On kick drums:
Some kick drums are hit with a soft/felt batter, these produce less higher frequencies than drums hit with a plastic or wooden batter. One old trick is to tape a coin to the kick drum skin right where the batter hits, for that nice click at the start of the sound.
But in general, if there is a transient, lots of frequencies both low and high are produced.
Some kick drums are hit with a soft/felt batter, these produce less higher frequencies than drums hit with a plastic or wooden batter. One old trick is to tape a coin to the kick drum skin right where the batter hits, for that nice click at the start of the sound.
But in general, if there is a transient, lots of frequencies both low and high are produced.
Okay. Ethan has example files with two tones, one about 60dB below the other to demonstrate how hard that is to hear. Seems someone else around the forum hid a brass band down 60dB (maybe it was 80dB, don't recall) to prove nobody could hear it. Both Ethan and the brass band guy know there is a limit to what people can hear in some demonstrations.
The problem comes when one try to extrapolate the result to other listening situations. For the two tone demonstration to be applicable to any other set of conditions there is a requirement that the system be no more than weakly non-linear. For the reproduction system that requirement may be met.
For human hearing it gets a lot more complicated. We understand a great deal about amplifiers, a good deal about the physiology of the ear, and very little about the neurological details of how sound in processed in human brains.
It seems to me that engineers are trained in such a way that they tend to take everything they try to understand as linear, otherwise they have almost no theoretical tools that are applicable. It leads them to deny that anything is sufficiently non-linear for Fourier to be inapplicable, but it appears to be inapplicable for some things about hearing.
Most people do not hear very low level distortion and other low level flaws without some training and experience. Nonetheless, some people have trained themselves to become expert listeners of artifacts much lower than -60dB.
For example, Jam, is a professional high end audio designer I know. He designed the Pass Labs HPA-1 by ear. It won 4 awards and two product-of-the-year's, and was their best selling product. It was designed by ear, mostly using a pair of Audeze LCD-X headphones. An AP was used at the very end to check a few things. Jam can hear very low level distortion well below the -96dBFS where undithered CDs are distorted.
Thing is, Jam isn't the only person that can hear what he hears. Since I know him and we have listened together I know I can hear most of what he hears. This is despite me having old age high frequency loss and some tinnitus. For us and others like us, we have no problem hearing the difference between CD audio and hi-res, or DSD512 for that matter. Provided that the listening system is good enough. There is no point in trying to listen critically to a poorly designed and implemented sound system (such as the background music at Starbucks, or satellite radio-based, etc. ).
Have said all the above, we need to give recognition to people at the other end of the hearing spectrum. Most people do not readily notice the difference between CD audio and high res formats. They are not exposed to high res enough to know there is more for there brains to recognize and musical sounds rather to be discarded as noise for presentation to conscious awareness (2-system cognitive model).
Some people may never hear the difference between CD audio and high res because their brains aren't wired to decode the low-level differences. Their brains might be wired to be very good at other things though, such as pitch recognition, or perhaps language.
We now know that doing research on humans is very difficult to do well. Seems that most or all the human perception so-called research is flawed by assumptions of linearity, and reliance on oversimplified models. Too bad, since there is no money now to do it over. We are stuck with a lot of bad science. Also stuck with some people who don't hear some low level flaws very well yet who are convinced they are normal or above normal (very human to believe that!). Those non-low-level hearing people may assume all who claim to hear low levels are fooling themselves since the flawed research would seem to support their belief.
To complicate matters further, some people do fool themselves when listening and its easy to assume those people are the only kind of people who claim to hear small differences. In that case the people doing the assuming are also fooling themselves.
Jam and his audio designs are living proof of that.
There are many others that can hear a difference between CD and high res, not so hard to do for some. No need to be overconfident they are only imagining it.
Lastly, better to ignore the 1/3 (or so) of audiophiles who are fairly neurotic and who fool themselves over and over. We can't help them if they don't want it, and most don't want it.
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It appears to be, meaning that it's a speculation by you.
How was the listening session set up?
Using impressions from subjective listening as bases for determining the performance quality of digital music files, DACs, amps & cables is also flawed. It's too bad that some people are stuck with it, either by ignorance or choice.
Healing ability is so diverse, someone obviously has GOLDEN EARS.
LIPINSKI Sound History
Andrew Lipinski's perfect hearing abilities were recognized by the US National Bureau of Standards, where he was the only individual to achieve a perfect score on the listening evaluation of phonographic recordings (NBSIR 88-3725). His work contributed to the decision of the U.S. Congress to uphold quality standards for a unified listening code, in opposition to one proposed by then, CBS. Andrew Lipinski's only perfect score ("...one listener achieving a perfect score... A score of 10 correct of 10 selections would be expected 1 out of 1000 times"), superseded the valuation of audio contemporaries such as Quincy Jones.
