Sony themselves disagreed with you, over two decades ago.
"Sony plans to offer its first Super Audio CD player model [SCD-1] to audiophiles and music lovers who seek the purest sound quality attainable, allowing them to fully enjoy the rich musicality the Super Audio CD and its ability to provide the full and faithful reproduction of a music source."
"The Super Audio CD is a next generation audio carrier that reproduces not only the musician's artistic expression, but also recreates every detail of the atmosphere, nuance, and space surrounding the original music source, making it far and away the World's paramount high-fidelity audio format. "
"Truly, the Super Audio CD format has been developed to offer the highest quality sound achievable with great consideration given to protecting the rights of copyright holders, and it is undoubtedly the best sounding audio format currently available."
"Super Audio CD software is recorded in Direct Stream Digital (DSD), a technology that employs a 1-bit digital signal to provide an extremely accurate reproduction of the shape of the analog waveform generated by the original source music. The [SCD-1] was designed to achieve the full, precise playback of this DSD signal. It draws on Sony's extensive expertise in laser optics and digital signal processing technologies- accumulated over years and years of designing and developing the CD and other audio products- to fully reproduce every detail of a music source, including its very atmosphere and nuance. "
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http://ethanwiner.com/dither.html
Here you can find files that have dither and no dither added, so far no one ever could proove that they can hear a difference between these files.
Of cause you can make any artefact audible, if you just remove the music signal and turn up the volume pot to max.
But these kind of tests are meaningless. Listening tests should be done with normal levels of audio, just as anyone listens at their listening enviroments.
The -60dB stuff could be mine.
As this clearly means that artefacts 60 dB below the signal level are not audible.
This should be no suprise to anyone, because vinyl can sound great. And that, most probably, has artefacts a lot higher that that.
Masking is a very real thing.
There has not been a single experiment, there have been countless.
And so far non showed that even one human can perceive artefacts 115dB below the signal level.
This is just a case of ignoring massive amounts of evidence.
Someone may have missed the point that whether not dither or the lack thereof is audible probably depends a lot on the source material chosen and how it was recorded. In other words, Ethan's test is biased by his presumption that one experiment gives results that predictably carry over to all similar experiments. For one thing, his recording lacks the sound of natural space, such as would be present in a symphonic concert hall.
EDIT: A quote from Ethan on the page you linked to: "...I've never heard dither make any difference when applied to typical pop music recorded at sensible levels. I'm merely pointing out that not using dither is never the reason a newbie's mixes sound bad." In other words, Ethan makes no claim that his experiment shows what Mr.Coltrane then claims it does.
EDIT: A quote from Ethan on the page you linked to: "...I've never heard dither make any difference when applied to typical pop music recorded at sensible levels. I'm merely pointing out that not using dither is never the reason a newbie's mixes sound bad." In other words, Ethan makes no claim that his experiment shows what Mr.Coltrane then claims it does.
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The subject remains controversial as it has for several decades. That's also something I have repeatedly pointed out, but which was selectively omitted when I was quoted.
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Red book, no dithering, multiple A/D and D/A conversions, completely transparent.
So all of the recording studios that are using much higher quality digital formats are
just kidding themselves, apparently. Along with the ones that use analog tape decks.
So all of the recording studios that are using much higher quality digital formats are
just kidding themselves, apparently. Along with the ones that use analog tape decks.
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Yes.
Edit: These people are no experts in perceptual testing.
That alway's gives audible distortions, that can be nice to listen to.
Of cause pluginns are a lot cheaper and can do the exact same thing.
Speaking of one well known science dude, Earl Geddes, I once asked him about how much we know about what people can and can't hear. He said he thought scientists had a pretty good idea of what about 95% of the population could hear. I asked about the other roughly 5%, to which he replied that new tests would have be developed for those people, and that a preliminary study might cost in the range of several thousands to some tens of thousands of dollars. No estimate was given for the final cost of doing the research.
