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Brad Meyer and David Moran of the Boston Audio Society have (once again) proven that we are all deaf. Here is the abstract from their article in the latest issue of the AES journal:
Claims both published and anecdotal are regularly made for audibly superior sound quality
for two-channel audio encoded with longer word lengths and/or at higher sampling rates than
the 16-bit/44.1-kHz CD standard. The authors report on a series of double-blind tests comparing
the analog output of high-resolution players playing high-resolution recordings with
the same signal passed through a 16-bit/44.1-kHz “bottleneck.” The tests were conducted for
over a year using different systems and a variety of subjects. The systems included expensive
professional monitors and one high-end system with electrostatic loudspeakers and expensive
components and cables. The subjects included professional recording engineers, students in
a university recording program, and dedicated audiophiles. The test results show that the
CD-quality A/D/A loop was undetectable at normal-to-loud listening levels, by any of the
subjects, on any of the playback systems. The noise of the CD-quality loop was audible only
at very elevated levels.
Is it any wonder that folks like John Curl have sworn off any association with the AES?
Follow Ups:
Mr. Hansen;
I respectfully suggest that you and anyone else who cares to comment on our paper actually read it first.
We sought diligently for source material, playback systems, and/or subjects to turn up any audible difference between the SACD or DVD-A source and the same signal passed through a CD-quality "bottleneck". We established a reference system gain (with digital full scale at about 100 dB SPL) for which we reported our results. If we increased the gain of the system by 15 dB, and used one particular recording with an extremely low background noise level (a list of sources is being prepared and will be made available to anyone who wants it), and looped the player through a bit of room tone, then anyone could hear the noise introduced by the CD codec. Played back at that level, the rest of the recording was quite a bit louder than life, since the small ensemble never reached anything close to 115 dB in the hall. This is all in the paper too.
But that (and the extreme case, when the player was stopped and the gain was up) was the only time we or anyone else could hear the difference. We did an evening of tests on a system with audiophile credentials -- recent Quad ESLs, Conrad Johnson preamp, commensurate player and power amps, $600 cables -- in a purpose built room that was very quiet and did not degrade the excellent imaging of the Quads. We used the favorite discs and cuts of the owner and his audiophile friends and let them sit and listen any way they wanted. Still no correlation. Their recordings were all noisier than the CD link, as are 99.9% of all discs out there.
The above high-gain test was done first with an inexpensive Pioneer player, which was plenty quiet enough to reveal the difference; the test exposed a small but audible low-level nonlinearity in its left channel decoder. We tried a $2000 Sony player, which sounded clean, and wound up doing the great majority of our tests with a Yamaha DVD-1500.
We also wrote that our recordings were as a class the best-sounding commercial efforts we had heard anywhere. As it happens, virtually all could have been released on a CD (just the two-channel versions, obviously) without sounding different. Why that doesn't happen is another very interesting discussion, and is addressed briefly in the paper.
-- E. Brad Meyer
Interesting - I'll have to look at the paper. Any time I see something of this nature, with this type of conclusion, I have to then wonder why so many engineers (recording, mixing, and/or mastering) part with hard-earned $$ for high bitrate digital equipment. Or cables for that matter, but that's another kettle of fish. Guys like Bob Ludwig, for example. Or any number of others of course. Now, Bob clearly has a bigger budget to play with than most in his profession, so a devil's advocate could say that someone in a similar position might be collecting the latest and greatest gear simply to impress clients. But so many other guys out there are really just getting by, or operate in a high-risk strata of their profession, and I would be hard pressed to believe that most/all of them would play that kind of game. What's left is that higher bitrate equipment, and other types of 'better' gear, must sound better to their ears. At least that's how it would seem to me.
I recall John Atkinson's remarks on a DBT study some years ago, to the effect of "what has really been proven is that these subjects couldn't hear the difference, not that differences did not exist." Or something like that. I'm probably misquoting. I would wonder if maybe that applies here. I will have to take a look at the paper, as you said, and see for myself.
Thanks,
Mike
Quads were a good choice for this kind of test.
You see many mistakenly mistook the study as a scientific investigation as hence there was considerable derision when it was revealed by a member (who had read the full report) that there was scant information as to the test methodology and procedures, equipment employed (including little on the "bottleneck”), selection of test subjects, statistical analysis, and on and on.
That was to be expected of course were it the case of research with pretenses of serious scientic. Now however we find that the study was at least in part informed by the results of a listening session at an audiophile's home with his audiophile buddies in attendance as listeners. That and some specialized tests where the playback levels were such that one hopes that participants left without suffering hearing damage; and who knows perhaps even further procedures and tests not described in any great detail?
Much ado about little it now seems, at least for those who were mystified at what appeared to be obvious omissions in the report of a serious research project/investigation.
It seems to me that the confusion could well have been avoided had the report included at least as much detail as you've now provided. Then all would have clearly have seem that it wasn't an attempt at serious science.
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
"many mistakenly mistook the study as a scientific investigation"
I'm not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding the situation, just to be provocative. If so, I shouldn't dignify your post with a response. From your post, I don't think you have read the paper, in which case I really shouldn't waste my time answering you. At any rate I'm going to assume that at least some people here would like to hear a few more details.
Of course this is a scientific paper; it's been published in a refereed journal, where people of demonstrated competence pick it apart and demand whatever they think it needs before they allow it to go to publication. The methodology is sound and the work has stood up to the challenges the reviewers posed, which were few, because we knew what we were doing. They wanted a bit more data reduction, which we supplied, and they otherwise pretty much appreciated our thoroughness.
Subjective publications become obsessed with specific makes and models of equipment used, but in a serious test you can use what is known to be competently designed equipment and everyone understands that your experiment is good. It hasn't been compromised just because we failed to conform to some tweako fashion of the month. The A/D/A link is not a secret; it was an HHB CDR 850, a very highly regarded pro CD recorder that some really fussy engineers have used as their main A/D for acoustic sessions. What you seem not to get is that if we hadn't used a good deck, our subjects would have spotted the difference between it and the high-bit source, which we gave them every opportunity to do successfully. That they didn't means that the codec is good enough.
The audiophile test session you denigrated was part of our experiment precisely because the system conformed completely to standards espoused in the subjective journals. Professional studios rarely use electrostatic loudspeakers because they won't play loud enough and are not sufficiently reliable for professional use. But it was a near certainty that someone in that part of the industry would claim that with a "real audiophile system" the differences would have been obvious. So we found such a system and gave its owner and his friends a chance. We conducted that test with the same rigor as the others; levels of the two signals were matched within 0.1 dB at 1 kHz, and then the subjects were asked to choose their best material and listen however they usually do, to maximize their aural acuity.
I'm not sure why you think our doing that somehow compromises the test (if in fact you do), but I would guess that almost everyone else here understands that it strengthens our conclusions significantly.
Are our results unassailable? Nope. If someone comes up with a cogent objection or spots a flaw in our procedures or conclusions, we or someone will investigate further. The nature of this process is that nothing is final. There could be someone out there who can hear these differences on music at normal levels, in which case we'd love to have him or her prove it, and if possible teach us to hear the difference as well. But we tried hard to find such a person, and failed, so far. For now, if someone disagrees with our results, it falls to that person to do another experiment and prove the contrary case. -- E. Brad Meyer
"Professional studios rarely use electrostatic loudspeakers because they won't play loud enough and are not sufficiently reliable for professional use."
Sorry but how loud is "loud enough" and how reliable is "sufficiently reliable for professional use"?? I have three pairs of Acoustats, the oldest of which is more than 20 years old and all are capable of nearly 115db with sufficiently powerful amplification. They can play at levels over 100db all day long and simply don't die. No need to refoam a woofer or worry about a burned voice coil. Now I know that there are SOME electrostats that are fragile but the truth is that not all are that way or is it an inherent trait of them being an electrostatic speaker.
This brings up another question though, why exactly is it necessary for a professional studio to listen to music at such elevated levels?? Is it to hear all the details in the recording?? If so then the speakers they are using are not good and they would be better served using something with a high resolution so that they can listen at more reasonable levels and still get all the information they require.
Philips once used to use Audiostatic loudspeakers for mastering their classical recordings and they made some very fine sounding recordings during this period.
"We conducted that test with the same rigor as the others; levels of the two signals were matched within 0.1 dB at 1 kHz"
Why not with a broadband source like pink noise?? I have done level matched preamp tests and I found using pink noise to set the SPL level for each preamp (within 0.3db on my test) worked quite nicely and would perhaps give less bias if one or the other source is somehow not uniform and 1Khz gives a significantly different level between test units.
Okay, okay. I should have known better than to cast aspersions on ESLs around here.
Yes, many of them can play loud enough for me, but a peak level of 115 dB SPL at the monitoring chair does not, I'm afraid, come close to many people's requirements (nor is that level sustainable by any ESL I know down into the chest-pounding dance-club bass range; YMMV). Sometimes it's necessary to reveal how much skin there is in a kick-drum sound to a room full of noisy, pharmaceutically impaired musicians.
You say no one should need levels like this. You may also say they do much hearing damage, especially to the poor mixing engineers who are in there all day. If you said those things I would agree, but it wouldn't change the nature of the market.
You asked about level matching with pink noise. It's necessary to do this to less than 0.1 dB, which is much harder with a time-variant source. The pitfall you cite with non-flat devices certainly exists. But, partly because it's fast, easy and repeatable, my tendency has always been to use 1 kHz and let the rest of the spectrum do what it will. If the device is non-flat by more than a couple of tenths of a dB over a couple of octaves or more, you're gonna hear it whatever you decide about the level match. That was very true for my power amp test from 1991, as you can see from the graphs. It's at http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/features/651/the-ampspeaker-interface.html
-- E. Brad
Good Lard can you really be serious?
"Of course this is a scientific paper; it's been published in a refereed journal, where people of demonstrated competence pick it apart and demand whatever they think it needs before they allow it to go to publication. The methodology is sound and the work has stood up to the challenges the reviewers posed, which were few, because we knew what we were doing. They wanted a bit more data reduction, which we supplied, and they otherwise pretty much appreciated our thoroughness."
What, are we to suppose that you gave them a verbal extensive description of your methodology, procedures, detail results... the whole shebang! What then, should we suppose they said, "Great, look write up a short summary and we'll publish it in our scientific journal... Oh! don't forget the conclusions but if you want to leave off all the boring detail No Problemo!, we're already fully satisfied on those points and there's no need to bore the poor readers to death."
Did it go down something like that? Surely it must have because a memeber here reported after reading the full report that "... the test description and analysis is surprisingly thin. No equipment readout, no results breakdown by listener or location or whatnot, no detailed description of listening venues, no musical selections. No null hypothesis, no description of type I/II error."
Which brings up an interesting question, how exactly would a reader come "... up with a cogent objection or spots a flaw in our procedures or conclusions"?
I mean really! Is this a reflection on what passes for "science" for the folks of "demonstrated competence" at the "scientific" journal in question?
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
"a memeber [sic] here reported after reading the full report that "... the test description and analysis is surprisingly thin. No equipment readout, no results breakdown by listener or location or whatnot, no detailed description of listening venues, no musical selections. No null hypothesis, no description of type I/II error."
Okay, again you are read someone else's opinion, accept it as gospel, and insist you know what you're talking about on that basis. You seem determined to critique the paper without reading or really thinking about it, so I'm about done with you.
Each of those criticisms, as it happens, is either untrue or irrelevant. The exact equipment doesn't matter because it was well chosen and was good enough for the test (we're preparing a more specific list, to be made available to those who have read the paper and wish to know). There were several venues, all chosen for the excellence of the room; one important criterion is that the background noise must be extremely low for enough detail to be heard, and we measured and reported this.
There is little point in burdening the reader with individual listener data -- though we checked their high-frequency hearing limit of most subjects, since that seemed possibly relevant -- when not one person could hear differences with music at normal levels. Most subjects listened from the sweet spot in our main system, of which there is a photograph in the paper, but again no one, sitting anywhere, passed the test.
A list of musical selections will likewise be made available; we submitted one with the paper but it was not published. The null hypothesis -- that there was no detectable difference between the high-bit audio and the same signal passed through our codec -- was obvious from the paper. Type II error (Have you read Leventhal's paper? Somehow, I doubt it.) is relevant only when there are results that show positive correlation, but not enough of one to meet the 95% confidence limit. We had no such data. No one even came close.
"I mean really! Is this a reflection on what passes for "science" for the folks of "demonstrated competence" at the "scientific" journal in question?"
The idea that the people who actually do the work in the audio industry are all fools, who neither know what they're doing nor understand anything about scientific procedure, is bandied about rather easily around here, I notice. Saying such things just makes you look bad, a job I leave in your competent hands. -- E. Brad Meyer
"The exact equipment doesn't matter because it was well chosen and was good enough for the test "
You are right BUT who decides that the equipment was well chosen and good enough for the test?? You or the reviewers of your paper? Why the reviewers should be allowed to determine this. Your job is full disclosure in the paper not a predecided "it was good enough". When I publish papers in scientific journals I disclose ALL the instrumentation we are using for our measurements. We also show examples of those measurements so that people can see that the instrument is operating without bias and the data delivered meets important criteria.
