C'mon, your fellow countrymen are kings of super-micro-engineered passive x-overs; think B&W, KEF, Spendor..., all of them.
BBC used active for LS5/9 and you forgot ATC who have made a nice living from mainly active units.
Jakob: I will agree if you just produce the same curve active and passive with no additional EQ you might end up just gaining some dB of headroom (which can be very useful) and enhanced damping. But the next steps can be interesting. At some point you end up polishing that which cannot be polished unless you start adding motional feedback, but I'm not there yet.
After these final condemnations of this work by a handful of contributors, I was surprised by the seriousness of this experiment and the means implemented.
There are not enough psychoacoustic studies, it should rather be encouraged.
When to reject its conclusions, I am willing, on the part of researchers who have implemented the same kind of means and seriousness.
Psychological evaluation indicated that the subjects felt the sound containing an HFC to be more pleasant than the same sound lacking an HFC.
These results suggest the existence of a previously unrecognized response to complex sound containing particular types of high frequencies above the audible range.
We term this phenomenon the “hypersonic effect.”
Why do we need Pet-scans and EEGs if added ultrasonics result in a more "pleasant" sound.
The listener seemed to have been aware of the added HFC, so why can't the "feeling pleasant", because now he got the full treatment, be seen as the cause of the changed Pet/EEG instead of concluding that he "heard" something.
What would have happened to Pet/EEG with and without showing a Playmate of the month to exclude this emotional effect, seriously !
One last remark: the ultra full range speaker that I mentioned in, John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III, could very well be an active system to keep the signals offered to the speakers as pure as possible and the overall FR as flat as possible. But stick to the rule of reducing the amount of variables to the minimum, in this case to just one.
Hans
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I don't know if I'm alone to feel this, but I was often sensible to ultrasonic sounds. It was noticed when I was working in the anechoic chamber of the L.N.A to make measurements of the speakers of the company I was working to.
It resulted in some kind of discomfort. An impression of deafness that I knew how to recognize when I forgot to turn off the generator.
My current speakers cut around 16kHz, and, with my old ears, that suits me perfectly. But I don't see why we would limit ourselves to 20kHz if we can record up to 40.
Anyway, a brick wall at 20kHz is completely unnatural.
Good safety margin. Maybe easier in hardware or software design. Memory is cheap, too. But their threshold is far below 20kHz, so 44.1kHz is more than enough.
I don't make it a religion either one way or the other. Given that, now, 24-96 is available at low cost*, it seems stupid to do upsampling in DACs when we can have 96 natively.
The CD is disappearing, streaming is gradually replacing it.
Let us live with our times, while we are still alive.
*If some record companies sell 24-96 formats more expensive than red book, it is not because it is more expensive to produce, it is less (no CD), it is just to make more profits.
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I agree that new formats are just to stimulate additional revenues.
But the ongoing discussion is not to prevent people from buying 96/24 or higher, but whether leaving the ultrasonics intact will make the sound more "pleasant" or not.
Hans
Is that the bottom line, seriously? How many studies and subjects were there, and do they represent all 7.5 billion people on Earth?
Does downsampling eliminate the brick wall filtering issue?
Example....something recorded in 24/96 (or above) downsampled to 16/44.1
In comparing new recordings of the past year or two there are some red book versions that totally impress, others not so much. I know there’s much more to the recording process than format sampling/bit rate but can’t help but wonder if the difference I’m hearing is from what’s being discussed.
I’d like to see a bit more info from the high end streaming services about the recording/transfer process.......I suppose that kind of transparency would expose their upsampled tracks!
Example....something recorded in 24/96 (or above) downsampled to 16/44.1
In comparing new recordings of the past year or two there are some red book versions that totally impress, others not so much. I know there’s much more to the recording process than format sampling/bit rate but can’t help but wonder if the difference I’m hearing is from what’s being discussed.
I’d like to see a bit more info from the high end streaming services about the recording/transfer process.......I suppose that kind of transparency would expose their upsampled tracks!
You should be aware that I’m a Oohashi denier, so this whole discussion is just .......Is that the bottom line, seriously? How many studies and subjects were there, and do they represent all 7.5 billion people on Earth?
But to prove that a bullet can kill people, you won’t have to kill all 7.5 billion, although it would be one possible way to bring this hypersonic discussion to an end.
Hans
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Yes some people run from reality......I blame tubes/vinyl.
Could you please expand on that? Because it's just the way that the brain contructs ( its own) reality and how it is helped in reconstructing it - say a piece of music.
When/if you deny other's people way to construct their own reality, and everyone makes it different ( culture, experience, prejudices etc.), why would you be dispensed from such assertions ( well, this is how it goes) ?
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