Those studies are not conclusive but this one is:
AES E-Library: Audibility of a CD-Standard A/DA/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback
Furthermore, if 44.1kHz/16bit would lead to bad sound then an additional 44.1kHz/16bit A/D/A would sound even worse, right? The double-blind test showed that this is not true.
Best, Markus
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Don't know about conclusive (one can't prove a negative), but it was certainly suggestive. And as the author said, it firmly returns the burden of proof to those who claim to be able to hear the effects of 16/44.
(Here we go with the 'perfect sound forever' schtick again🙄) That would have to include virtually the entirety of audio professionals then, who have abandoned 16 bit audio for live and recorded sound going onto a decade now. Even 48Ks/s is regarded as 'slumming' among serious professionals.
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Hi Dr. Geddes,
Thank you for your thoughts. That's very interesting - do you feel that distortion content is not important, or is it that it is so low in either form of HF driver that it is not of concern in this comparison? Anyway, all very interesting. I'll have to read up on waveguides and compression drivers.
Jim
Higher resolution on the production side is desirable. We already discussed that. But when looking at the requirements for the final product, CD quality is good enough. Even if you have the need for higher resolution for whatever reason, you can get it (Blu-ray, etc.). Why is there still a need to discuss that? Do audiophiles feel such a deep love for their nostalgic sound reproduction devices? That's just sad.
Best, Markus
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It's the bass drum. Don't think it has such a lot of low frequency content on purpose. It is not a dominant sound in that song. Other songs are better examples why speakers for music reproduction should be able to reproduce frequencies as deep as 20Hz, e.g. songs from Bjork. Anyway, here's what the left and right channel of Starship Troopers looks like:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Best, Markus
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Markus, can you explain how to interpret this capture? What is the time base? (Over how many milliseconds were these waveform envelopes captured?) I'm not familiar with the capture software and there is not much detail to be seen. Without context it does not really make the point you are trying to get across. (IMHO)
"use damping material" means nothing to me.
most speakers use it SYMBOLICALLY. you open it up and find a tiny bit of wool somewhere in the corner of the box just so that people would think that you did something.
to properly damp the speaker will cost as much as to put in a passive radiator. mackie gives you everything you want in a speaker because it costs only 1/5 as much as Genelec.
Since Genelec costs 5 times as much it means you are already accepting that you are going to get ripped off so what's the point of also giving you nice things ?
thats sort of how you get every feature you want ( backup camera, etc ) in a $40,000 Infinity. fewer feature in a $70,000 BMW and fewer still features in a $130,000 Porsche and NONE in a $1,500,000 Ferrari FXX
that's just how things work. every company rips you off to the extent their name recognition allows them.
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no haven't had a chance to look inside those.
but trust me a LOT of people DO use mackies ...
of course if you have tons of $$$ to blow you will convince yourself that a speaker that is 1/20th your budget can't be as good as one that's 1/4 your budget.
that's the compromise - if you don't price the product high enough you will lose the customers who wanted to spend more. but you will gain customers who wanted to spend less.
i personally think mackies should have been priced at 2X what they go for. they probably wouldn't make any more money that way but at least they wouldn't be spoiling consumers.
i guess they're doing it for publicity just like Nissan GTR.
That's a spectrogram of the whole song generated with Sonic Visualiser. X-axis shows time and y-axis shows frequency.
Best, Markus
Why so pessimistic? A Ferrari has features an Infinity hasn't. Furthermore Infinity can't offer you these features optional. If they would, you probably would have to pay an extra 1.46 million 😉
Best, Markus
No doubt, the performance of the Mackies is excellent but there're better speakers that perform even better and don't cost as much as a O500 does: Loudspeakers
Best, Markus
I thought you don't get Infinitys in Germany - how would you know ? 🙂
edit ( nevermind lol )
nissan is just better value than german cars period.
370Z value > Cayman value
GTR value > 911 Turbo value
G37 value > 3 Series Value
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well that's debatable. mackies are 40 hz - 20 khz. geddes are 100 hz - 15 khz.
and besides the point was that cheaper speakers use better design ( no ports ) while high end speakers use el-cheapo design. geddes speakers are sealed aren't they ?
Suspension limits (linearity, throw) and size. Fitting a big PR in compact sized two-way may be difficult.
I think that saying a design is better simply because it doesn't use ports is something of an oversimplification. There are many means to achieve an end, and a passive radiator, ported box, horn, or sealed box are choices that the designer makes based on his (her) design goals.
FR doesn't tell the entire story of how a speaker sounds. I have worked with Mackies and they are really good for high quality PA work as compared to a lot of their somewhat less expensive competition, that said I would not use them at home. How do you know that the Geddes don't completely blow them out of the water where it counts - i.e. in the listening? Or do you listen with an RTA?
Just because a box does or doesn't have a lot of damping material in it is not a reflection of its quality either. Acoustical measurements and listening should fairly clearly indicate what the optimum damping is for a given driver in a given box.. In my very limited experience overstuffing a box that has to produce anything other than the lowest few octaves can have a pretty negative effect on the sound.
I would love to own one of those BMW or Ferrari that you so glibby refer to as a rip off. The target markets are quite different between the Lexus or Infinity and the high end BMW or any Ferrari. Gadgets are fun, but have little to do with how the car feels when you are driving for the fun of it. Lexus are nice boring well built boxes on wheels. I'd rather have the BMW frankly. Low volume production and a great deal of exotic engineering and materials not to mention chassis design not found in the Lexus account for a great deal of the difference.
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Hi Markus,
Yes that much is obvious, however you haven't really answered my question. Knowing the time base (period of time shown in the visualizer) would allow me to determine how much low frequency energy I was actually seeing over what period. As it is just tells me it is pretty loud and not a lot more.
No, Moran et al is not "conclusive". There was discussion on DIYaudio a year or two ago about it. Both equipment and methodology were questioned by non-fanatics. The best conclusion I could get from the paper and discussion is that the results were something to bear in mind.
I was really dubious about the speakers they used - they should have used something like you and I have, or better yet, earphones, and two of the three players they used were dubious quality. Could well be differences were masked by artifacts from those particular speakers.
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/everything-else/128488-aes-objective-subjective-forum.html
What Kunchur found is that measuring what is possible for us to hear in time domain is equipment dependent. Whether or not the thresholds he found (@ 6 microseconds) are applicable when evaluating our playback systems are up to us.
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