An example: I regularly make measurements in the lab on trace levels of organic compounds. I have three different mass spectrometers in the laboratory that I could use to make those measurements. One of them though has a sensitivity about 100 times greater than the other two.
If I were, for whatever reason, to use one of the lower sensitivity instruments I could very easily state that most of the compounds that I KNOW to be there are not there because I cannot detect them on that instrument.
If I were to publish a paper saying that we cannot detect those compounds because they are not there but I put in the paper in the methods section that I am using merely a Brand X mass spectrometer with detection limits that are quite low then my peers would like ask, "Why the hell didn't you use a more sensitive instrument because we KNOW that the compounds are present at lower levels than you could measure". If I didn't disclose the mass spectrometer in the paper for fear of getting such a question then the first question would be, "What type of Mass spectrometer did you use and is it good enough?"
That your peers were apparently unconcerned about your failure to disclose the equipment you used for your test says a lot about how lax they were in their duties as reviewers OR there is an unreasonable bias in the Audio engineering society that audio equipment used is not important for listening tests!! What rubbish because in other scientific fields the equipment used to prove a test or not is VERY important. If I were to use a Mass spectrometer from the 1960s there might be a lot of eyebrows raised when that paper is submitted for publication. It seems that you peers were only concerned that your PROCEDURE was correct and not the meat of how it was actually conducted and with what equipment, which despite what you think, is highly relevant. I am an Ph.D. in analytical chemistry with many years training and experience in making analytical measuremnts and data interpretation and I can tell you that in chemistry or audio its just as relevant.
The whole point of audiophile gear is that the exact equipment DOES matter and that it will give you significant bias if not chosen carefully. I applaud your use of electrostatic speakers but what amp was used?? This is important because as you are surely aware, electrostatic speakers provide an highly unusual load in that they are largely reactive in nature often with wild impedance curves and can drive many amps into fits of oscillation or just plain bad performance. Why don't you publish the equipment and let US decide if was a good choice or not?? It is not like using a lab equipment where as long as the voltage is right its a good powersupply (we would still include it in the methods section of a paper though).
I've already discussed a lot of this with David Moran on HydrogenAudio (see link).
People who are using my complaint to justify attacking the paper as a whole, who haven't read the paper themselves, definitely don't know how I feel about it. I don't have a problem with the conclusion at all. And for that to be true, ultimately, I don't have a problem with the test setup. I'll probably never be in as good of a position to evaluate the value of high res music as you were with your test setups. It's a result that, even if I were to take your setup with a grain of salt, is still a test well beyond my means both financially and in terms of my listening experience. So I trust it.
Still, I understand that much of the data was omitted either because the editors thought it was impertinent (ie, the music selections), or because it was perceived that no rational debate on the data is possible. The former can't be helped, but the latter seemed like a somewhat cavalier attitude to take, and one that confused me. Even though, as some others have pointed out, it's most likely true.
Like I said to David: "Trust us" is not a very reasonable argument to use in a technical paper. Clearly the editors disagreed, though, and I don't think one must resort to conspiracy theories to explain that. I'm still a little confused as to how much detail is acceptable for peer review, versus how much should ideally exist in a paper for the purposes of test reproduction and establishing trust in the test procedure.
Nevertheless: Thank you very much for doing this test!
- http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=57406&view=findpost&p=517818 (Open in New Window)
Initially it was expressed in:
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/prophead/messages/3/37245.html
See, it's not about "omission of data"!
Then that was expanded upon in:
Howdy
Ironically one of the papers in their references doesn't seem to have these problems, it gives much more detail about equipment used, music selections, details of the test protocol, some demographics of the test subjects, a serious digression into the four outliers who could hear a clear difference, etc.:
D. Blech and M. Yang, “DVD-Audio versus SACD: Perceptual Discrimination of Digital Coding Formats,” presented at the 116th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, Berlin, Germany, 2004 May 8–11, convention paper 6086
I certainly don't know what the differing constrains are for being published by AES in these two different fora, but after reading the paper which is the subject of this thread reading the cited paper above was a breath of fresh air.
-Ted
One is once again reminded of Todd Krieger's inimitable phrase, "token peers".
Why, I've even gotten E. Brad to treat me high-handedly, in that connection:
"This statement was about whatever should or should not
be written at this point in a particular refereed journal. Unless you're
planning to write for it, which something tells me you aren't, it doesn't
apply to you."
Good to know.
I'll sign off --
clark, AES Life Member
"Sometimes experimenters may make systematic errors during their experiments, unconsciously veer from the scientific method (Pathological science) for various reasons, or, in rare cases, deliberately falsify their results. Consequently, it is a common practice for other scientists to attempt to repeat the experiments in order to duplicate the results, thus further validating the hypothesis." (see link)
It seems clear that documentation in this case was lacking and hence it would not be possible to replicate the experiment based upon the published paper. This is a sad statement for the documentation of an empirical investigation published in a peer reviewed scientific journal.
It would be entirely futile to argue this point as the demands of the scientific method clearly were not met and franlkly it matters little what I, you, or the editors feel about it. The scientific method makes no allowance for lowering standards regardless of whether rational debate may or may not be possible, and it certainly makes no allowance for "Trust us" assertions!
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
I agree. Full disclosure of equipment used and methods is a mandatory and prefunctory part of all scientific papers. It would be like me publishing a paper on detection limits in mass spectrometery for some compound and then not telling them what kind of mass spectrometer I was using...instead simply saying that it was a properly designed and funcitoning unit. I can assure you lots of questions would be forth coming from the reviewers if I had omitted that critical piece of information. Also, omission of sample handling would raise a few eyebrows!
You're reasoning with a lynch mob. These are not people interested in comparing, testing, improving, and accumulating knowledge. It's a fraternity enamored with rituals and rites, a club rather or a mutual affirmation society, not a site for openly debating issues in electrical engineering, acoustics, and the physiology of perception as one might otherwise be mislead to think.TL
"You're reasoning with a lynch mob."
Well, when anyone decides the paper is no good without reading it, I have to agree there's no point in arguing with that person.
We tried to present the data necessary to prove our result -- that if high-bit audio sounds better, the extra bits are not responsible. If the equipment we used was defective in any audible way, the subjects would have heard the difference, so any errors of the type we are alleged to have made would have led to the opposite outcome. That's why, for example, the gain stage that we used to match the levels of the CD link to the original was in series with the CD link. When subjects heard the high-bit audio, it wasn't in the circuit. So if it had an audible flaw, again the experiment wouldn't have come out as it did.
In the meantime, we are planning to make available the details we left out for the purposes of clarity and brevity. That handout/email should be ready this coming week if anyone here is interested. -- E. Brad
Just as it was done -- and to the hilt --
that house of cards that Charles built,
and John came all the way to paint
(now ain't that man a saintly saint!)...
Clarkjohnsen rushed up with the roses.
Some fires, yes, but with their hoses
the younger boys delivered doses of their famed
and sour salvos, and lo! they thought once mo’ they’d tamed
that nasty nature (oh so, um, unyielding!) --
Was safe again what they were shielding:
those labels that they do like wielding...
(Do I compare to Henry Fielding?)TL
Um... I'm not sure quite what *all* of this means, but it looks as though you may, in the course of writing it, have called me "young".
If that's true -- THANKS! It's been a long time since anyone mistook me for anything but the geezer I am. -- EBM
Sorry for all the obscurity. It was quite modestly meant as a mockery of the kind of mentality that gets people to jump at the chance of launching a 258-post onslaught on an article that no more than one person has read.Thus also that "young boys" was basically nothing more than a reference to the acolytes following their opinion leaders named earlier, so I am afraid I never meant to include you in that category...
The last line was a semiprivate joke meant to schematically connect with a recent string of situational humor by poster Richard BassNut Greene.
Thanks for supplying all that additional information about your interesting and quite pioneering experiments (and also of those given his own interpretation by J. Atkinson). You guys are the hard workers. Moreover, this is an issue that has been on my mind and I'm curious to learn more.
TL
"It was quite modestly meant as a mockery of the kind of mentality that gets people to jump at the chance of launching a 258-post onslaught on an article that no more than one person has read."
Now THAT I can really appreciate.
"I am afraid I never meant to include you in that [young] category..."
Ah, I knew it was too good to be true.
Meanwhile, if there's anything else you're curious about, ask away. -- E Brad
"It was quite modestly meant as a mockery of the kind of mentality that gets people to jump at the chance of launching a 258-post onslaught on an article that no more than one person has read."
Oh yes! I remember a 'discussion' a few years ago about an article by Tom Nousaine in Stereo Review describing a Geek and Tweak systems test which at most two or three here had actually read. It was truly pitiful!
I don't think E. Brad minded being called "young" any more than I would!
-
"It pertains to all men to know themselves and to be temperate."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
One tries to pre-empt any possibility for open, unprejudiced debate if one can't afford such.As you point out, they like doing that sort of a thing. I'm pretty convinced there are more than the two or three occasions when I've seen John Atkinson here "accidentally" slip out a wholly unsubstantiated rumour (or not even rumour but an insinutation claimed to be something that people "in the know" had "confidentially" told him "in private" which privilege he had promised "to respect," and so forth - all that crap) about his competitors in the business, only to backtrack just enough a couple of days later when pressed on the issue, with the vocal regrets that quite unfortunately, for the time being he was not in a position to speak more about the subject (back up his claims, in other words) due to some circumstance or another, like the advise of his lawyers (clearly good advise if that's what he got), etc., etc.
Oh well, the story was already out and nothing to do about it now!
(And yes I can paste the stuff here if anyone's interested.)
So, nothing new if Charles Hansen and his disciples now opt for the same strategy. Only I can't see why he feels like he should be so worried (apart from being a manufacturer of SACD capable players). clarkjohnsen everyone already knows; that's his sole mode of operation, but I don't take him seriously since it's very unprobable that too many do that anyway. (Strike that; I just saw another post by someone claiming to do so. Everything's possible, then.)
Yet it doesn't cease to astonish me. It's kind of like not how you were told at primary school we do these things.
TL
> > proven that we are all deaf.
Haha, hardly! But this is wild stuff posted here. I sure wish all of you had taken the test. Esp since not one subject, of whatever experience or hearing bandwidth, got results better than coin-flip. Clark J, you're in the BAS, sometimes, I think, right? You did not hear about it? We were running it for months and months and months and mentioning it in BAS mailings.
We had recording engineers take it, yes. Well-regarded ones. Who wish to remain anonymous, understandably.
Anyway, read the actual article. We had no desired result going into the test. It would have been quite cool to see that hi-rez does sound somehow better, for some reason or other.
We got pretty heavily peer-reviewed, actually, compared with other AESJ papers I have been involved with.
I notice no one here objects to the totally untested, unsubstantiated adulatory characterization of hi-rez that licensor Bob Stuart published in the AESJ. Which is what got us motivated to do the test.
If you feel our result is disprovable ("wrong") and that hi-rez is audibly better in some way, well, do your own proper test.
-- David Moran
> Brad Meyer and David Moran of the Boston Audio Society have (once
> again) proven that we are all deaf.
In my September "As We See It" essay, reprinted this morning at
www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/907awsi , I report the results
of blind tests performed at McGill university that came to a different
conclusion to the Meyer/Moran findings: "To achieve a higher degree of
fidelity to the live analog reference, we need to convert audio using a
high sampling rate even when we do not use microphones and loudspeakers
having bandwidth extended far beyond 20kHz. Listeners judge high
sampling conversion as sounding more like the analog reference when
listening to standard audio bandwidth."
The tests were perfomred by Wieslaw Woszczyk and John Usher of McGill
University, Jan Engel of the Centre for Quantitative Methods, Ronald
Aarts and Derk Reefman of Philips. Their conclusions were contained in a
paper presented at the 31st International AES Conference, held in
London, in June 2007, "Which of Two Digital Audio Systems Meets Best
with the Analog System?", and reprinted in the Proceedings of the
Conference.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
John: I've read the non-refereed preprint you refer to. Though many of their methods are interesting and they went to a lot of trouble, I don't believe the data support the authors' conclusions. They asked their subjects to tell them which sounded more like a multichannel analog feed, a band-limited codec with 44.1kHz sampling, or another with 352.8k. By a small (and statistically insignificant) margin, the subjects thought the 44.1k codec was truer to the source. There were also separate tests with two transmission channels (two sets of microphones and speakers), one with response to 100 kHz and another band-limited to 20k. Again through an unsurprising random statistical variance, the subjects chose the 352k codec *less* often, and the 44.1k codec more often, when there was > 20k audio in the source.
The authors assume (and say so in the paper) that there has to be an audible difference between the codecs, which leads them into a tortured and illogical explanation of how this could have happened. They posit that the ultrasonic material somehow sounded bad, so subjects chose the 44.1k codec when it was present -- but subjects were asked only to say which was more like the (high-bandwidth) source, not which one they liked. So the whole argument kind of collapses in a heap at that point. -- Brad
Don't bother - stereophile doesn't pay any attention to facts when it comes to these issues. They're ad-based, not reality-based.
