Do NOT change text in a quote. That is not tolerated here.
If it's the Meyer paper I'm thinking, not confirmed were that the playback devices were capable of high resolution output or that the source material was more than 16-bit. In independent testing one of the units - since there were only three more than enough to render the results invalid - couldn't achieve 18-bit accuracy. Since a great many 'hi-rez' releases of the time were also found to be sourced from 16-bit masters, this should also have been checked. Apparently the authors felt that manufacturer reputation was confirmation enough.
not possible to "prove" - just an attempt to explore whether any of a good number of listeners could AB/X "hi res" vs "CD"
some "hi res" wasn't, some was - no one in that study showed clear ability to discriminate at reasonable music listening levels on the material that did have "hi res" frequency content, bit depth
not proof that "no one can hear..." - but adds weight to the argument that the differences can't be "night and day" for any large fraction of the populace
Hi, don't be so hard.
This is audio world that need skills beyond mathematics, except you going to measure your ears response.
Also,
without true seekers, most people will blind by darkness, they need some lights, but sadly they even don't know what is useful for their self.
Poor human..
What I love is the apparent glitch in the thinking of so many in the audio game, like a clean break between two completely sections of involvement with the procedures, a disconnect ....
Part A is the perhaps close to a fanatical desire to achieve technical excellence or perfection in some engineering or fiddling area of the audio gear.
Part B is then listening to recorded music, when everything is then considered with terminology like "quite nice", "pretty natural", "sounds not bad", "wouldn't kick it out of bed"...
, etc, etc, etc.
To me this is equivalent to going down a perfectly sealed bit of bitumen, then suddenly hitting a stretch of completely unmade road, just raw countryside, then we're back on a rough and ready concrete road, very wavy, joint bumps, pot holes, the works.
For me there is a continuum, starting with the audio gear which will source the sound, through to the experience of listening to a variety of styles and qualities of recorded music - there is a constant, strong feedback loop from the end game to the starting point, which is followed over and over again, in the endeavour to optimise the final outcome. Poor quality in the hearing of material tells me that I have an "error condition", so I supply extra energy, "input", to improve the 'accuracy' ...
Part A is the perhaps close to a fanatical desire to achieve technical excellence or perfection in some engineering or fiddling area of the audio gear.
Part B is then listening to recorded music, when everything is then considered with terminology like "quite nice", "pretty natural", "sounds not bad", "wouldn't kick it out of bed"...
, etc, etc, etc.To me this is equivalent to going down a perfectly sealed bit of bitumen, then suddenly hitting a stretch of completely unmade road, just raw countryside, then we're back on a rough and ready concrete road, very wavy, joint bumps, pot holes, the works.
For me there is a continuum, starting with the audio gear which will source the sound, through to the experience of listening to a variety of styles and qualities of recorded music - there is a constant, strong feedback loop from the end game to the starting point, which is followed over and over again, in the endeavour to optimise the final outcome. Poor quality in the hearing of material tells me that I have an "error condition", so I supply extra energy, "input", to improve the 'accuracy' ...
Talking of variants, quite interesting is this version of "truth": Criteria of truth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ... minetinkit a few around here are particularly partial to this flavour ...
Getting back to CDs and digital, again, at least for a moment. I was thinking about slew rate, again. Presumably, more than one instrument could be playing at once; or more than one note from the same instrument. What would happen if multiple initially-independent waveforms all happened to have a zero crossing at the same time, and with all of them going in the same direction/polarity?
It seems that their waveforms must be summed, in any case. So at some point, i.e. at greater than some number of coincident individual waveforms with the conditions given, the slew rate of the resultant summed waveform would, for a time, violate the limit imposed by the sampling rate and filtering. The overall output (of whatever part of the recording or playback chain first imposed the limit) would be slew-rate limited or low-passed and would thus not be a faithful reproduction of the input, even if all of the individual instruments' waveforms were well-within the frequency-content that should be allowed.
That's just a theoretical scenario. So no claims are made as to whether or not it's an actual problem, yet.
It seems that their waveforms must be summed, in any case. So at some point, i.e. at greater than some number of coincident individual waveforms with the conditions given, the slew rate of the resultant summed waveform would, for a time, violate the limit imposed by the sampling rate and filtering. The overall output (of whatever part of the recording or playback chain first imposed the limit) would be slew-rate limited or low-passed and would thus not be a faithful reproduction of the input, even if all of the individual instruments' waveforms were well-within the frequency-content that should be allowed.
That's just a theoretical scenario. So no claims are made as to whether or not it's an actual problem, yet.
Last edited:
I go and listen to a system, where it's proudly pointed out that everything is technically about the "best" that it can be. I put on a recording that I know well, am familiar with how good it can sound when everything is correctly working ... and it sounds like sh!t - glaring distortion, timbre's all wrong, a whole stack of detail has fallen through a hole in the floor ...Huh ........
I call that a disconnect ...
No great mystery, Tom ... just consider 2 maximum amplitude 20kHz sine waves in phase, being added - what happens? The signal clips, a no-no in any recording scenario ... solution is to reduce the gain, halving the slew rate ...
I guess a formal argument in support of this could be very hard to defeat. It fits neatly into the European liberal conception of democracy, too.
There's the immediate but probably trivial problem, that if you took the average of all opinions as to whether the truth is the average of all opinions, then it would probably be "no".
If I buy an audio machine, I try to construct some kind of vector sum of opinion. I think that's the best and probably the most common way of making purchasing decisions. I make things because purchasing decisions are often just too hard for me. Individuals can't test everything, specs lie constantly, knowledge is social by necessity.
With hi-fi I imagine the method is particularly apt. Arguably, music is defined by how most people hear it, so if I use what most people use, it's hi-fi by definition.
Hi Frank. Wasn't implying mystery; just a scenario for which digital would not be transparent.
Also suppose that the amplitudes were all low-enough that no clipping would occur. Then it's just an out-of-bounds slew rate (frequency).
I have no idea what sort of occurrence density there might be, for that, in real music. But it's easy to imagine harmonics having lots of simultaneous zero crossings.
What would it sound like, if only the areas near the zero crossings were frequency-limited?
Last edited:
Interesting lines of thought. Glimpses of multiple possible recursive-paradoxical "black holes".
Last edited:
- Status
- Not open for further replies.