In trying to determine what we hear and what we think we hear the forum has seen a number of various listening tests. While some participate by listening, its also obvious that many analyse via software and file comparsion techniques.
And all we really want to know is what do you hear. What do like about a particular recording ? Is there some obvious (or less obvious) artifact or characteristic that you constantly pick up on. Is it generating some kind of fatigue that you feel is noticeable ?
We never seem to get to find out these things.
So that got me thinking, and in the interests of a true listening test (call it what you will) I have put two files together. They are both different pieces of music, in fact one is recorded live by SY and makes a really good test track. That is the track called "Just For Fun 2" which for my own amusement I also did as a FLAC file. The first track "Just For Fun 1" has lots of fine detail and HF. So there is lots of choice here... enjoy !
So what are the questions we are asking hear ? Well I think just for you to listen and then comment on how they sound. For example, does it sound processed at all ? Any grain ? HF splashy, compressed or generally OK ?
Make a true judgement on what you hear. Would you be happy using these as test tracks for example ? If there is something you do not like having listened then lets hear what that is.
Just For Fun 1
Just For Fun 2
Just For Fun 2 FLAC
And all we really want to know is what do you hear. What do like about a particular recording ? Is there some obvious (or less obvious) artifact or characteristic that you constantly pick up on. Is it generating some kind of fatigue that you feel is noticeable ?
We never seem to get to find out these things.
So that got me thinking, and in the interests of a true listening test (call it what you will) I have put two files together. They are both different pieces of music, in fact one is recorded live by SY and makes a really good test track. That is the track called "Just For Fun 2" which for my own amusement I also did as a FLAC file. The first track "Just For Fun 1" has lots of fine detail and HF. So there is lots of choice here... enjoy !
So what are the questions we are asking hear ? Well I think just for you to listen and then comment on how they sound. For example, does it sound processed at all ? Any grain ? HF splashy, compressed or generally OK ?
Make a true judgement on what you hear. Would you be happy using these as test tracks for example ? If there is something you do not like having listened then lets hear what that is.
Just For Fun 1
Just For Fun 2
Just For Fun 2 FLAC
So #1 sounds pretty good, lot's of air, nice snappy drum sounds. A bit of "whininess" at the top of the vocal. I am guessing this is a straight wav from a CD.
#2 sounds like someone took a belt sander and sanded off everything except the basic song.
#2 Flac is much improved. Air and spaciousness in the recording. Very similar to #1. No "whininess" but then it is a very different vocalist. I would like to compare FLAC vs WAV of the same recording to determine if I can tell the difference. Or is that can I tell the difference on my current equipment?
#2 sounds like someone took a belt sander and sanded off everything except the basic song.
#2 Flac is much improved. Air and spaciousness in the recording. Very similar to #1. No "whininess" but then it is a very different vocalist. I would like to compare FLAC vs WAV of the same recording to determine if I can tell the difference. Or is that can I tell the difference on my current equipment?
Ah, so track #1 gets a guarded 
There's a lot of subtle audio cues in that track which I think they can make for great test track for evaluating other audio components.
Come on folks 🙂 we need more opinions on these two.
There's a lot of subtle audio cues in that track which I think they can make for great test track for evaluating other audio components.
Come on folks 🙂 we need more opinions on these two.
First off there are a few vocalists that I just can't listen to. Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant are two I just have to turn down. The female vocalist on JFF1 is one of those. I can't say why, but I just have to turn her down. The first 14 seconds are quite realistic and so is everything from 1:15 on. Enough dynamics to clip the little amp at half throttle, can't pass judgment on the bass drum without my sub, but the rest of the percussion, bass, guitar and slide are good.
JFF2 sounded familiar. Then I read your text and realized that it is already on my hard drive with a few other of SY's recordings. The version I have is bigger, 124 MB VS your 84 MB file. There maybe some differences in the sound, but nothing outstanding.
Some of the comments let you know that we listen with preconceived expectations.
That's because it's UNPROCESSED live recording with no fluff added, hence nothing to sand off. Kinda like popcorn without the salt and butter, once you get used to the fluff, you want it.
Even a lousy medium like MP-3 or FM radio can deliver realism if it was there to begin with, and not destroyed with excessive processing.
There used to be a guy down the block from me in Florida who ran a pirate FM radio station. Everything went into, and came out of a PC so that the station operated automatically when he wasn't home. All of it came from a radio station package he bought from Israel on Ebay about 10 years ago.
He had live shows including play along guitar lessons which I listened to. One day I got into my car at work, turned on the radio and there was a guitar player on the floor in front of the passenger seat and vocals were inside the dash somewhere behind the steering wheel. Another guitar came from the driver's door. I listened intently as I dove up to the guy's house. I knocked on the door and his wife told me to be quiet and led me to the garage. There two acoustic guitar players, both singing. There were 4 mics, one on each guitar, and one for each mouth. All 4 went to a Yamaha mixer and it's outputs went to the computer, and out over the air. Very realistic for a simple setup, FM radio, and a factory Ford stereo in my car.