Truthseeker:
Thanks for the advice. Whatever the magazine *per se* may do, I have had at least a nodding acquaintance with John A. over the years, and wanted to give him, or anyone else reading over our shoulders, my take on the paper, which was intriguing but has to be read carefully. For example, they invented a sound source for the test, which was a series of amazing contraptions (photos are included) creating a quasi-repetitive noise of complex character, in order to exercise the > 20k bandwidth of their system while removing the usual musical syntax from the subjects' experience. I'd love to hear a sample of that source. Brian Eno probably would too. -- E. Brad
t
Hard to believe there is even a debate about whether recording engineers or other people who deal with recorded music on a daily basis embrace high rez over low. Absolutely unbelievable. But I guess our non-experiential objectivist friends will believe anything they read, as long as it fits their agenda.
So the paper opposes one or two audiophile beliefs. What is to stop an audiophile with a bit of confidence in those beliefs spending a few minutes making a low-res copy of a high-res CD and having a bit of a listen? If the results of controlled listening tests disagree with the published results as surely the must then take the time to collect the evidence and write to the JAES and let them know. This is how science works and they will welcome and publish contradictory scientific data but, obviously, not unsubstantiated statements of belief.
Since anyone that works with audio and has an interest in the audible differences of various bit resolutions and depths will have established this long ago there would seem to be little scientific reason for the study. Perhaps a more general interest for their members or, possibly, to oppose audiophile marketing? I believe somebody once reported on speaker cables a few decades ago but can we now expect controlled listening tests of power cables or some of Geoff and May's products?
> Since anyone that works with audio and has an interest in the audible differences of various bit resolutions and depths will have established this long ago <
You obviously don't know many recording engineers! Your statement above is so totally wrong that it's not worth commenting about further. Not just objectionable, not just shortsighted, not just a differing of opinon, but just plain dead wrong.
> You obviously don't know many recording engineers!
Depends what you mean by many and recording engineer.
> Your statement above is so totally wrong that it's not worth commenting
> about further. Not just objectionable, not just shortsighted, not just a
> differing of opinon, but just plain dead wrong.
I presume you really want to tell me about how despite earning their living from making recordings in high and low res formats and listening to them closely for upto 12 hours a day, recording engineers fail to hear the differences in the formats. Unlike audiophiles like yourself who, despite not knowing the details of how the recordings were made, can use their sophisticated trained ears and audiophile equipment to clearly hear all the deficiencies in both high and low resolution digital formats. Please tell me about it.
> I presume you really want to tell me about how despite earning their living from making recordings in high and low res formats and listening to them closely for upto 12 hours a day, recording engineers fail to hear the differences in the formats <
Just the opposite. I don't know a single recording engineer that doesn't know that higher rez recordings sound "better" and more accurate. Most of them just know good sound, whether they are audiophiles or not. "If it can be played back at higher rez, it should be recorded in high rez" is their credo. I can't imagine anyone working with music and sound that has missed this, and if they have, I'd have trouble trusting them to get the best sound out the recording studio.
Knowledge is a wonderful thing, trumped only by experience.
> Just the opposite. I don't know a single recording engineer that doesn't
> know that higher rez recordings sound "better" and more accurate.
There you go then.
> Most of them just know good sound, whether they are audiophiles or not.
Audiophiles? What sort of recording engineers are these?
> "If it can be played back at higher rez, it should be recorded in high
> rez" is their credo.
Now this looks like fantasy. Recording engineers will usually take care to produce an accurate recording but will deliver it in the form the customer wants. Why is modern pop music loud?
> I can't imagine anyone working with music and sound that has missed
> this, and if they have, I'd have trouble trusting them to get the best
> sound out the recording studio.
I think you may be living in an audiophile fantasy land.
> Recording engineers will usually take care to produce an accurate recording but will deliver it in the form the customer wants. <
True. Thankfully, a lot of the customers want to maximize the RE's talents and allow him to do a lot of the setup. Especially when, as in a couple of cases involving RE friends, the customer and the RE are one and the same company.
> I think you may be living in an audiophile fantasy land. <
I forwarded your previous post to a couple of RE's I know, both personally and from their work. Both advised me not to argue with a nitwit and that the computer has an "off" button I should get to know. I usually listen to them, at least eventually. Sorry, but you do not know what you're talking about in this case. The experts in the field of sound and music recording have spoken. I can't argue with you anymore because it's as if you're arguing against 2+2 equaling 4.
They get pissy when people put false words into their mouths, just as they get pissy when I or anyone else tries to tell them their business. They don't seem to mind telling ME how to play the guitar, though! LOL!
> I forwarded your previous post to a couple of RE's I know, both personally
> and from their work. Both advised me not to argue with a nitwit and that
> the computer has an "off" button I should get to know. I usually listen to
> them, at least eventually. Sorry, but you do not know what you're talking
> about in this case. The experts in the field of sound and music recording
> have spoken. I can't argue with you anymore because it's as if you're
> arguing against 2+2 equaling 4.
I must congratulate you for an original reply. Do you think the audiophiles will believe it?
> I must congratulate you for an original reply. <
Thanks, but I can't take credit for it, as I was paraphrasing - but I'd say it was very close to direct quotes. I'll be happy to let the originators of the comments know, on your behalf.
> Do you think the audiophiles will believe it? <
Well, any that are RE's probably will. As for the others, there's no reason for them to believe what I post anymore than there's a reason for them to believe what you post. The only thing I really recommend to people regarding audio is to think for themselves, and try things out for themselves. There's enough misinformation on both the subjectivist and objectivist sides that taking anyone's word for anything is risky, especially around here.
The ones that make the best recordings.
Is that sort of like how the religious faithful have determined that the religious make the best religions?
Or those with superior perception have determined that those with superior perception have the best perception? Cool.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
> Is that sort of like how the religious faithful have determined that the religious make the best religions?
Of course not. But your question certainly does tell us a lot about your perspective that you would not see the difference between assessing excellence in audio and assessing the merits fo religions.
> Or those with superior perception have determined that those with superior perception have the best perception? Cool.
When it comes to audio, do you have anything other than baggage? If it weren't for the fueds would you actually have any interest in audio?
Of course not
Why?
But your question certainly does tell us a lot about your perspective that you would not see the difference between assessing excellence in audio and assessing the merits fo religions
Excellence in audio according to who? Excellence as assessed how? Someones words of interpretation of sound? To be taken as gospel? Have faith?
When it comes to audio, do you have anything other than baggage
You mean like my portable radio? Sure, I have a couple home audio systems.
If it weren't for the fueds would you actually have any interest in audio?
What or who are the fueds? I do have an interest in foods, but I am not sure how that would correlate with audio.
BTW, how were those NFL games today on your analog TV? Completely absent of the harshness and grain of my digital set I imagine? Or does video perception not affect your condition?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
> > Of course not > >
> Why?
You really don't understand the difference between consumers passing judgement on consumer goods and people of a particular religious faith doing comparative surveys of all religions? that does explain a lot about your posts.
> > But your question certainly does tell us a lot about your perspective that you would not see the difference between assessing excellence in audio and assessing the merits fo religions > >
> Excellence in audio according to who? Excellence as assessed how? Someones words of interpretation of sound? To be taken as gospel? Have faith? >
Once again your questions tell us more about you than anything else. Who do you think should evaluate excellence in audio and how should it be done? once again you seem to be confusing religion and consumer products.
> > When it comes to audio, do you have anything other than baggage > >
> You mean like my portable radio? Sure, I have a couple home audio systems. >
You consider a couple porable radios to be home audio *systems* OK,,,,, That also adds some perspective to all your posts. You might want to look into upgrading. From your point it shouldn;t cost much nor should it be difficult to acomplish. you might even start hearing differences you you don't believe exist.
> > If it weren't for the fueds would you actually have any interest in audio? > >
> What or who are the fueds? I do have an interest in foods, but I am not sure how that would correlate with audio.>
The most sure sign of an internet loser is finding personal victories in other peoples' typos. did you dance on the table in nothing but your stained underwear when you saw this golden opportunity to pounce? Must have felt real good huh?
> BTW, how were those NFL games today on your analog TV? >
My "analog TV?" didn't know there was such a thing as analog TVs and digital TVs. Did you mean CRT or tube monitor? I understand how words like analog and tube make guys like you see red.
> Completely absent of the harshness and grain of my digital set>
Difital grain of TV? what are you sniffing?
> I imagine? >
That about sums it up right there.
> Or does video perception not affect your condition? >
My condition? LOL
--
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
...I'm not above dancing on the table in stained undies from time to time.
"Am I boogying to a salsa dance,
or is that salsa on my underpants,
la la la scooby doo...."
P.S. I won't give up my day job... if I even have a day job.
Are you enjoying your speakers, you rat-fink so-and-so %#$%&^@&*$???? Hope so! I haven't seen any updates from you. How're they coming along?
Ha ha. I actually worked on them a bit today for an hour or two. Soon. Soon. I'm hoping for a working prototype by weeks end. At least one (close your eyes) that can be measured. With a generic DSP as xo. Daily evening rains have been killing me as my anechoic chamber looks a lot like my back yard.
The real McCoy uses a full blow computer, but that's close to 70% done now too. Sloooowwwly.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
Like, totally, dude; the guy's so off, so obviously. Just don't ask me why. He should be, like, banned, man, by the authority of the sacred community of us believers in the privileged truth that no way can be articulated, dude, not to mere mortals at the very least. It's more than that, man, way more; you can't really capture it with this request for evidence thing, dude, you know what I mean? It's like a vision, a beautiful vision! You feel what I'm feelin'? Dude, we're free from the constraints of nature, that boring old bull! You know what I mean, man, only you, and let me tell you, trust no one else. It's all in your head. One day we'll rule the Earth again, man, they won't hold us down for ever, not this evil apparatus of establishment shit, you know what I'm saying? Poor losers! Let them spew their misguided shit. Let's go, we've got some work to do, since they won't bother; we listen, they just talk, those insecure sissies -- right or wrong, Clarkie my man? But bring that green marker of yours, it makes everything even more beautiful and blissful, I've got the hand cream already, and tonight we'll do this teleportation thing that Geoff showed us last time we spoke. Far out!
TL
I showed your post to my kids. It was an excellent way to show them the danger of massive amounts of illegal drugs. :)
Exactly, the clinical pictures are rather alike. I think you came close to a realization here.TL
> I think you came close to a realization here. <
Yes. A massive amount of drugs can cure any listening skills one might have. Well, that and daily doses of DBT's. But I'll pass - you enjoy! :)
x
Very sad -- really destroyed his family.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
His participles dangled, too! It was embarrassing!
I made a joke out of this but really described a true story, and have met the ex-wife and her children once or twice. I never met the husband but he died a few years later, probably not helped by the stress of his arrest and subsequent divorce. After hearing this story it makes pubic, er, public libraries seem kind of creepy.
.
.
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.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
Can't imagine why his wife divorced him! I had to do stuff a whole lot worse than that to get rid of my wife!
They caught him by the organ and threw him out.
see if you can tell the difference between a full resolution CD and a low rez MP3. Let us know your outcome.
rw
> see if you can tell the difference between a full resolution CD and a low
> rez MP3.
First I would probably have to see some logical train of thought?
then get back with us concerning the results of your stated test.
rw
> then get back with us concerning the results of your stated test.
I think you will find that it was you that stated I perform a test. This is what I meant about the logic and train of thought thing. Bit of clarity required before the next step.
What is to stop an audiophile with a bit of confidence in those beliefs spending a few minutes making a low-res copy of a high-res CD and having a bit of a listen?
Here is your test. I have done such a comparison on good gear. How 'bout you?
rw
> I have done such a comparison on good gear.
There you go then. If you used proper controls, write it up and send it off to refute the claims in the paper.
> How 'bout you?
I am not an audiophile and have no problem with the paper. We seem to be back to this logic thing.
Evidently, your experience in such matters is absent. No surprise.
...write it up and send it off to refute the claims in the paper.
One of the lead authors, Meyer, has already done that and stated the despite the findings of the test, high rez still sounds better. No need to refute that which I agree.
rw
d
Don't hold your breath for AES or any other "recognized organization" to perform any type of tests, blind or otherwise, on the items you refer to. Organizations like AES (believe they) have much to lose by even pretending to take such products seriously. That will be the day! Ha HaAlong these lines, The Journal of Acoustical Society of America (oldest in the US and like AES quite set in their ways) published an article on audio tweaks last year (a portion of which I posted here a while back). That article mentioned both Brilliant Pebbles and the Belts, as well as some other items -- but only in the context of ridicule. After all, they are the Acoustic Society of America LOL.... it wasn't as if the author of the article had actually seen, much less heard, the items he was ridiculing.
