None of the skilled listeners I've ever known have been young. Many young folks have great hearing, but lack skills.
It takes time to acquire the skills.
Happy New Year! 
That is true, Pano. It is best to get a good start with youth on your side, if possible. Some do, some don't. As we age, it becomes more difficult to note the differences, and easier to accept mediocrity like TV sound when it is necessary.
I found when I was a teenager that I had an 'ear' for differences in musical instruments, guitars notably. That is just a 'fact of life'. I used this 'advantage' to go into audio reproduction, when I ultimately realized that I would never be an exceptional guitarist, even after years of trying. Sure beat building 'bombs' etc for the military, at least I thought so at the time.
It is unfair. My disco is full of *wonderful* recordings. Mp3, was invented by the audio industry (not sound engineers) to replace K7 in your car. Mp3 is hated by sound engineers, as was K7. (While i use compression to store more tunes in my cell phone 🙂
What, you don't especially like mp3? I heard that it was almost undetectable in many double blind tests. Where was I misinformed?
You better tell 'jj' that he is the 'audio industry' and not an 'audio engineer'. If he agrees with you, I will go along with it.
Problem with unexperienced listeners, most probably. With experienced listeners, we have very high score in dbx tests mp3 (256kbps and more) vs. original. Depends. One may organize the test to get null results, if he wish so. Just use bad acoustics, poor audio equipment, bad recordings and unexperienced listeners and your are at the null result suddenly.
Of course the famous story is when Philips developed one of their compression algorithms and had panels evaluate material to see if they could detect artifacts. The panels didn't notice anything. Then the late Bart Locanthi gave it a try, and came back with a list of problems ("listen here at 4:33 and hear the background tone at 1.3kHz...." and similar).
When thus coached most listeners had no difficulty in hearing the problems. But suits at Philips already had decided in favor of the schemes. So it goes. Philips, I might add, are notorious for being bullies, packing standards committees with their loyal and faithful, and ramming through what they desire. My first patent attorney used to say "Philips is truly evil. And I mean that in the nicest possible way."
Is AT&T Bell Laboratories a recording studio or a record production company ?
Did i make a misunderstanding between "audio" and "sound" engineers in this context ?
Yes i disagree with MP3 for any professional use and, as a consultant, i had made a big change in the projects of a big radio station which wanted to sample all their records in a compressed format. Explaining them that, for the human price of the copy process, it would be better to copy in uncompressed format (CD at this time), expecting the prices of bytes on HD drive to decrease rapidly with time.
Saying that the original MP3 recordings were perfect is like saying that Bose is high end audio! The premise that if we can remove unneeded information it will not be missed is Dr. Bose great gift to audio reproduction. I'm with Jneutron, Eperado, and others that say that we need to look at the 3D aspects of the original waveforms and reproduction. How is it that we hear the differences between sounds. It is not the steady state, it is the initial waveforms rise time, or leading edges that gives us those clues.
Jan,
You seem very up on the way that we actually process sounds between the ear and brain. Someone said to me the other day that we only hear the positive wavefront and not the negative. Perhaps I am not using the correct terminology here, what I think he was saying is that we only hear a pressure wave and not the opposite, a negative pressure? What is your take on that, I am in the dark on that principal.
Happy New Year and a safe night to all.
Jan,
You seem very up on the way that we actually process sounds between the ear and brain. Someone said to me the other day that we only hear the positive wavefront and not the negative. Perhaps I am not using the correct terminology here, what I think he was saying is that we only hear a pressure wave and not the opposite, a negative pressure? What is your take on that, I am in the dark on that principal.
Happy New Year and a safe night to all.
Thank goodness, you made the right decision, Esperado. The local rock station here, did just the opposite, and I can't even stand listening to it in the car.
Can you cite a reference for that? MP3 is excellent for its intended purpose, but I've never seen any data claiming it was indistinguishable from uncompressed. In dbts, I was able to distinguish it and rank by degree of compression, and I've never claimed to be a golden ear.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.