With regard to current recordings, it's the production values that are killing the stuff - this morning they had on TV the Fall Out Boys, a current American rock band, on a morning show - and was it dire! Sounding like it was emerging from a shoebox, squashed into a tight ball, with every spare scrap of possible empty room filled with something going on - the overall impression was that this was tiny, tiny music - instantly disposable when finished, if one was possibly interested in waiting that long. How someone could possibly be inspired to buy the stuff, I find hard to fathom ...
You quite nicely summarized most current 21'st century media.
I can't watch cable - garbage , I won't buy a CD (why should I - I can DL it?)
All this stuff we are made to believe we must have .... not worth squat!
PS - I can't watch "morning shows" - get a headache after the first ad !
Edit - many decades of low value material .... the public now has low expectations.
OS
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We are doomed ... Fall Out Boy: "American Beauty/American Psycho debuted at No. 1 on the US Billboard 200 album chart, selling 218,000 equivalent copies in its first week alone and becoming the band's third No. 1 album" ... 
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.Hi Richard,
You could look at dynamic range required another way, the threshold of hearing is actually below the noise floor of the air on your eardrum at about -6dBA (young adults), the threshold of pain is variously reported at 120-140 dBA, the 140 figure seems high to me, and likely permamently raise the lower number, so any more than 126-136 dBA is wasted, and might only be usable as a one time event.
22 bits more than covers most reasonable use, I cant see 32 being needed at playback any time soon, even if you tried to get near that the dissipation issues in the D/A converter would be significant. Mind you I can see marketing people jumping on it already.
If you try to lower the hearing threshold by dropping the ambient temp there is a phase change of the membrane at 10% reduction in the temperature ;-)
Wrinkle
You could look at dynamic range required another way, the threshold of hearing is actually below the noise floor of the air on your eardrum at about -6dBA (young adults), the threshold of pain is variously reported at 120-140 dBA, the 140 figure seems high to me, and likely permamently raise the lower number, so any more than 126-136 dBA is wasted, and might only be usable as a one time event.
22 bits more than covers most reasonable use, I cant see 32 being needed at playback any time soon, even if you tried to get near that the dissipation issues in the D/A converter would be significant. Mind you I can see marketing people jumping on it already.
If you try to lower the hearing threshold by dropping the ambient temp there is a phase change of the membrane at 10% reduction in the temperature ;-)
Wrinkle
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You can also look at it yet another way. We can't hear down to -6dB and up to 120dB AT THE SAME TIME. The INSTANTANEOUS dynamic rage of our hearing (such as when we're ACTUALLY LISTENING TO MUSIC which is what all this is about in the first place) is only about 60-70dB.
se
At the end of the day we are discussing audio on an open forum in open debate, everyone should be addressed in a courteous manner... This does not mean we cannot disagree with peoples comments...
I have Fall Out Boy CDs as well as Panic at the Disco and others of that genre.... Of course you were listening on TV it is not the same as a good system.......
But each to their own Heh! lets move on now to criticising peoples taste as well as replay systems....
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Oh! I am sorry Richard, I didn't notice the dot.
0.5% THD is something that I wouldn't worry about.
Then again if you mean that there is a causal relationship between the 8 bits (cause) and the 0.5% THD (effect), I don’t support it.
I was thinking of preparing something for to show Kindhornman that he wouldn't have to worry too much for the effects of digital attenuation. That would be readily applicable to the 8 remaining bits=0.5% THD assumption.
George
marce, I'm sorry that I happened to target a personal choice of yours. However, the conversation at that moment was about what was "wrong" with current recordings, and I'm afraid what I heard ticked all the boxes. I come from an era when most music had light and shade to it, even on a lowly kitchen radio - and hearing music lacking such does nothing to endear it to me, especially when it appears to be mimicking what "everyone else does".
It also doesn't help when they pretend to play the piece live, the obviously heavily manipulated studio production makes the performance on the set come across as being quite ludicrous ...
It also doesn't help when they pretend to play the piece live, the obviously heavily manipulated studio production makes the performance on the set come across as being quite ludicrous ...
With so many master pieces in my record collection, including "Bop till you drop" of Ry Cooder, one of the first albums recorded in digital (probably 16 bits 48KHz) i wonder how you can say this.
This is an insult to all those musicians, producers, sound engineers, whose passion and talent are extreme.
Right now, i'm listening to "On solid ground" of Don Pullen, with tears in my eyes. He is in Heaven, but his piano is in my room, as real than the one of my mother when i was a young child...
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Truly excellent record, really good mastering!
Many newer records not so good - compressed to death.
The Lipshitz example is a bit different, because he was able to detect an additional noise usable for identification.
In our example it was a real difference in the audio information, which nevertheless could slip through in a controlled test, due to the conditions of the test.
As posted before, i have done quite a lot controlled tests and conducted tests with other listeners as well. The problem that listeners had to get used to the conditions of the controlled tests was obvious whenever i tried it.
Or, to cite JJ:
I'm glad your link correctly stated quantization distortion and not the inherent non-linearity of the A/D, this is an important distinction. A perfect 24 bit A/D still has it. It is not feasible at this time to even make a perfect 24bit A/D, although we are far from the Heisenberg limit (yes their is one) I don't see a financial return from doing better. Another 8 bits of pure noise is no different than the dither.
Dither was not a band-aid it was a massive engineering oversight by a lot of smart people who simply blew it.
EDIT Sorry, or of course the marketing folks that could not deal with -93db rather than -96dB
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They will likely disappoint re: -118dB
. We managed to get -110dB from a cell phone and had the same issues with 300 vs 32 Ohm headphones, but of course I couldn't hear it just measure it.We played some HDtracks downloads of opera through the reference design and Sennheiser HD650's I could't tell the difference.
I forgot to mention, you should check it out when you are there. In Asia there is a whole program for streaming HD audio over the cell phone network (at least in China). I listened to a prototype phone
while there, pretty nice.
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