Was the Journal of Acoustical Society article peer reviewed? Who among the "peers" would have stood up and objected? LOL This is precisely what we've come to expect from the so-called pillars of modern audio thought: "There's nothing new under the sun, and when there is you'll hear it from us first." HA! HA!
~ Geoff Kait
> Don't hold your breath for AES or any other "recognized organization" to
> perform any type of tests, blind or otherwise, on the items you refer to.
They are publishers, they do not perform tests themselves but report the tests of others. So get testing and submit your results (scientific flavour required).
> Organizations like AES (believe they) have much to lose by even
> pretending to take such products seriously.
Indeed they do have a great deal to lose: their scientific credibility. If they lose that they will lose almost all their members and hence far too much income to remain in business. It is not unlike an audiophile publication losing the support of the audiophile industry by publishing too much scientific data about sound, sound perception and electronics.
> Was the Journal of Acoustical Society article peer reviewed?
If you mean the one by Wright, probably not in the sense you mean because it is a light hearted review article not an article presenting new science.
> Who among the "peers" would have stood up and objected?
I skimmed your section in the context of a light hearted article reviewing acoustical nonsense over the centuries. Nobody with a grasp of how sound propagates would object to jars of pebbles in the corner of a room being held up as an example of something that fails to audibly modify the sound field but may influence sound perception in some people. I would not have objected.
> LOL This is precisely what we've come to expect from the so-called pillars of modern audio
> thought: "There's nothing new under the sun, and when there is you'll hear it from us
> first." HA! HA!
If you look at the other articles in JASA you will see many people reporting new things to do wiht sound while conforming to the scientific method. Apart from the review articles of course.
"Nobody with a grasp of how sound propagates would object to jars of pebbles in the corner of a room being held up as an example of something that fails to audibly modify the sound field but may influence sound perception in some people. I would not have objected."Excellent Strawman Argument (Appeal to Authority). You'd make an excellent token peer.
Thanks for making my point more vivid.
~ Cheerio
> Excellent Strawman Argument; that's called Appeal to Authority. You'd
> obviously make an excellent token peer.
It is an appeal to the scientific laws governing the propagation of sound. This is indeed an authority and one that all that have spotted the usefulness of science tend to recognise.
> Thanks for making my point more vivid.
I think you may have to expand the strawman bit to really make it stick.
I have the sneaking suspicion that you're just being argumentative and really have no idea what the laws governing the propagation of sound are nor whom you can consult to support your non-argument.~ Cheerio
> I have the sneaking suspicion that you're just being argumentative and
> really have no idea what the laws governing the propagation of sound are
> nor whom you can consult to support your non-argument.
Not sure about the argumentative. I am responding because you posted but not in a wholly serious manner it must be admitted.
I am afraid you will have to judge my knowledge of the laws of sound propagation from the content of my postings. I am not going to give you an authority.
My non-argument has not drawn a convincing rebuttal (not that know which non-argument you are referring to) so it presumably stands as the last word?
Unfortunately for you, that's exactly what I did. Your posts have no content. That's why I said you were being argumentative (and continue to be). Not to worry -- even if you don't know these laws you hold so dear, it's quite easy to find experts out there who will back you up 100%. LOL
> Unfortunately for you, that's exactly what I did. Your posts have no
> content.
Which raises the question what you have found to reply to?
> Not to worry -- even if you don't know these laws you hold so dear, it's
> quite easy to find experts out there who will back you up 100%.
Why do I need backing up? The point was that the readers of your JASA article would be experts knowing these laws and how to use them to determine whether or not your product could audibly change the sound field. Whether I am an expert or not makes little difference.
You fail to grasp the original point of my mentioning the article -- that supposed scientific experts in the field jumped to the same conclusion you and numerous others have: the concept of the "rocks in jar" sounds too ridiculous to investigate further, thus should be pronounced "rubbish." Ditto for the readers of that austere publication. Arrogance and ingorance, plain and simple (no offense to you, personally).Making the Journal and its readership appear even more foolish, if that is possible, is that the author apparently boosted much of the material for his "article" off of Wikipedia -- Hell, a fifth-grader could do better than that!
As for your argument, it continues to be a Appeal to Authority, a rather weak one at that. Can I suggest you get a hold of the Skeptics Handbook? You will be better prepared and have higher entertainment value when trolling these waters.
~ Cheerio
> that supposed scientific experts in the field jumped to the same
> conclusion you and numerous others have: the concept of the "rocks in jar"
> sounds too ridiculous to investigate further, thus should be pronounced
> "rubbish."
Not at all. They evaluated the ability of your rocks in a jar to modify the sound field using the known scientific laws and then they pronounced rubbish. For your argument to work you must pick a group of people that do not know about the science of acoustics. Have you tried to convince audiophiles?
> Ditto for the readers of that austere publication. Arrogance and
> ingorance, plain and simple.
It cannot be that austere if it contains light hearted articles of the kind to raise your hackles.
> As for your argument, it continues to be a Appeal to Authority, a rather
> weak one at that.
It is an appeal to the authority of scientific knowledge. I would suggest that for matters in the scientific domain this is the strongest authority that mankind has yet devised. Or would you disagree?
> Can I suggest you get a hold of the Skeptics Handbook. You need to be
> better prepared when trolling these waters.
I have no objections to being better prepared but the "serious" sceptic material tends to be a bit too earnest and judgemental for my tastes. I am expect one or two articles might be entertaining but it will have to wait for a holiday break.
You are suggesting that the author - or anyone asociated with the Journal - had a single thought regarding the "rocks in a jar." They did not evaluate anything. Obviously, they cut and pasted some paragraphs from Wikipedia. Just some old men sitting around at the end of their careers, giggling.
That is not science. It's stupidity.
~ Cheerio
> You are suggesting that the author - or anyone asociated with the Journal
> - had a single thought regarding the "rocks in a jar." They did not
> evaluate anything.
I think you will find they did evaluate what a jar in the corner of a room would do to the sound field. This does not involve lots of hard sums or complicated experiments but a brief flash of thought based around the laws of acoustics and experience of where the wrinkles may lie.
> Obviously, they cut and pasted some paragraphs from Wikipedia.
No sane person uses wikipedia as the source of anything that is important. Certainly not someone writing an academic paper even a lighthearted one.
> Just some old men sitting around at the end of their careers, giggling.
The author of your paper is young. I suspect it may be a requirement for mustering the effort for that sort of thing.
> ~ Cheerio
Does that mean I get the last word?
That is quite an assumption on your part that any thought was given to the jar of rocks. What proof do you have? "A brief flash of thought" -- that is so funny! Is that what you think science is? What they were probably having was hot flashes. LOL
~ Cheerio
> That is quite an assumption on your part that any thought was given to the
> jar of rocks. What proof do you have?
A knowledge of how my peers think. Is that proof?
> "A brief flash of thought" -- that is so funny! Is that what you think
> science is?
When it comes to jars of rocks in the corner of the room brief is about the limit.
Do not seem to have had the last word. Need to hang on a bit longer?
Not really. You are perhaps the peer of the author of the article, but you are not my peer. I will leave you to your flashes of thought or hot flashes, as the case may be.
d
--
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
;-P
"If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?"
What's a ghost supposed to sound like?
What's a ghost supposed to sound like?Aw, c'mon now. I thought you with your "superior perception" would be the one telling me? Ok, I'd say they sound a lot like different colored wires, frozen photos and wood blocks.
Now of course, not all ghosts sound the same! (Only an objectivist would believe that). They are huge differences in the sound of different ghosts. However, if one is both sufficiently gifted and properly trained(through self analysis of course), these differences are trivial to hear. Except when other people are present. With scientific knowledge and equipment. Then, no.
Sound (no pun intended) familiar?On a less serious note, what wall are your hemptones in front of, in that 16x13 room? How far out?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
"On a less serious note, what wall are your hemptones in front of, in that 16x13 room? How far out?"
I think the room's a big bigger.... It's at a condo I'm renting a room at..... The speakers are kind of placed at an angle so they play into the room..... There was no real thought behind the placement, since the owner's furniture, fireplace, and patio door kind of put some real limitations in placement options.
I'm not really a room placement freak, unless the usual "red flags" in placement become obvious..... (I'm more of a "enjoy the music anywhere in the room" guy than a "sweet spot" guy.) Not so much to me, but to visitors more into things like that.
So, 2' out (rear of speaker box) from the short wall (13) listening along the longer room dimension (16)? I understand it's a rental, but where are they placed in the room? Where do you sit?
BTW, still no Don Allen(sp) website. How much power from those SET's, 2-3 watts or so?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
"BTW, still no Don Allen(sp) website."
Chances are he won't have one..... He doesn't really need one..... He has more work than he can deal with, due to solely word-of-mouth demand.....
"How much power from those SET's, 2-3 watts or so?"
Depends on the amp..... The unit at the condo is about 6 wpc..... Or about 4 dB above a 45 amp.
Remember, a 96 dB Hemptone powered by a 6-watt amp is equivalent to a typical 87 dB speaker powered by a 50-watt amp..... Sound great with symphonic works, and it is a condo..... Anything louder might bother the neighbors.
I have something in the works that is in the size range of the Fritz. One small problem though. It will be 96db +/-2db average sensitivity , not "96db for tube audiophiles" like the hemp, with what +/- 10db amplitude distortion alone? So you may not like it. Or you may. To make matters even worse(?), the impedance will be flattened. Is this acceptable for tube "magic"? Or forget that idea and create some "excitement"?
The other issue is that it can convert from dipole/cardioid bass to full ranged cardioid. Both would require the face of the speaker to be at least 3' out from the wall (4' recommended for dipole, hence my room questions) unless you want "audiophile" type sound (then you can place it anywhere, physics plays no roll). Any objections to a(n)(adjustable)powered bass section (yes I know there are neighbors, but there is also this thing call bass, which is present in recordings, very different from what you hear from the hemps resonating pipe/8" paper cone tweeter)?
Your thoughts?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
They are mentally ill. They do indeed "hear it", when they "just listen".
Which is why they congregate en masse in places like an "Audio Asylum".
Sheeesh.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
They are mentally ill. They do indeed 'hear it', when they 'just listen'.
Which is why they congregate en masse in places like an 'Audio Asylum'."
Then why do you even bother spending time here? Unless your sole objective was to instigate trouble?
Then why do you even bother spending time here?
Because I enjoy it? I find your posts highly entertaining, why isn't this reciprocated?
Unless your sole objective was to instigate trouble?
Instigate trouble? By offering a view different from yours?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
when you want it to.
when you want it to
That would suggest (no pun intended) that the mind can overrule the ears...and we know that is not possible , now don't we Scott?
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
just demand DBTs of others and it will solve everything and make you feel real good about what you have.
I said "hear" ghosts, not fear. Can you hear them? If not, don't be envious and jealous because you have inferior perception. Just deal with it.
just demand DBTs of others
Why? I have repeatedly stated that psychiatric exams would be far more appropriate for audiophile matters than DBT's.
and it will solve everything and make you feel real good about what you have
Solve? What problem? I feel just fine and I hear even better. Thanks for your concern Scott.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
> > I said "hear" ghosts, not fear.
I realize that. I didn"t realize using a word that rhymes would throw you for a loop. I apologize.
> Can you hear them?
Ghosts? I do not hear them. I do not fear them.
> If not, don't be envious and jealous because you have inferior perception. Just deal with it.
Consider it dealt with.
> > just demand DBTs of others
> Why?
So you don't have to worry about things you do not understand. so you don't feel bad about what you have. So you don't have to change your MO.
> I have repeatedly stated that psychiatric exams would be far more appropriate for audiophile matters than DBT's.
Speaking from experience? If so i'd reconsider.
> > and it will solve everything and make you feel real good about what you have
> Solve? What problem?
::sigh:: I forget the first step is in admitting you have a problem. Just know we are there for you when you are ready for this first step. i understand it is often the hardest.
> I feel just fine and I hear even better. Thanks for your concern Scott.
No problem. and remember, we are here for you when you are ready to move on. That is here not hear. I realize that those words do sound the same. Well. maybe that will give you some comfort in the mean time.
I realize that. I didn"t realize using a word that rhymes would throw you for a loop. I apologize.
Actually , what's thrown me for a loop is your new found spelling prowess.
Did you re-enroll in HS to complete your GED or discover a spell check program? Either way, congratulations.
Ghosts? I do not hear them.
Good to see you can accept your perception inferiority. Nothing to be angry or ashamed of. Try to keep it in mind next time May Belt or Posy post about something you cannot hear. No more lashing out because of your admitted perception inferiority. I'll try to remind you just in case you slip.
we are here for you when you are ready to move on
Thanks. Move on where?
That is here not hear. I realize that those words do sound the same
Your level of education definitely seems to be on the rise. Don't forget "hair" too (google it if you need to).
BTW, watching any games today on your analog TV tuner(s)? Take care now.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
Hope you don't mind my jumping in but as we're doing the disclosure thing there is something I always wanted to get off my chest... I do not like green eggs and ham.