It's interesting that there were live shows broadcast from his house almost every week, yet none ever invoked that kind of realism, even though the equipment was always the same. Sometimes I listened in my car, and sometimes I listened from my home stereo, a Technics solid state tuner through one of my tube amps. Much of the live shows and guitar lessons used electric guitars that were played quite loud. Loud enough to invoke compression and / or limiting inside the transmitter hardware.
JFF2 sounded familiar. Then I read your text and realized that it is already on my hard drive with a few other of SY's recordings. The version I have is bigger, 124 MB VS your 84 MB file. There maybe some differences in the sound, but nothing outstanding.
Some of the comments let you know that we listen with preconceived expectations.
That's because it's UNPROCESSED live recording with no fluff added, hence nothing to sand off. Kinda like popcorn without the salt and butter, once you get used to the fluff, you want it.
Even a lousy medium like MP-3 or FM radio can deliver realism if it was there to begin with, and not destroyed with excessive processing.
There used to be a guy down the block from me in Florida who ran a pirate FM radio station. Everything went into, and came out of a PC so that the station operated automatically when he wasn't home. All of it came from a radio station package he bought from Israel on Ebay about 10 years ago.
He had live shows including play along guitar lessons which I listened to. One day I got into my car at work, turned on the radio and there was a guitar player on the floor in front of the passenger seat and vocals were inside the dash somewhere behind the steering wheel. Another guitar came from the driver's door. I listened intently as I dove up to the guy's house. I knocked on the door and his wife told me to be quiet and led me to the garage. There two acoustic guitar players, both singing. There were 4 mics, one on each guitar, and one for each mouth. All 4 went to a Yamaha mixer and it's outputs went to the computer, and out over the air. Very realistic for a simple setup, FM radio, and a factory Ford stereo in my car.
It's interesting that there were live shows broadcast from his house almost every week, yet none ever invoked that kind of realism, even though the equipment was always the same. Sometimes I listened in my car, and sometimes I listened from my home stereo, a Technics solid state tuner through one of my tube amps. Much of the live shows and guitar lessons used electric guitars that were played quite loud. Loud enough to invoke compression and / or limiting inside the transmitter hardware.
So Tubelab, recording Just for Fun #2 was just a straight recording as it happened in the studio, and Just for Fun #2 Flac was the recording after the producer got done adding all his producer tricks to it? Did I get that right?
SY has created several live recordings that he has posted on Soundcloud over the past few years. Most were minimalistic live "mic into soundcard" or "mic into digital recorder" setups recorded at a local venue, or in his house. He did some "mastering" on some of the files.
I don't know what Mooly did with these files, and for now I don't have a means for playing the FLAC files on the PC that is wired to the speakers, so I haven't heard it. I used Windows Media Player for today's test, which doesn't work too bad as long as nothing else is running in the PC. It won't play FLAC, and I haven't installed Foobar or any analytical software on it yet.
The original WAV files that SY posted is here:
https://soundcloud.com/stuart-yaniger/peter-mulvey-knuckleball-suite-master
The thread is here:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/music/203771-high-res-downloads.html
I don't know what Mooly did with these files, and for now I don't have a means for playing the FLAC files on the PC that is wired to the speakers, so I haven't heard it. I used Windows Media Player for today's test, which doesn't work too bad as long as nothing else is running in the PC. It won't play FLAC, and I haven't installed Foobar or any analytical software on it yet.
The original WAV files that SY posted is here:
https://soundcloud.com/stuart-yaniger/peter-mulvey-knuckleball-suite-master
The thread is here:
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/music/203771-high-res-downloads.html
>>Some of the comments let you know that we listen with preconceived expectations.
>>I haven't heard it.
Well I have heard it and I heard a significant difference between #2 and #2 Flac.
>>I haven't heard it.
Well I have heard it and I heard a significant difference between #2 and #2 Flac.
I sure didn't. But I am limited in equipment at the moment. That's what I get for breaking my Sennheisers. 
Great... so if you wished you could compare one vs the other. Use file analysis if you want.
Exactly. That's one of the big reasons many don't participate in these kind of tests. There is some hidden fear of 'picking the wrong one' or not hearing something they should. When you compare an original rip or master to an MP3 or WMA file there is this characteristic trait (see, I'm learning 🙂 thanks Scott and Tattoo) of being able to tell when one is compared against the other. Then the difference is 'obvious'. It is akin to the oft quoted example of 'peeking' when comparing audio components in a blind test. When you have 'peeked', then you know which one to pick.
That's an interesting comment Tom.
(The FLAC file I made was my first ever. Never used or listened to the format before that. When all this is done we could certainly do a WAV vs FLAC test, perhaps also encoding the FLAC back to WAV. That's for another day though)
Some of my preconceived notions come from the fact that the early MP-3 recordings sounded gross, especially on percussion. Bias, yes, my daughter played the drums and I spent a lot of time trying to get percussion right in the early days of home recording on a PC....my first sound card was the best there was at the time, 12 bits at 44.1 KHz. You can still hear the lossy compression on transient edges and cymbals, but I remember this from my past.
