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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

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

#91

Post by bayindirh »

nerfbatplz wrote: post #28
gwern wrote: post #2

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and…

Not only can you not tell the difference between analogue and digital, you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3. Most audiophile mania is poorly informed at best and astrology at worst. http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

As a former orchestra player I can say that, with a good hi-fi system, the difference is audible, in terms of soundstage size/depth, not in details.

I have a couple systems, one is a proper hi-fi system. If the album is mastered without brick-wall normalization, the difference is easier to hear.

When I listen the same album via my DAC, from MP4, I enjoy it. When I listen the same album, from a CD, I sit in front of the system like a rabbit blinded by lights.

The DAC is the same. It’s a Yamaha CD-S300 with a proper iPod interface, which carries the signal digitally till DAC.

This ABX test is the same. You need a high fidelity chain to enjoy it. I have a nice sound card, but the speakers connected to it can’t handle the resolution put out by it.

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

#92

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mturmon wrote: post #85
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[ 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. ]

This explanation loses me at "infinity per dB" ... and I'm an EE. I think you're trying to cover too much ground here, it's really confusing to try to understand what you mean. I believe the comment you're responding to is talking about the analog filter that is needed to avoid aliasing -- as the first words of your comment correctly note/explain. And in particular, the original comment seems to be noting the phase d…

That's why I had some blank lines in there :)

You're right that its a big design space. The key takeaway is that "yes, higher sample rates can actually make a difference, but almost entirely down to the filter design, not because Nyquist moves ... and you probably cannot hear the difference."

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

#93

Post by allears »

apohn wrote: post #73
allears wrote: post #45

People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or totally white. That's a complete dynamic range. But it's the in-between shades that require more bits to specify. It's the same with audio. It's not how soft or how loud a recording can get. It's the subtle shades of variation. 16 bits is pretty good, but not…

> You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in the headphone audiophile community and people were always using the shimmer of a cymbal as how they could tell the difference between MP3s and Lossless, Analog vs Digital, CD vs SACD or whatever. Then they'd do a blind test using Foobar2000 and start saying the w…

I'm a recording engineer, and I can tell you that there definitely is such a thing as high quality audio. Certainly there are people who believe in snake oil and like to parade their ignorance as though it were knowledge. But if you bother to study the science of audio, read trade magazines, or hang out with engineers and studio owners, you will find that just quoting frequency range or dynamic range, or even noise floor, is not enough to specify an excellent audio signal. And if you think CD audio is as good as it gets, and nobody can tell the difference between that and a studio master tape, for instance, you are dismissing the expertise of the people who have studied and worked to make the recordings you love.

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

#94

Post by Nav_Panel »

Maursault wrote: post #53
nerfbatplz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only can you not tell the difference between analogue and digital, you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3. Most audiophile mania is poorly informed at best and astrology at worst. http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

> you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3 I'm not sure what you mean by "properly transcoded," as though there's a scourge of bad encoders out there and everyone has nutty encoding practices, but I really, really bet you can. Listen to an mp3 of a rock/pop track. Try to focus on the cymbals. See if you can isolate them aurally from the rest of the music. Can you hear how mp3 e…

^ yeah exactly. Also, you really do need a pretty good sound system to hear it. I was with the poster above you for a long time, but then I did blind A/B testing on my buddy's $10k monitors, and the difference was clear.

I wouldn't call it "night and day", but I had no trouble distinguishing even 320 MP3 from FLAC on his system by focusing on the very high frequencies (3/3, small N I know I know, but I felt like I could've gone on indefinitely). The MP3s lost some clarity in the highs which led to less dimensionality/sense of space ("soundstage"), because our spatial hearing is very attuned to minute transient differences in high frequencies in particular. But you need to be listening on a system that is adequately equipped to reproduce very high frequency transients accurately, which most people don't have access to.

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

#95

Post by 323 »

com2kid wrote: post #46
mod wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?

Yes, the "warmth" generated by from literally any possible analog circuit can be reproduced digitally. Physics doesn't care about people's beliefs, but sadly many people also don't care about physics.

In theory.

In practice, if I give you a random analog box, transforming it into an accurate DSP algorithm it's an extremely difficult problem.

Which is why people instead of doing that, they recreate the "idea" (reverb, delay, ...) digitally, but it's not a copy.

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

#96

Post by Kirby64 »

allears wrote: post #45

People who claim CDs have more dynamic range than analog are missing the point. Think of it in terms of graphics. 8 bit graphics can represent totally black, or totally white. That's a complete dynamic range. But it's the in-between shades that require more bits to specify. It's the same with audio. It's not how soft or how loud a recording can get. It's the subtle shades of variation. 16 bits is pretty good, but not…

I don't think they are. Dynamic range is easily quantifiable and vinyl has worse dynamic range, full stop, compared to CDs. Anyone claiming otherwise does not know how to measure dynamic range.

Likewise for bits, there is very little evidence (and, in fact, lots of evidence to the contrary) that you can detect the difference between a 24-bit and a 16-bit recording, assuming they're mastered the same way.

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

#97

Post by kazinator »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #77
TylerE wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nyquist isn't about such assumptions at all. It is an information theoretic value, based on the provable claim that there is zero information present in the original analog waveform that is not represented in the digital version. Yes, your filters, DAC and speaker wire could still create a less than ideal listening situation, but the fundamental aspect of the Nyquist frequency is not concerned with any of that.

There is zero information present in a waveform that is not contained in the digital version, if that original waveform is confined below the Nyquist limit. Either it is that way already, or else is derived from an original-original waveform that isn't, by low-pass filtering.

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

#98

Post by Nav_Panel »

Afaict 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 very good (almost as good as the digital version!).

That said, vinyl is effectively an obsolete medium. I say this as someone who owns upwards of 1k vinyl records. I buy them because many recordings remain inaccessible or very challenging to find digitally. But I would never buy a newly released album on vinyl over digital if I had the choice and if both were using the same master.

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

#100

Post by mrandish »

mod wrote: post #31
jrajav wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?

You can also bake analog sounding warmth into your hi-res digital master and it's done all the time. There are a wide variety of different digital mastering plug-ins which do remarkably sophisticated analog modeling.

Ultimately, this boils down to signal which vibrates speakers. As a thought experiment, if you use some kind of theoretically perfect surface-sampling laser to capture every movement of the speaker surface at sufficient frequency and fidelity to reproduce all of the information in the original signal and speaker surface vibrations (ala Shannon->Nyquist), then a digital playback of that signal which vibrates the same speaker surface identically will sound exactly the same.

Individuals can prefer different sonic characteristics encoded in an output but that's an aesthetic choice. The entire signal chain creating that output is the result of creative and technical choices. It goes from guitar string to studio acoustics to microphone to mixing board to outboard processing gear to recording medium to duplication to distribution to playback to amplifier to speakers to room acoustics to human ear. Most of those elements significantly color the sound. Yes, mistakes can be made in the downstream signal chain which diverge from the creative intent. However, those mistakes are exceptions, and not inevitable. Done correctly, there's no reason a digital step in the chain shouldn't be completely undetectable.

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