PS: Lipinski is a person who is behind Mytek digital. I guess many successful audio manufactures has been making a decision based on those people's hearing ability, including Pass Labs.
LIPINSKI Sound History
Andrew Lipinski's perfect hearing abilities were recognized by the US National Bureau of Standards, where he was the only individual to achieve a perfect score on the listening evaluation of phonographic recordings (NBSIR 88-3725). His work contributed to the decision of the U.S. Congress to uphold quality standards for a unified listening code, in opposition to one proposed by then, CBS. Andrew Lipinski's only perfect score ("...one listener achieving a perfect score... A score of 10 correct of 10 selections would be expected 1 out of 1000 times"), superseded the valuation of audio contemporaries such as Quincy Jones.
PS: Lipinski is a person who is behind Mytek digital. I guess many successful audio manufactures has been making a decision based on those people's hearing ability, including Pass Labs.
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Thanks for your reply.
1
You, and others, have criticisms about perceptual testing.
Do you really think that, if these criticisms are legid, the scientific comuntiy in this field doesn't account for them?
2
As a non expert, and hopefully with enough critical thinking skills, I have to go with the consensus of all the experts in a specific field.
An expert is someone (we're talking about science stuff here) who has published several peer reviewed studies in renowned scientific magazines, in that same field. Everyone else's opinion on this specific field is worthless. In fact it doesn't mean anything what 1 expert is saying.
What does matter is what they all combined say.
Then you have to determine if there is a consensus among all these experts.
The consensus among experts in a specific field of science, is determined by all the peer reviewed scientific publications in renowned scientific magazines.
3
Now let's apply all this to high resolution audio.
Are there studies published that show people can hear the differences between a high resolution file and a bandpassed to Redbook file and that can teach other what to listen for?
I'm not aware of any of such publications.
I am aware of quite a few studies with negative results.
This makes it very hard for me to believe the high resolution claims you, and lots of others make.
I agree with your basic argument here.
I, personally, could not tell the difference between a 48 kHz and 96 kHz versions of the same album with original source material recorded and released by the artist at 96. This is important because spectral analysis of many high res popular music releases show they are most likely resampled versions of the 44.1/48 files. I downsampled the 96 kHz files with Foobar PPHS (ultra mode) SRC.
The market has spoken. They spoke in favor of MP3/MP4/AAC being generally transparent. No one bought SACD or DVD-A. Virtually no one buys high-res audio files. I realize that the masses are unwashed, but if there was real merit I think there would be larger demand. When people first saw 720p or 1080i HDTV after watching NTSC or PAL video on a CRT they were wowed. Even people who didn't give a damn about their TV quality. I find people can be wowed with high-end speakers or headphones, but not high-res files.
I am in favor of artists releasing their "master" 24/96 or 24/192 files for those that want them. I think 24/96 is overkill for playback, but makes life easier for processing in general.
I did not read every post in this thread, but people also need to pay attention to what their ADC and DAC do at high sample rates. Many popular audio converters are not giving you full Nyquist and have decreased performance at high sample rates.
I, personally, could not tell the difference between a 48 kHz and 96 kHz versions of the same album with original source material recorded and released by the artist at 96. This is important because spectral analysis of many high res popular music releases show they are most likely resampled versions of the 44.1/48 files. I downsampled the 96 kHz files with Foobar PPHS (ultra mode) SRC.
The market has spoken. They spoke in favor of MP3/MP4/AAC being generally transparent. No one bought SACD or DVD-A. Virtually no one buys high-res audio files. I realize that the masses are unwashed, but if there was real merit I think there would be larger demand. When people first saw 720p or 1080i HDTV after watching NTSC or PAL video on a CRT they were wowed. Even people who didn't give a damn about their TV quality. I find people can be wowed with high-end speakers or headphones, but not high-res files.
I am in favor of artists releasing their "master" 24/96 or 24/192 files for those that want them. I think 24/96 is overkill for playback, but makes life easier for processing in general.
I did not read every post in this thread, but people also need to pay attention to what their ADC and DAC do at high sample rates. Many popular audio converters are not giving you full Nyquist and have decreased performance at high sample rates.
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I call bollox on that whole stream of your post.
Audeze are really crappy headphones, so that invalidate's everything else here.
Been there, had Correntzis' own crappy cans to test, (Audeze of course!)cos he told everyone they were the best....conductors as audio experts. (oh grief!)..
telling us what to do, or even how to do it- even better!
Underwhelmed as usual, especially by Sony music, their crappy so called "best of the best" grammy award winning crap recordings..from a "hi res label" with PR freak Quintard complete with fake reverb then a release to crappy vinyl too.
bah
, had enough of all that rubbish, it's proveable the bloke can't hear over 8khz, and on top of that those headphones can't even reach the resolution of 16 bit (as is the vast majority of audio reproduction devices).
Just the mere "optimising stuff with headphones" is a nonsense.