Once again it appears that the 'science dudes' believe one thing, and Mr.Coltrane has overstated what is known and generally agreed upon.
The above is not to say that I entirely agree with Mr. Geddes either, but I am not claiming to speak for his 'science dude' side.
Once again it appears that the 'science dudes' believe one thing, and Mr.Coltrane has overstated what is known and generally agreed upon.
The above is not to say that I entirely agree with Mr. Geddes either, but I am not claiming to speak for his 'science dude' side.
To be clear, it seems that you are making a statistical argument that, say, 95% of a randomly selected
group of people will be unable to distinguish A from B in controlled testing related to digital audio.
Is that correct?
If so, I don't think anyone here had that in mind. We are more concerned about the work and judgement
of those with a substantial amount of experience and dedication in audio.
"Earl is an audio enthusiast with an intense interest in the acoustics domain. Realizing very early on that the weak link in virtually all audio systems was the acoustic sound production (loudspeaker, room, etc.) he focused his attention on this aspect of the sound reproduction problem."
It will be beneficial for your sound reproduction system to ask him some more.
I'm sure none of that 5% is in the 65 years or older range.
It appears? Another conspiracy theory. 🙄
Science: picking a system that sounds better to your own ears.
Scientism: believing in the science.
Scientism: believing in the science.
No.
I'm claiming that we know in quite fine detail how human perception works. 150 years of scientific recearch is a long time.
And that a lot of people here ignore that knowledge.
Well, since Newton (over 400 years ago), physics still does not have fundamental theories
to replace current effective theories like quantum mechanics and relativity. Nascent fields
like psychology can hardly be expected to be as highly developed as current physics.
And they are not.
But science is about removing our prejudices from the understanding of the world around us.
This is admittedly difficult, but possible and worthwhile, including the field of audio.
Some are indeed more able to do this than others, whether from experience, interest,
or native ability. It is to be expected that others will not understand, or will disagree.
But that does not make them right.
to replace current effective theories like quantum mechanics and relativity. Nascent fields
like psychology can hardly be expected to be as highly developed as current physics.
And they are not.
But science is about removing our prejudices from the understanding of the world around us.
This is admittedly difficult, but possible and worthwhile, including the field of audio.
Some are indeed more able to do this than others, whether from experience, interest,
or native ability. It is to be expected that others will not understand, or will disagree.
But that does not make them right.
Sorry, I'm no expert in perception but I believe you are overstating this, particularly for audio perception. If what you mean by "works" is the underlying perceptual mechanisms, then we are a long way off this goal. If you are an expert in the field of perception then you will know about the following & I would be delighted to learn more about these issues:
Not only are there still unaccounted for perceptual phenomena that we can't explain such as comodulation masking release, pitch perception of complex audio signals, summary statistics in auditory perception & more. All of these are not just esoteric phenomena confined to laboratory but things we encounter everyday. It goes without saying that we don't understand the fine or even the gross detail of the underlying mechanisms in our perception.
The field of study of visual perception is far more advanced than the auditory perception field & even so all is not even understood about visual perception - summary statistics, for instance.
A rich vein of recent research https://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/bib2php/publications.php
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In the area of ASA & somewhat related to how we listen to foreground/background in our stereo systems - food for thought "Adaptive and Selective Time Averaging of Auditory Scenes" http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/McWalter_McDermott_2018_texture_time_averaging.pdf
Of cause we don't know every fine detail on human perception. The brain is complex.
But what we do know for certain is:
That it's very easy to fool ourselves.
That it's very difficult to do tests that eliminate biases.
And to stay on topic, we know exactly how we perceive non linear distortions. Read my first post here.
(Every pro audio engineer knows, either consciously or unconsciously, how to use this to make things sound better.)
But what we do know for certain is:
That it's very easy to fool ourselves.
That it's very difficult to do tests that eliminate biases.
And to stay on topic, we know exactly how we perceive non linear distortions. Read my first post here.
(Every pro audio engineer knows, either consciously or unconsciously, how to use this to make things sound better.)