I know, I know, pretty embarrassing... but damn it at least I don't hear ghosts!
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
he has good reason to be in the denial camp where hearing things go.
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
I accept that you can hear every thing you say you hear. I believe you are hearing what you say you hear. So you should accept everything that I say I can hear as well. Then we can all be one hear everything happy family.
You hear different color wires, others hear frozen photos, someone else hears ghosts and on and on it goes.
No one denies anyone can hear anything. Simply ignore those envious jealous idiot deaf Engineer/Psychologist types and their scientific BS. Science doesn't know everything. There can't measure everything either, including ghosts and reef knots.
So lets not deny anyone can hear anything because they said so and move happily along, one big happy hear everything family.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
HA HA HA ... now go away.
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
nt
Hi Geoff, how are ya? How's that whole teleport thing working out? Well I hope? Brilliant idea I must say. Brilliant.
I really must re-enroll in school. Physics has come a long way since the old days indeed.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
nt
Teach me to become as strong as you in the Dark Side of the Farce.
Of course I'd probably use it to do the whole choke thing rather than exorcise stereos from afar :-).
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
nt
This would turn into a pissing match? It ALWAYS DOES! That is why there is propeller head forum.
Doc S.
Just joking :-)
Hey, this is Plop Heads. When in Rome...
What's a "Bottleneck" and where can we buy them?
Unless an audiophile used a similar "Bottleneck" in his audio system, which seems very unlikely, test results based on the use of a "Bottleneck" would not apply to him.
We already have 30 years of blind testing that consistently shows audiophiles can't even come close to proving their claims that "everything sounds different", except with speakers and two components playing at different SPL's, so why would an audio club waste time testing some theoretical "Bottleneck"?
I suppose their next test will be metal coat hangers versus speaker wire?
High resolution digital recordings/discs are much more likely to be sold on the basis of better sound quality so the engineers involved are much less likely to provide the usual LOUD compressed overprocessed pop recordings that seem so common on Redbook CDs.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
Richard BassNut Greene, notorious throne in the side of the faithful at the Audio Asylum and well known staunch DBT advocate, little impressed by announcement of the Boston Audio Society's latest victory in debunking yet another Audiophile Community myth. Ridiculing the BAS effort that utilized scientifically valid DBT methodology Greene was reported to have said, "I suppose their next test will be metal coat hangers versus speaker wire?"
While this reporter could not obtain an official statement from any of Green's fellow Ultra Objectivists one did offer the following off the record comment, "We fear that Richard has gone off his rocker, I really don't know what to think, it's just surreal like, like... I dunno, Rush Limbaugh going on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton? It's a sad day."
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Does that mean I used to be "on my rocker"
I'll add that to my resume.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
be sure to add "notorious throne". One seldom ever sees that on a resume.
That must be the infamous Senator Craig "wide stance" toilet from the airport bathroom where he was arrested.I heard it's being auctioned on ebay.
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.Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
--
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
The problem is that our ears are connected to our brains.
Bill Bailey
___
Feanor's list of 250 Core Classical Compositions
That is a problem?
(nt)
we must avoid using it. It can lead to a life long addiction to thinking for one's self. ::GASP::
> It can lead to a life long addiction to thinking for one's self. <
Does that mean we'd have to listen for ourselves? How horrible! We need to remember that this is audio, and nothing in the word "audio" denotes listening. Measurements tell us all we need to know about audio gear. If we feel we *have* to listen, we should only do so under 100 DBT trial conditions. Learning *what* to think is much more important that learning *how* to think.
I would never make it as an objectivist. LOL
x
Check out my post in Vinyl. I'd bet you've heard of the Victrola Magic Brain.
adjust your perceptions. Measurments are objective. Perceptions are unreliable.
How was that impression of an objectivist?
> adjust your perceptions. Measurments are objective. Perceptions are unreliable.
How was that impression of an objectivist? <
Spot on! Measurements don't lie! :)
That is, if any of you have an AES membership to read it. But, I guess nobody here does... Oh! Wait. I've got the article right here. Along with your moms. ZING!
"Virtually all of the SACD and DVD-A recordings sounded better than most CDs — sometimes much better... Partly because these recordings have not captured a large portion of the consumer market for music, engineers and producers are being given the freedom to produce recordings that sound as good as they can make them, without having to compress or equalize the signal to suit lesser systems and casual listening conditions... Our test results indicate that all of these recordings could be released on conventional CDs with no audible difference. They would not, however, find such a reliable conduit to the homes of those with the systems and listening habits to appreciate them. The secret, for two-channel recordings at least, seems to lie not in the high-bit recording but in the high-bit market."
In other words, SACD and DVD-A releases generally sound better than CD, for reasons that have nothing to do with the encoding. Everybody - including (almost) all the DBT folks at HydrogenAudio - agree with that.
...please write me and I'll send you something.
clark
clarkjohnsen at gmail.com
" In other words, SACD and DVD-A releases generally sound better than CD, for reasons that have nothing to do with the encoding. " Yep, I agree too, and for the reasons stated.
At inception, did Sony ever really want SACD to go mainstream? I very much doubt it, otherwise why did they first release only pure DSD, non-hybrid discs? Reflecting on the whole thing, I think it's just as well SACD has remained niche .
Bill Bailey
___
Feanor's list of 250 Core Classical Compositions
SACD would be a repeat of the great Cash Cow that CD was!
So, yeah, I'd say they very much *really* wanted SACD to go mainstream, what the hell do you think, that they were guided by philanthropic motives?
But you need not believe me, here's a little something from Stereophile's reporting of a joint Sony/Philips market launch announcement back in 1999 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago (emphasis [bold] added):
---
"Unsurpassed pure audio," Fidler told the audience of industry journalists, some of whom asked pointed questions about the new format's market potential. Stereophile's Sam Tellig expressed doubt about the public's concern for ultimate audio quality, to which a Philips exec replied that in extensive tests, untrained listeners could tell the difference even on boomboxes, and they expressed their preference for SACD. A student journalist from UCLA asked how college students and others of limited means would receive the format. "We fully expect that SACD will trickle down to the entire market," he was told, "eventually to portables and car stereo."
---
So much for niche market pretenses, I mean really??!!
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Good try, no cigar. While I can't name everyonehere who might be a member, try:
Charles Hanson
John Atkinson
John Curl
and
clark, Life Member, AES
how hard everybody is focusing on the DBT itself, and not on the significant apology for SACD/DVD-A tacked on at the end of the article. That would only make sense to me if few people had actually read the paper.
I've listened to a few SACDs myself and found them mostly lacking in superiority to CD, but this paper is making me reevaluate that.
For Meyer to appear to be so focused on obtaining a null result - as JA and Todd allege - and then for him to backtrack and say that high rez *still* sounds better than CD, means to me that the BAS was not clearly on some sort of anti-audiophile or anti-high-res vendetta. Despite the shouting on this thread, they *were* trusting their ears on this one.
That said, the lack of detail on equipment used and test results is a damn shame.
If the conclusion of the DBT is:
"The test results show that the CD-quality A/D/A loop was undetectable at normal-to-loud listening levels, by any of the subjects, on any of the playback systems. The noise of the CD-quality loop was audible only at very elevated levels."
yet
...then for him to backtrack and say that high rez *still* sounds better than CD...
What then does that tell you of the relevance of the DBT? It would appear that Meyer doesn't agree with the findings of his own test.
rw
The latter statement simply means that a high res release generally sounds better than the Redbook release of the same album, but that the difference is *entirely* explained by improved mastering practices for high res releases.The former statement means that the higher digital resolution has nothing to do with the improved audio quality of high res releases.
This is really nothing new, Chris Tam did articles on this a few years ago for Audioholics if I remember correctly.
d.b.
Tham most certainly did not do DBTs of SACD vs Redbook in her Audioholics articles. CD vs SACD DBTs, carried out to this extent, and published, is new.
Tham's dynamic range comparisons of CD, SACD, and LP, while methodologically problematic, do clearly illustrate that significantly different mastering of CD and SACD can occur in commercial releases. She wasn't the first to notice this, either. The most famous instance was probably the th etwo layers of the Dark Side of the Moon SACD hybrid, as revealed in Stereophile.
Without very good evidence that the SACD and CD versions were mastered identically except for format, any claims about the sound of SACD vs CD made from such comparisons, is suspect at best and useless at worst.
"Tham most certainly did not do DBTs of SACD vs Redbook in her Audioholics articles. CD vs SACD DBTs, carried out to this extent, and published, is new.:
Is anyone claiming that she did?
"Without very good evidence that the SACD and CD versions were mastered identically except for format, any claims about the sound of SACD vs CD made from such comparisons, is suspect at best and useless at worst."
I would agree.
d.b.
...but that the difference is *entirely* explained by improved mastering practices for high res releases.
Explained...how?
rw
1. SACD/DVD-A releases generally sound much better than their CD counterparts.
2. Assuming that the releases come from the same "master tapes", the difference can occur for only two reasons:
a) the mastering of the high res release is changed compared to the CD
b) the high res releases inherently capture more detail (when the mastering is modified to handle the additional detail but is otherwise held constant).
3. *If* you believe that the BAS DBT yielded an obviously meaningful result, then b) is not possible - the effect of higher resolution, when studied in isolation, cannot explain the large difference in sound quality. And even if you don't believe it, the fact that so many supposed audiophiles couldn't tell a difference still casts b) into question. Such an apparantly subtle effect, if it managed to be missed in a DBT, still cannot explain the large quality difference.
4. Therefore, the difference in sound quality between SACD/DVD-A is due to improved mastering, because it cannot be due to increased resolution.
Furthermore, changes in mastering have been known to yield considerable improvements in sound quality, in the same format.
you must first validate the ability of the test to answer the intended question. Since one of the persons who designed the test disagrees with the DBT outcome, that certainly calls into doubt whether or not that job was accomplished. The reasons why are numerous and may not have to do with the DBT itself, but rather in the way in which the test was performed along with the choice of equipment, familiarity of the musical selections, etc. Since it seems none of that information was given, I question the outcome because there are so many ways in which to cripple the test. This guy has a track record of doing just that.
Furthermore, changes in mastering have been known to yield considerable improvements in sound quality, in the same format.
That has been the case for vinyl as well stretching back fifty years. No news there.
rw
You seem to be really having difficulty understanding this. It's NOT that he disagrees with the results of the DBT, which demonstrated that FOR THE SAME RECORDING reducing the resolution did not have an audible effect. However that fact obviously does not preclude the possibility that two DIFFERENT recordings, e.g. the CD and SACD releases, might sound different due to different mastering/processing.
I suggest you go back and re-read the abstract and the quote axon gave before posting again.
Or at any rate, not exactly. What they did was run a hi-rez recording through some sort of digital "bottleneck" -- totally unspecified -- and then infer conclusions about CD. Whether the bottleneck produced anything like CD sound is left for fertile imaginations to suppose, but that's a vital link and it's missing from their argument.
clark
"What they did was run a hi-rez recording through some sort of digital "bottleneck" -- totally unspecified -- and then infer conclusions about CD."
We reached conclusions about the CD because, as the paper says, the codec through which we ran the analog signal was a CD codec -- the A/D/A cycle of an HHB CDR-850 recorder. We didn't record the bits to a disc; we just encoded them and decoded them. As those who refereed the paper understood, a CD would have sounded the same but would have been hard to synchronize, while the 11-ms delay of the codec alone allowed us to do quick and easy comparisons.
Of course I realize you may still believe that the disc itself changes the sound, on the basis of your own unsupported perception. I'd love to see you demonstrate that, but you always refuse such requests (skepticism is so unbecoming in one's acolytes, isn't it?), so there seems no point in discussing it. -- Brad
...there's an immense body of uncontradicted evidence -- just read the hundreds of posts on Prophead and other AA boards -- that CD-Rs made from Redbook CDs sound quite a lot better. That raises the vexing issue, Which is the real CD?
Also, if one reads the literature, it appears that various CD players produce vastly different sounds. Which one is real?
Then we have the Memory Player (or equivalent, if any), which reinterprets the data off a Redbook CD and produces a sonic result (according to all reviewers thus far) superior to any other, even to the CD-R remakes.
So, again, which of those is the CD that "would have sounded the same"?
Even more to the point, which of the above does the aforesaid "bottleneck" sound like? Isn't that worth our knowing?
Had you not yielded to the temptation of "quick and easy comparisons", the above questions might have been addressed.
And then: "I realize you may still believe that the disc itself changes the sound, on the basis of your own unsupported perception." Again, even a casual perusal of these boards, or almost any audio forum, will show that I am hardly alone in my "perception", rather I have been joined by thousands.
"Anecdotal", you say? But what's the plural of "anecdote"? Data!
The rest -- "You always refuse such requests (skepticism is so unbecoming in one's acolytes, isn't it?), so there seems no point in discussing it." -- is beneath you, so I won't touch it except to explain to other readers that no "such requests" have been received at my place.
clark
Proof positive of illiteracy: you've misunderstood even what Uncle Charlie said. He said it's a ripoff.