I've seen enough of that PR to make me throw up!
The whole reproduction and evaluation chain just sucks, then as usual the people who are supposed to be "experienced professionals" are deaf by the age of 50 anyhow, idem T Faulkner...just more yuck terrible sounding stuff...
then:-
especially another vote for the conductors!
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The scientific community will probably get around to at some point, if and when funding to do it right becomes available. It has already started to happen in other fields such as experimental psychology (which tries to measure human cogition and biases). Historically, it can take quite a few years for scientists to start catching up with bad older research, nothing new that its taking awhile for the field of audio.
Okay, but you don't have to be an absolutist about it. You should stay open minded that the research may starting getting corrected at some point. Hopefully it will be soon but I am not holding my breath since its hard and expensive to do well. We could talk about why that is so, but its another subject to itself.
I personally doubt adults can hear above 20kHz or so. However, we have seen some evidence in another thread just finishing up in the forum where people could tell the difference between two preamps that measure the same except one rolled of HF at 100kHz and the other went up higher. The thread participants thought it might have been the phase shift in the audio band that they heard, although PMA said it goes against prior published research and no one would accept the result. Since he heard the difference himself, now he in finding himself in the same type of quandary I have been in for a long time.
Mostly what I hear with high res formats are two things: (1) they have low level detail I can hear that is not as much buried in the ugly sounding noise floor. And, (2) most dacs, maybe all SD dacs don't know for sure, seem to sound smoother and less distorted at higher sample rates. Don't know why, since it doesn't seem to make sense on the face of it, but they do and its not hard to hear with some careful listening. Once one knows what that characteristic artifact sounds like it gets more annoying to hear it the more distorted low-sample-rate way going forward.
Also, IME some people who don't initially hear the difference can learn how to. It becomes possible to hear it blind with some experience, at least for some people. There are other people that hear the differences on their own without any coaching or training. And there are people that are stubbornly oblivious to it. Then there are people that can hear the difference but just don't care about sound quality. I don't know why so many different kinds of ways people listen and why different preferences. I just try to take human nature as I find it rather than demanding explanations that science doesn't have answers for yet.
Odd no one talks about old AAA reccordings on cd then DDD when it was launched. We spend too much time to talk about dac. Adc reccording chain is far more a b...h. Add on that sometimes bad mixing, I don't worry anymore.
Theorically and I agree with Plasnu, a simple 16/98 since the beginning would have close those talks...I just add with a good enough reccorded AAA process... pre ringing of filters as said are hearable far below 10 K hz sometimes and as highlighted filters types matter, so you want to reject those from the hearable bandwitdh the sooner you can (since the adc captcha).
But... and it's a big one, I can't stop laughing from hapyness when hearing the old Gilberto Gill & Stan Getz duo...why wanting more ???? Too much guys are listen too with books and scopes, then they wake up at 50, indeed they are deaf...they spent times with focussing on the wrong items...but still disgress. We are aware there is no bandwith limitt or losses when listen oneselves speakings.
Theorically and I agree with Plasnu, a simple 16/98 since the beginning would have close those talks...I just add with a good enough reccorded AAA process... pre ringing of filters as said are hearable far below 10 K hz sometimes and as highlighted filters types matter, so you want to reject those from the hearable bandwitdh the sooner you can (since the adc captcha).
But... and it's a big one, I can't stop laughing from hapyness when hearing the old Gilberto Gill & Stan Getz duo...why wanting more ???? Too much guys are listen too with books and scopes, then they wake up at 50, indeed they are deaf...they spent times with focussing on the wrong items...but still disgress. We are aware there is no bandwith limitt or losses when listen oneselves speakings.
The loudness wars have made it hard for me to buy new music. I find something I like, but it's so compressed I can't stand listening for more than a song length.
This is what keeps me spinning some vinyl. They didn't play those games, at least not the same way, when most of my wax was made. Now, there are "digitally recorded" records from when digital was still poorly understood... they're awful. Worst of both worlds.
The fact that most people can't hear a sinewave with a frequency of 20 kHz (16 kHz for me) does not mean that we can't perceive a lot faster changes in a transient.
Our hearing is much more sensitive to transients and most transients contains much faster change of amplitude then a 20 kHz sinewave does.
Then there is the factor of how for an example an amplifier handles very fast transients while driving a reactive loudspeaker. Feed a 10 kHz square wave through a normal loudspeaker and watch the result on a oscilloscope coupled to the amp output. It is not very pretty.
You mean tje sound is travelling faster at 20 Khz then 1 K hz ? Or do you talk about wave length, so frequencies ? Not sure I understand it related to transcient ? Anyway brain treatment and ears capabilities iirc are 2 microseconds...no way to percieve 2 different hearable informations in between.
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It's called "price tag".
They (believers) would have presented the proof of audible difference already if they can prove it with scientific comparison test. All they have is marketing hype.
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