as a bridge for people like you and me that were reluctant to abandon their obsessively curated their music library for the brave new world of streaming music. After a few years of it my listening…

[deleted]
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