TL
“…there's an immense body of uncontradicted evidence… that CD-Rs made from Redbook CDs sound quite a lot better. That raises the vexing issue, Which is the real CD?... "Anecdotal", you say? But what's the plural of "anecdote"? Data!”
I you really think thousands of people can’t be wrong, I give you The Church of the Latter Day Saints, the fastest-growing organization on the planet. We’re talking tens of millions here.
So no, the fact that many people seem to hear something doesn’t mean it exists. And if CD players sounded “vastly different” the people writing about those differences in such florid detail would be able to tell one from another without peeking. They can’t.
None of this affects the outcome of our experiment either way, though. What we did was prove that, if high-bit audio sounds better, it isn’t the extra bits that are doing it. It doesn’t matter what particular player we used. I say that’s because it sounds the same as all the others, while you say no, they all sound different. If whatever we used had a characteristic sound, our subjects would have heard it. Over the course of about 550 trials, they didn’t.
As for the Memory Player, whatever that is, if it sounds different from our codec, it’s making a euphonic error, since ours is indistinguishable from the source. You asked what our bottleneck sounds like, and we’ve proven the answer quite well: It sounds like the signal that went into it.
You say you’ve never been asked to test your perceptions, but that’s not true. I asked you to take a blind test to demonstrate that you can hear absolute polarity years ago, but you never responded. So let me propose one again: I’ll make a bit-for-bit copy of a CD – your choice – on a CD-R. I’ll stand in your control room and on the basis of a coin flip I’ll decide which disc to put in the player, ten times. You tell me which disc is playing, ten times. You should get 10/10 with no trouble. Maybe while we’re there I can switch my polarity inverter box in and out of the circuit, and you’ll tell me when it’s active. How about it?
As you may know, I did the polarity test with a local recording engineer who insisted he could hear the effect every time, even through a car radio. His results were random. He then decided that changing the polarity at the preamp level somehow didn’t sound the same as switching the speaker wires. I decided that he couldn't hear the effect as well as he thought. – E. Brad
"If you really think thousands of people can’t be wrong", *I* give you -- the vile Compact Disc. Thousands, millions, *tens* of millions love it!
"The fact that many people seem to" like it "doesn’t mean it" is any damn good!
"And if CD players sounded 'vastly different' the people writing about those differences in such florid detail would be able to tell one from another without peeking. They can’t." You got proof for that assertion? Preferably, DBTs published in a (this time) reputable journal? Put 'em up! Or...
"...while you say no, they all sound different." A common, albeit useful to you, and blatant exaggeration. No one ever has said they "all" sound different. Myself, I simply drew attention to the *fact* that a wide variety of sonic results is available off any given CD depending on the player, and I asked for enlightenment on where the "bottleneck" stood within this range. No reply was forthcoming, save for, "You asked what our bottleneck sounds like, and we’ve proven the answer quite well: It sounds like the signal that went into it." What *that* sounds like, is circular reasoning... or worse, begging the question.
"As for the Memory Player, whatever that is..." I see three monkeys...
"You say you’ve never been asked to test your perceptions, but that’s not true. I asked you to take a blind test to demonstrate that you can hear absolute polarity years ago, but you never responded." Oh geez Luiz, that was *decades* ago. But numerous DBTs (or better) have proven polarity's undeniable audibility -- why don't you believe the DBTs?
You don't have to answer that!
clark
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot:
RCJ: "I simply drew attention to the *fact* that a wide variety of sonic results is available off any given CD depending on the player, and I asked for enlightenment on where the "bottleneck" stood within this range. No reply was forthcoming, save for, "You asked what our bottleneck sounds like, and we’ve proven the answer quite well: It sounds like the signal that went into it." What *that* sounds like, is circular reasoning... or worse, begging the question."
Do you really not get this? The device we were using is a recording system, which passes a signal *through* it. We were testing for whether it made any audible change to the input signal. Except for a broadband hiss at -92 dBA re full scale, it didn't; and it turns out this noise level was below that of virtually all the high-bit recordings we found. This means that on music at normal levels, and on most recordings at any playback level... careful now, this is heretical... it has no sound of its own.
Is it possible that someone out there can spot this device in the signal chain on normal high-bit recordings at normal gain settings? Could be. We tried with a lot of good people on several good systems* for over 500 trials, and didn't find any. That's all. If that's not enough for you, go in peace, or take the test yourself and teach us all how it's done. -- E. Brad
* Lurkers: An equipment list and musical selections should be ready this week; just email me if you want one. It has also been claimed that no Boston-area college offers a recording program; we went to UMass Lowell, where they've built a fine-sounding large listening room with a pair of the best SLS ribbon-tweeter monitors.
That's good to know. Very informative. Now, back to the question: Since the paper inferred results about CD from these experiments, how did said "bottleneck" make things sound compared to the rather wide variety of results available off CD players and DACs? Was it even like a CD at all? Enquiring minds etc.
"Go in peace, or take the test yourself and teach us all how it's done." What is it I detect a note of there? Could it be...??
As I've explained from the start, the objections everyone has to the paper ("a crock" / forum moderator) do not concern the test procedures themselves, particularly, rather 1) the sweeping conclusions drawn from an inadequate rig, and 2) the mysterious nature of the "CD sound" obtained from a still-unspecified apparatus.
clark
[Meyer claims reviewers can't hear CD player differences] "You got proof for that assertion? Preferably, DBTs published in a (this time) reputable journal? Put 'em up! Or..."
It's not up to me to prove reviewers can't hear the huge differences between CD players that they write about; it's up to them to take a blind test, at least once, and prove they can. For all these years, after all this argument, all they do is avoid the issue. Has my statement been proven? Nah. But wine experts comply with these requirements all the time -- it's how they get their street cred. If a subjective reviewer did this even once it would be big news (see below).
"But numerous DBTs (or better) have proven polarity's undeniable audibility -- why don't you believe the DBTs?"
Now you're changing the subject. Sure, there have been tests that prove to everyone's satisfaction that polarity can be audible under certain special circumstances. The signal has to have a fair amount of asymmetry; percussiveness helps; so does a large amount of asymmetrical distortion in the loudspeaker. On most material and systems, most of the time, there was no evidence of audibility. None of those tests prove anything like what you claim in "The Wood Effect", which is (feel free to fine-tune this but I believe it's essentially correct) that you can hear polarity most of the time on just about any material, even through lousy playback equipment, and almost all the time on your personal system. Those claims are entirely different from what's been accepted in the literature, and you would make big news if you could verify them. One positive result -- say, 15/15 or 20/20 correct in a well run test -- and everyone, including me, would credit your remarkable powers. I actually think that would be pretty cool, and I expect you'd enjoy it as well. I notice you didn't accept my invitation, though, and didn't address the stamped-vs-CD-R issue at all. -- EBM
...that they couldn't. Now it's up to *me*, to prove they can? Again, LOL!
"Wine experts comply with these requirements all the time." Very rarely, actually -- only in contests (of which there are few) and in the examination for MW (of whom there are few). Suggest you stick to your own expertise.
Clark: "But numerous DBTs (or better) have proven polarity's undeniable audibility -- why don't you believe the DBTs?"
EBM: "Now you're changing the subject."
Guy, you're the one brought it up! Geez Luiz. You only wanted me to do all over again, what has already been firmly established.
And on it goes:
"The signal has to have a fair amount of asymmetry." Yep. Not like test tones, rather like, oh, musical instruments!
"On most material and systems, most of the time, there was no evidence of audibility." A total mischaracterization! My own tests established a 99% confidence on musical examples alone, and John Atkinson's got IIRC 95%; both were published. And Stan Lipshitz reported 95% as well, on tests involving both tone bursts and music, not to mention that he was a fierce partisan of absolute polarity, as was Prof. Richard Heyser.
"None of those tests prove anything like what you claim in 'The Wood Effect'." I made few claims of my own in that book; it was a compendium of, and analysis of, other people's claims and tests. Interestingly, of the some eighty quotations I found in the literature pre-1988, only one disacknowledged polarity, and he was Sam Burwen, a stalwart BAS member!
"I notice you didn't accept my invitation, though, and didn't address the stamped-vs-CD-R issue at all." The invitation was for an experiment fraught with error, as was the one in the M&M paper, so no, thank you. I wasn't aware that you were also proposing some "stamped-vs-CD-R" sort of thing as well, and upon review I don't seem to see it.
clark
"John Atkinson's got IIRC 95%" :
Reference, please. (Right, there is none.)"Stan Lipshitz reported 95% as well" :
See link for the correct score. "The audibility of polarity on music was not confirmed whether the sound source was vinyl or a 1/4 inch 2-track master tape" says the report, which, if not obvious to you, refers to the 60/113 (53%) result obtained for the part of Lipshitz & co. So there's your "fierce partisan of absolute polarity.""...as was Prof. Richard Heyser" :
Reference, please. (Right, you've always refused to provide one in the past, and you will refuse to provide one now, too.) It's a dubious practice to ascribe claims to people who are no longer with us to deny the assertions.You're full of chicken litter, as usual.
Your own "listening sessions" don't count for the obvious reasons. Amazing that you still keep trying.
As for deluding others, that's a different matter, and so for the record, I have stated on numerous occasions the exact sources *and words* of those three gentlemen, all in print, and I'm not going to repeat myself for nasty twerps.
Do a search.
clark
...and all I've ever found is more instances of you squirming. The only reference you've given that has something to do with the subject matter is the one to your own self-published pamphlet that you keep liberally bringing up. Now that's not a lot, is it, considering your big claims: "Atkinson 95%, Lipshitz 95%, Heyser..."So where are those figures available? Nowhere.
I almost feel bad for you. You've lied so much you can't stop now.
The link gives a nice example of how you go about doing it. (Yes, I know it has that false claim by Atkinson included, thinking as he did that that would somehow help you get off the hook. Nice thought... too bad only his figures were a little bit "misinterpreted" so to speak so it could only make you look that much worse.)
TL
Clark;
Here is my original proposal to you, since you claim not to know about it, quoted from my message to you of last weekend:
"I’ll make a bit-for-bit copy of a CD – your choice – on a CD-R. I’ll stand in your control room and on the basis of a coin flip I’ll decide which disc to put in the player, ten times. You tell me which disc is playing, ten times. You should get 10/10 with no trouble. Maybe while we’re there I can switch my polarity inverter box in and out of the circuit, and you’ll tell me when it’s active. How about it?"
Those experiments might well be fraught with error, as you say, but not because they're invalid or hard to understand. They're too simple and way to risky for you. You claim to have already done the polarity experiment, though you never wrote it up or published any description of it at all that I know of. (If it is in print I'd be very interested to read it.)
So let's see -- you have ignored what I've proposed, ignored or deliberately misconstrued my explanations of what the experiment was about, gone off on irrelevant tangents about nearly everything, ignored my specifications of speakers and room for several of the systems we used, claimed I haven't identified our A/D/A link when I posted it here last week, and generally obfuscated and evaded issues right and left. I think this has been demonstrated adequately to everyone else here, so there's not much point in taking this any further.
-- E. Brad
> > You claim to have already done the polarity experiment, though you never wrote it up or published any description of it at all.
AES Preprint Number 3169, "Proofs of an Absolute Polarity" -- to have been the first of three sets of experiments, the rest abandoned as inconsequential.
> > So let's see -- you have ignored what I've proposed
Hmmm... that does not comport at all well with the above discussion.
> > ignored or deliberately misconstrued my explanations of what the [polarity] experiment was about
I know perfectly well what the experiment was "about" -- inter alia your refusal to mind previous reported experiments.
> > gone off on irrelevant tangents about nearly everything
"Nearly everything." OK... whatever...
> > ignored my specifications of speakers and room for several of the systems we used
I was unaware they had been given here. Nor does anyone else here seem clear on that, given the number of questions raised. Why single me out?
> > claimed I haven't identified our A/D/A link when I posted it here last week
I may have missed link, but to me you wrote, "The device we were using is a recording system, which passes a signal *through* it." Oh. Good to know. Not very specific, though. Elsewhere you wrote, "You asked what our bottleneck sounds like, and we’ve proven the answer quite well: It sounds like the signal that went into it." Equally helpful.
> > and generally obfuscated and evaded issues right and left.
"Right and left." OK... whatever...
Say! So far, you've not replied to repeated questioning on how the "bottleneck's" sonic results compare to an actual CD device, an important consideration as you drew several (abrupt) conclusions about CD -- not about the "bottleneck".
Nor have you replied to my demonstration that you had blatantly mischaracterized my book The Wood Effect.
Nor... nor...
Do those qualify as "right and left"?
> > I think this has been demonstrated adequately to everyone else here, so there's not much point in taking this any further.
"Everyone else here"? The moderator of this forum called the M&M paper "a crock". How d'ya like them apples? Someone else remarked, "They got exactly the results I would expect with the player they used." And: "I believe the authors were being disingenuous when they stated that they used 'very expensive electronics'." And: "Bottom line - The authors got the results they wanted. Neither is a scientist or an engineer and it shows."