If you remember the early days of small dish satellite TV (DirecTV in the US) the video codec failed miserably on massive scene changes. A sporting event where the crowd is all waving a colored flag, turns into confetti. Today that still happens to a small extent, but the average user doesn't see it, unless he knows to look for it because it was so obvious years ago.
Memorable note from long ago......don't put a Shure SM-57 INSIDE the bass drum!
Some peoples preconceptions may be totally different from your own, based on what they find important. My daughter was in the high school band, taught at a music school and had a lot of musically inclined friends that hung out at our house, hence the recording experiments.
I made small SE guitar amps for a few of them based on a Fender Champ schematic. I had put together a quick "zero budget" amp for her friends to use whenever they were at our house annoying the neighbors. It used a couple of old JBL car audio speakers that I had which sounded much to clean for a screaming guitar amp, but they were free (I pulled the stereo from my car before trading it in).
One of her friends showed up one day with a Gibson ES335, plugged in and started playing chords while singing along. I have to admit that the amp, guitar, and playing style all matched very well. It produced a nice crisp clean sound that didn't work for 80's big hair rock, but sounded nice with "Jimmy Buffett music".
If we analyze music to death with our PC's we don't take the time to enjoy it. A few weeks back someone posted a live recording of some drums and assorted percussion. It was analyzed to death by several people who pointed out clipping. Did anyone actually crank this track up and listen....I did, and despite a few technical flaws, the percussion sounds "right." It's very dynamic, and realistic. The clipping shown in the analysis isn't very obtrusive in listening, especially at high volume.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/music/266891-free-192khz-24-bit-percussion-drum-track.html
If you remember the early days of small dish satellite TV (DirecTV in the US) the video codec failed miserably on massive scene changes. A sporting event where the crowd is all waving a colored flag, turns into confetti. Today that still happens to a small extent, but the average user doesn't see it, unless he knows to look for it because it was so obvious years ago.
Memorable note from long ago......don't put a Shure SM-57 INSIDE the bass drum!
Some peoples preconceptions may be totally different from your own, based on what they find important. My daughter was in the high school band, taught at a music school and had a lot of musically inclined friends that hung out at our house, hence the recording experiments.
I made small SE guitar amps for a few of them based on a Fender Champ schematic. I had put together a quick "zero budget" amp for her friends to use whenever they were at our house annoying the neighbors. It used a couple of old JBL car audio speakers that I had which sounded much to clean for a screaming guitar amp, but they were free (I pulled the stereo from my car before trading it in).
One of her friends showed up one day with a Gibson ES335, plugged in and started playing chords while singing along. I have to admit that the amp, guitar, and playing style all matched very well. It produced a nice crisp clean sound that didn't work for 80's big hair rock, but sounded nice with "Jimmy Buffett music".
If we analyze music to death with our PC's we don't take the time to enjoy it. A few weeks back someone posted a live recording of some drums and assorted percussion. It was analyzed to death by several people who pointed out clipping. Did anyone actually crank this track up and listen....I did, and despite a few technical flaws, the percussion sounds "right." It's very dynamic, and realistic. The clipping shown in the analysis isn't very obtrusive in listening, especially at high volume.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/music/266891-free-192khz-24-bit-percussion-drum-track.html
FLAC is lossless and can be interconverted to and from WAV indefinitely. May as well zip an Excel file, then unzip it and look for the numbers to have changed.
😀 that's one way of putting it.
If the interest in this thread is still on the wane tomorrow I might fill you all in on what exactly these files actually tell us... about how you listen, what you hear, and whether knowing what you are listening to skews the results.
If the interest in this thread is still on the wane tomorrow I might fill you all in on what exactly these files actually tell us... about how you listen, what you hear, and whether knowing what you are listening to skews the results.
Yes, just overall 'technical quality' if that's the right term to use.
With nothing to compare against, the acuity of the listener and their system comes to the fore. The only tool available is the listeners ears, and as such any comments made have to be based on the sonics.
With nothing to compare against, the acuity of the listener and their system comes to the fore. The only tool available is the listeners ears, and as such any comments made have to be based on the sonics.
Karl, only just listened to 1 and 2. Definitely go for track 1, as being far more valuable for monitoring auditory cues.
Amusing to see this still happen very badly on celebrity, VIP news footage - when the flash cameras go off the image quality completely disintegrates for a split second, to perfectly reconstitute an instant later ...
Pardon me for being offtopic. If digits degenerate or are coded differently, through communication, wouldn't internet just collapse ? It would be good few years since internet took off.
Internet visualisation
Massive data communication. Amazing animation.
Regards
Internet visualisation
Massive data communication. Amazing animation.
Regards
You need to differentiate between digits representing precise data, and digits encoding what we call 'analogue' information. In the former the information needs to be 100% correct, all the time - and very sophisticated error correction guarantees this; in the latter only an approximation is usually sufficient for the needs, the communication systems save money by using only just enough digits, or "accuracy" that they can get away with.
Thanks for listening Frank. Before I spill on this, have another listen to 1 starting at around say 30 seconds in and listen to the sibilance on the voice generally and also to the backing track on the right channel in particular. Keep listening to at least 60 seconds in.
Anything ?
Anything ?
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