Yikes!
Finally, one fellow said, "The player determines the quality of the test." Whereas Meyer said, "It doesn’t matter what particular player we used. I say that’s because it sounds the same as all the others."
I rest my case.
clark
.
...the moderator.
Nor would I advise you to be so sanguine about whom you're aligning yourself with. Don't let your longterm animus against me get the better of your mind. Read this, for a demonstration of who's trying to stick to the point, and who's going overboard:
TSP: Thanks. It's hard not to try, whatever the odds. An eon ago we lived in the same house, and at some well-chosen times, he was a true and good friend. -- E. Brad
I managed to score repeated positive results - 10/10, 19/24, 25/34, 7/8, 26/32, 23/32, etc - with an Etymotic ER-4S driven with a PC sound card, with a rock music sample. There were failed tests too, but even with those included, the overall proportion IIRC does point to a successful test. The effect was far too minor for me to care about for recreational music listening, but it definitely was there, in a realistic listening environment.
Besides the HydrogenAudio link below, also note the flamefest that was the commentary on Critic's Asylum: http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.pl?forum=critics&n=31990
Yeah, by the time you got 10/10 your results were pretty solid, since the chances of that happening randomly are less than 1 in 1000. The advantage of using headphones like those, which seal in the ear canal, is that any very low-frequency stuff in the mix, which might tip you off if it's asymmetrical, will get through.
Did you really do 140 trials with the same source material, or did you use a variety of songs? I hope the latter, unless you enjoy, say, banging on your head with a board (or, as Jerry Lewis once said, "because it feels so good when I stop!"). -- E. Brad
I did everything with "Hamburger Train". Once I found that one sample I was too scared of failure to hunt down any other reproducible sample. I figured that just getting a positive result out of a single popular release was significant enough.
"I did everything with "Hamburger Train". Once I found that one sample I was too scared of failure to hunt down any other reproducible sample. I figured that just getting a positive result out of a single popular release was significant enough."
Aiee! cried Mowgli softly.
You deserve some kind of prize for that; I'm just not sure what it should be.
It's entirely reasonable to do a large number of trials when you discover a source that works for you, of course. That just means you're searching diligently for a way to quantify and establish what you claim to be hearing. We gave our subjects chances to do that when there were few enough in a trial, which was most of the time -- they got to pick the material they thought was best.
But still... after 25 trials, when you've already got good data... it's time to stop, for god's sake. Unless of course you *like* hearing it that many times, which is something I don't care to think about. -- E. Brad
The second test I attempted was at home instead of at work, and it failed miserably (7/16 or something like that). That bugged the hell out of me, so several of the tests following that were simply attempts to isolate the system change that triggered the change in result. That chase alone resulted in an extra five tests.
The chase was not for naught: I couldn't get a good statistical result at all with one pair of headphones, and getting good results for another sound card was a hell of a lot harder. That could be the start of an extremely interesting test: One might be able to correlate the difference in results to some objective THD criteria.
After that, people commented that I shouldn't have run the tests without fixing the number of trials beforehand, because I could have cherry-picked where the test stopped. That alone necessitated redoing the tests at N=32.
It's worth noting that I've done a lot fewer ABX tests since I did that. :)
Axon:
Well, you were following the evidence, like a good experimenter. Of course that way is often tiresome and annoying. If your blind test method gives you the answer after each trial, then there is a possibility that you could affect the overall result by deciding to stop at a certain point, but there's a relatively easy way around that: Decide beforehand how many trials you're going to do, and stick to it. There's a mathematical rescue of a sort if your results are positive too. A score of 10/10 is quite conclusive, and you can stop there.
Yes, you could get 8/10, be disappointed, and choose to go on to try for a better score, which is a bit slippery. But if you miss any at all, you know the effect is at least not obvious. If you do another ten, and again get 7 or 8, you're in that gray area, where effects probably make themselves heard, but not all the time. Remember too that in the case of polarity, asymmetrical distortion in your playback transducer aids audibility, so the device on which you can't hear it may be a better reproducer, not a less revealing one.
Finally, about that hypothetical 8/10 score: The usual confidence level that is asked for is 95%, and 8/10 is 94.5%, so that one is close enough unless you're writing it up for publication. After getting 8/10, I'd also call it fair to do another ten and total them -- but not to do another 10 and throw it out if you do less well. It's pretty easy to grasp what is cheating here and what isn't. -- E. Brad
"..there's an immense body of uncontradicted evidence -- just read the hundreds of posts on Prophead and other AA boards -- that CD-Rs made from Redbook CDs sound quite a lot better. That raises the vexing issue, Which is the real CD?"
LOL. 'hundreds of posts on Prophead and other AA boards' You call *that * an argument? You call that 'uncontradicted evidence'??? (Never read Dennis & Dunn's paper on numerically identical CDS? I'll cut to the chase: no one heard a difference)
Do you being to realize why you folks are considered something of a *joke*?
That's one fine idea of "scientific validation." Another brilliant idea is to have this guy as the spokesperson for the "alternative viewpoint," the "subjectivist camp," or "the new paradigm" or whatever it is that seems so significant about it.TL
The paper is not available to me, but I find the conclusions and the clarifying posts of interest. It seems to me that they have demonstrated that 16/44 is adequate if nothing goes astray. However as you point out, something usually does. I've found that CD's and players interact in unpredictable ways so perhaps a better way to express it would have been that a CD is capable of the same performance.
Reliable people report that higher resolution formats sound better. Now I wonder if part of that is that they may be more forgiving in some manner because they have data to spare. As far as I know, the CD format was originally a compromise of quality vs. recording time. As was the LP. Both good if everything works perfectly. And now we have MP-3...
Rick
Rather, I showed that a wide variety of sounds can be had off a single CD, depending on the player and/or on whether a numerically-exact CD-R copy had been made.
The authors' "bottleneck", lacking any descrip, fails to tell us where it stands, sonically, within the group.
Myself, while I find most Redbook CD reproduction to be edgy and awful, a hi-rez disc of any sort being preferable, I also allow that the Memory Player (Redbook only) produces an elegant, refined, entirely palatable and musical sound.
So: Where among those possibilities does the "bottleneck" stand?
It astonishes me -- or, not -- that the authors' "peers" who reviewed the paper overlooked that vital missing link, the sound of the "bottleneck" and how it would so decidedly affect the outcome. Without such an assessment the paper remains entirely useless.
clark
I think we are referring to the same thing Clark. By going astray I mean that even though they are recovering the data accurately from the disk that the sound quality of CD players is often dependent upon the media characteristics. That has certainly been my experience and is widely recognized (well, by most folks) and there are plenty of mechanisms to account for it.
However since the test didn't use CD players, they have eliminated this as a variable, whether they believed in it or not. If I understand the test correctly they did a 16/44.1 A/D-D/A pass of the demodulated material from sources with higher sample rates and resolutions and compared the result with that analog input.
Since the outcome was that they were indistinguishable this says a lot to me about how good this process CAN be. If their test was accurate, the 16bit,44KS/s linear CODEC process itself is sufficient, at least for one trip.
As far as the sound of the translation outside of sample rate and resolution goes, as pointed out that would show up as an error term in the tests and since it wasn't recognized was apparently not of significance. This isn't too unlikely, especially a single master clock was probably running the whole shebang.
Perhaps the player problems are worse than we thought. Good job that they are obsolete...
Regards, Rick
...that hi-rez is no better than CD.
But they have eliminated CD from the equation!
So how can they know?
All they have proven is, that with an apparently crappy system and unqualified subjects, "hi-rez" sounds no better than an unspecified "bottleneck" -- a "bottleneck" that bears Lord-knows-what relation to actual CD, apart from the fact that it has the right "numbers".
But all CD players have the right numbers!
The reported experiments simply leave us hanging.
clark
I can see that I wasn't missing much.
The "CD standard" is good enough, at least under best-case conditions. No efforts were spent establishing margins however so the results are of no engineering value. I suspect that it is just barely "good enough". Clearly you are correct, they inappropriately infer that on all CD based system that mastering will be the limiting factor.
I do appreciate the work they've done especially since it vindicates some of the tentative conclusions that I'd drawn from experience. However the notion that all CD chains are blameless is absurd. Fortunately now that we have capable computers we can reduce or eliminate many of the medium and playback problems so their conclusions are actually far more applicable now than they were when we were stuck with "real time" CD players.
Thanks for letting me see it,
Rick
x
They do appear to be drawing a wider conclusion than their test data supports. Since I don't have access to the damned (at least in this forum) paper I'm forced to rely upon summaries and postings.
If I can summarize the summaries: 16/44 can be good enough. The test was essentially "best case" so indeed it doesn't say that a CD WILL sound good, especially on a given piece of equipment. Although they seem to think it does.
Since this fits my experience I'm not surprised. Even in my modest systems the quality of the mastering, well actually the whole production cycle, is really the biggest variable. The well made ones sound good. And then there are the other 95%. LP's used to have about the same ratio. Reel to reel tapes did better on average.
Again, I'm coming away with the conclusion that 16/44 is barely adequate. So is a 36 Hp Volkswagen, especially if you enjoy observing the fauna and flora while going uphill.
Rick
I don't know... the window may close... Let me know and I'll work around it.
clark
...and then for him [Meyer] to backtrack and say that high rez *still* sounds better than CD...
Axon's quote is clear to me.
rw
s
isn't your strong suit then, is it?
However that fact obviously does not preclude the possibility that two DIFFERENT recordings, e.g. the CD and SACD releases, might sound different due to different mastering/processing.
Is that your answer? Final answer?
rw
...with no audible difference. They would not, however, find such a reliable conduit to the homes of those with the systems and listening habits to appreciate them. The secret, for two-channel recordings at least, seems to lie not in the high-bit recording but in the high-bit market."
What, exactly, do you find hard to understand about this?
Anyway, I've wasted more than enough time here. Good luck.
I bought several Telarc SACD/CD hybrid recordings a few years ago and found the sound quality to be outstanding, and I don't have an SACD player. I chalked it up to extra care during the recording process.
Rick
the concept of backsliding has eluded you.
rw
It's not backsliding. The authors simply note that the MASTERING might be better on the SACD, because they're aimed at an audiophile market. The exact same mastering COULD be released as a CD, with no audible difference.
In other words, we could return to the early CD mastering practice of actually committing a faithful transfer of the spectral and dynamic range of the original recording, to CD. Crazy idea!
The author's bottom line is that the sonic 'superiority' of one version over the other, often attributed by 'audiophiles' to the formats themselves, is actually INDEPENDENT of the formats. It's a mastering choice.
is called speculation .
rw
Ever read a scientific paper, E-stat? You'll usually find that after presenting the data, the authors attempt to plausibly explain what it means.
Then again, I guess to you that's all just SPECULATIN'. I can only imagine you have a more parsimonious explanation for the results?
between that which a study proves and well that which generates speculation. Continue to speculate away.
rw
xc
Right.
TL
Howdy
How about the Redbook discs that were mastered in DSD? Ignoring the Redbook discs that are mastered in DSD and not released as SACDs by this logic all CD layers of SACDs should sound as good as the DSD layers...
-Ted
As JA already showed that the CD layer on an SACD has been mastered completely differently on at least one occasion (DSOTM). Look it up.
There is no guarantee that the mastering on the CD layer of an SACD is any good. Actually, there is no guarantee that the DSD layer is any good either, but apparently, it usually is.
I'm not saying it's ALWAYS going to be like this - there are going to be SACDs out there with poor mastering that matches the CD layer, just like there are CDs out there with great mastering that matches the DSD release.
The reality of this is completely socially defined and subjective. If all labels decide tomorrow that they're going to stop spending money on high res remasters and get all the "benefits" of high res with existing CD masters, the advantage of SACD/DVD-A disappears entirely. But for now, the advantages are there.
Howdy
I never claimed ALL hybrids had their CD layers derived from their DSD stereo layer, but most hybrid SACDs have their CD layer derived from the DSD stereo layer with Sony's Super Bit Mapping.
Go look on Hi-Res where some of the masterers laugh at the idea that they don't take at least as much care on the CD layer as the DSD side: after all many people who get the hybrid SACDs (most for single inventory releases) just play the CD layers and the masterers sure don't want to release inferior material for every one to judge their work (of course the man paying the bills is still boss): e.g. http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/63631.html and http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/164821.html or http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/155060.html and http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/153403.html and http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/129128.html
For that matter go compare some XRCD, XRCD2, XRCD24, or K2HD CDs, etc. to hi-res. They are among the best mastered CDs around (the mastering process for them is designed to preserve the most possible precision and to use the least jitter prone production), but they are still at the disadvantage of the Redbook format: too few bits and too small of a freq response compared to hires.
All I'm saying is that there is no evidence to support the tenuous hypothesis that the only advantage hi-res has over Redbook is the mastering process. Anyone who thinks that the given argument makes sense clearly has little experience with SACDs, DVD-As or the mastering process.
-Ted
Baloney. Assuming we can be 100% sure mastering engineers have followed Scarlet Book recommendation -- which is to make the CD layer a straight transcode from the DSD version -- and that's a huge assumption -- you still have two issues: 1) whether your playback chain does anything significantly 'different' to the two formats after D/A and 2) sighted bias.XRCD etc is a non-argument; they are almost certainly different masterings, with different levels and EQ and whatnot; XRCD vs K2HD probably won't sound the same, and that will be evidenced in a comparison of their waveform stats too. The interesting philosophical point you unwittingly bring up is, 'should all 'best' masterings sound alike'?
As for 'tenuous hypotheses', all *you* are making are the same technically dubious assertions that "SACDs sound better because CDs don't have enough [bits, samples]". The fact is you *haven't* ruled out the other factors in your comparisons --- different mastering, different playback, sighted bias. And I've noticed some mastering 'engineers' don't bother to, either.
Howdy
No you are making assumptions about my experience and tests. But I know better than to try to convince people that have already made up their minds.
I was just pointing out that the original claim that mastering is the big difference it a huge over generalization from very little presented info and it flies in the face of my and everyone I knows direct experience as well as the facts.
-Ted
Have you go the least inkling as to why 'direct experience' is no guarantee of correct diagnosis of cause and effect?
Howdy
I brought up some of the reasons that their conclusion (that mastering differences explain the perceived benefits of hi-res) was unwarranted or at least unsupported. You haven't really addressed them, instead you attack my (undisclosed) experience and avoid the real issues.
Bye.
-Ted
d
HowdyI basically agree with posts from yourself, other inmates and especially bjh in http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/prophead/messages/3/37228.html
Also I think my posts in this subthread indicate that my belief is that they are more or less clueless if they think that mastering is the biggest difference in quality of hi-res. It shows an unbelievable degree of unsophistication for people that aspire to doing real research.
-Ted
The mindset behind such work is NSD, "no sonic difference". If "hi-rez" is no better than "reg-rez", the next step certainly must be to prove that "reg-rez" is no better than MP3.
NSD, QED!
clark
Or are just being crudely political and feeling like it's time to summon up the reactionary troops? I though you did have a rational Western-style education building on the enlightenment tradition, but maybe I read too much into your CV.TL
HowdyYes I read the paper and in fact I don't think it was materially misunderstood here (ignoring the expected knee-jerk responses of the fundamentalists on both ends of the spectrum.)
-Ted
Are you an AES member?
clark
Howdy
I'm a member of the ACM, IEEE, MAA and AES. Tho I have no idea where anyone would find my CV :)
-Ted
and I guess I should listen to it more. I've got the player. But in my opinion, the large quality gains experienced with hires release just cannot be explained by resolution differences that happen to magically disappear in ever blind test conducted so far. It just doesn't make any sense.
I have plenty of experience listening to SACDs, DVDA and CDs, Axon.
Rest assured that for the home listener, separating the intrinsic 'sound' of the formats, from other possible factors, is well-nigh impossible without the sorts of efforts Meyer et al took.
And I have certainly heard 'hi rez' releases that are dynamically compressed and processed like their CD counterparts. I;'ve also 'seen' them , too, as waveforms.
Howdy
Come visit sometime :)
It's obviously equipment specific, but I've listened to arguably the best Redbook reproduction on the planet get stomped by much less expensive SACD players over and over. I have thousands of SACDs (and thousands more CDs) and have been playing and listening to them for years. When people claim things that are obviously foreign to my, my friend's, my mastering friend's, people whom trust on Hi-Rez's, etc. experience I suspect that they don't have nearly as much experience or at least haven't listened with better than average players...
-Ted
Tequila.
...and "reasoning" that went into it. For a journal as forlorn as the JAES, this was an especially shallow effort. But then I've read the whole thing, have you yet?
clark
I do have to agree that the test description and analysis is surprisingly thin. No equipment readout, no results breakdown by listener or location or whatnot, no detailed description of listening venues, no musical selections. No null hypothesis, no description of type I/II error.
The impression I'm getting is that the paper provides just enough information to give people with anti-high-res bias enough justification to continue ignoring it, and not enough to ever convince anybody else one way or the other. So I can clearly understand what you and Todd are saying about the "token peers" thing. One needs to trust the Meyer/Moran's test setup and analysis on basically all counts, on faith, to believe the conclusion, and that's quite a leap of faith to make.
On the other hand... would it have ever mattered in this dicussion if all that information was provided? Most audiophiles, it seems, do not hold much stock in blind testing at all, no matter how well it's conducted, or the requirements placed on it are so large that they make the tests entirely unfeasible. (cf the whole argument about type II error and requiring thousands of listeners to keep it low.) I mean, I'm tempted to just email Meyer and ask him for full documentation on the tests. Asking for more information after a paper is published is entirely acceptable. His email is right on the top.
Clearly, there is a grey area between "a test that provides an unambiguous and comprehensive result" and "a meaningless test that doesn't show anything". Everybody agrees that the test isn't the former. I don't think there's enough evidence to state that it's also the latter. Especially when - in a lot of people's experience, including my own - high res just doesn't sound any better than Red Book, everything else being equal.
Look at two of their statements:
"The CD has adequate bandwidth and dynamic range for any home reproduction task." Oh really? I’ll bet no attention whatsoever was devoted to low-level resolution and dynamics; whenever one hears talk about “dynamic range” it’s only about how loud something can go, never how well it can reveal the music at low, bit-strangulated levels. (Talking PCM here.)
Even worse:
"The burden of proof has now shifted." And now I’m mad as hell! Cleverly they have slipped this article into a forlorn albeit vaguely respected journal, from which a campaign can be mounted to shoot down any opposition. “See? Read the article the JAES if you don’t believe me.”
You say you might "email Meyer and ask him for full documentation on the tests". Good! Also ask him what the equipment was, esp. the speakers -- and if you would, please, pass the response along to me.
clark
"I’ll bet no attention whatsoever was devoted to low-level resolution and dynamics; whenever one hears talk about “dynamic range” it’s only about how loud something can go, never how well it can reveal the music at low, bit-strangulated levels."
We looked for music with low-level detail and gave our subjects lots of chances to hear it and use it for the tests. That was one of the things the extra bits was supposed to do better, so of course we tried to test for it.
""The burden of proof has now shifted." And now I’m mad as hell!"
Whoa, easy there. This statement was about whatever should or should not be written at this point in a particular refereed journal. Unless you're planning to write for it, which something tells me you aren't, it doesn't apply to you. -- E. Brad
clarkjohnsen,What equipment are you using, what speakers? You don't seem to list your system, neither do you disclose it when throwing out quality judgments about hardware and software all so knowingly and sharing your own personal "test results" concerning phenomena, gear, and gadgets.
Just occurred to me since you always speak of component quality and its consequences for the credibility of evaluations and evaluators.
You are not hiding that on purpose, are you? I thought you are a reviewer, given the profile you've given to yourself.
I have a feeling you'll prefer to stay mum on this one.
TL
I could speculate what kind of contest you might be involved in, but I'll await your response.
z
...see link.
We'll get back those misrepresentations on another day. Now it's the weekend.
TL
I'm not sure what you are referring to, but if you have a point to make on a specific post, you are obviously free to articulate your comment just like everyone else if there is reason for that.TL
WGAF?
The subject is the the BAS's report, isn't in? On that topic, if you wouldn't mind terribly, what we're hearing reported bcak by readers of the full report is beyond dismal. Let's re-examine shall we?
"... the test description and analysis is surprisingly thin. No equipment readout, no results breakdown by listener or location or whatnot, no detailed description of listening venues, no musical selections. No null hypothesis, no description of type I/II error."
Holy Crapola, seems the requirements for doing "scientific" research are getting pretty lax these day.
Care to comment or would you prefer to stay num on this one?
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
Dahlin',
Maybe you are the visionary amongst us, but I don't see how there can possibly be a whole discussion thread going on to collectively criticize an article that apparently one (1) person has read. Look at the misinformation evident already.
You tell me, but that doesn't seem like living up to the exacting standards those same critics' expect of scientific rigor, does it. Many of these critics aren't even believers in science or show much of a scientific worldview in the first place, so why do they care. As such it would be quite comical, even, were it not for the fact that the attitude is so widespread.
My point above, too.
TL
In fact it would have been better than the foolishness you offered.
Perhaps your position is something like... Shoddy science is better than no science or something similar. I really don't know but for those that have any proper conception of science their motto would surely be... Shoddy science is worst than no science at all.
Anyway, you go back to sparring with CJ if that's what turns you on but please refrain from comments on science if you please.
Thanks in advance
ps. Sweetie allow me to give you a little hint, don't hit Clark with "I thought you are a reviewer" because he's certain to counter telling you that he *isn't* a reviewer and very likely point you to his Reasons I'm Not A Reviewer (or whatever it's actually called) article. Ever hear the expression "Know thine adversary"?
ta-ta
We hope our perceptions ain't slippin
But we swear to God we seen Lou Reed
Cow tippin
In fact I would have preferred to speak of things like "reason" and "rationality" instead, but I wasn't sure if the terms would be familiar enough. Point proven.But you can also think of these issues in terms of consistency or intellectual honesty, if you know what I'm talking about.
Does that help?
Are you saying that clarkjohnsen "*isn't* a reviewer" in the same way he "prefers not to" publish anything?
So many pieces of advise in one message - that's so sweet of you! But don't you fear it might seem a bit sissy to be so nice to others?
TL
I'm not surprised. Recording engineers that I know are telling me that they are limiting the dynamic range to 60 db to 70 db because most folks don't have the systems that go beyond that.(Think about how many speakers can realistically do this.) There is one caveat from the same folks, practically all of them hear the benefits of 20 bit, and due to the increased low level linearity.
d.b.
The root criticism is that a study was seemingly brought up out of thin air with a desired outcome, and then used as factual basis for the remaining article. (It also used subjective perception of just a few people, that is not unanimously agreed with, as factual basis.) The lack of references, controls, or data raised skepticism over whether such a project had actually taken place. Citing the seemingly-sacred belief that because it's an AES article, it's automatically truth and ought not be challenged.
Like your buddy Cheever?
The old "base your evidence on the conclusion" trick. Science at its best.
Quite so. Also remember, it's peer-reviewed , another sacred touchstone.
LOL! What does that say about the peers?
clark
By grinding it on the sacred stone of woe and anointing it with green ink and myrrh. All praise be to the Lord CJ. Amen.
cheers,
AJ
If you can't hear ghosts, just how Golden are your Ears?
A peer-reviewed study or document is normally so air-tight in terms of references, data, and theory, it would be extremely difficult to find a hole that is permeable to challenge. This is what the peers are supposed to achieve.I personally think the AES's "peer reviews" were never so much peer reviews in the classic sense as much as mutual agreement amongst a circle of people with like thought. I've thought for a long time that many papers in the audio engineering field have utilized "token peers," whose concern was getting these papers submitted to establish a sense of authority amongst those within the circle, rather than maintain and advance sound design practices within the industry. This in time has also established a dogmatic belief system amongst audio designers (often with hushed dissent) and an "us versus them" mentality in regard to their consumer base.
Most of the questioning levied at the audio engineering establishment from the consumers should have been flagged by the peers themselves. But since the quest for "authority immune from challenge" has trumped the quest for sound practices, such burden for genuine review has shifted to the consumers. (Which has driven the belief system and "us versus them" mentality.) And in time, some amongst the consumers realize this. You and me amongst them.
Peer reviews are a lot more effective when the pool of reviewers is vast, the reviewers are otherwise independent in thinking (there is no fear in citing problems or rejecting the presentation), and there are elements in the study or document that are critical (often involving either human health or safety), which could come back to haunt the reviewers if they were later to be found to have let questionable statements or data evade their scrutiny.
the quest for authority overriding the quest for knowledge.
You have voiced my own inchoate objections most forcefully. You have written a classic!
Say, do you belong to them (as it were)?
clark
Did you ever get anything accepted through those lowly filters and get a piece published with them?Oh, you didn't even want to? Then why expend so much time and energy in trying to convince everyone in those circles at your own home domain of how very correct and deserving of broadest possible attention your "theses" were, and how blatantly wrong and mentally suspect those in any way critical of them had to be?
You even had your friends there as officers. They wouldn't have just gone ahead and brutally suppressed your "emerging paradigm," wouldn't you think?
TL
Thanks for the summary.
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
I'm generally a skeptic when it comes to hearing this sort of thing, and my 52 year old ears roll off like a stone off a cliff at 14.5khz. But...
I've been recording some old LPs to CD and noticed that the character of some awful clicking/rattling maracas (or something) on a 1959 Enoch Light demo album (Provocative Percussion) wasn't quite right. I changed the sampling from 44.1 to 96khz and the problem went away. Looking at the digitized waveforms, it's pretty obvious that the higher and lower rate waveforms simply aren't the same. I admit it's subtle, but that's not the same as non-existent.
.
Logic is dead! Long live eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemotion!
What utter nonsense.
Our senses are quite interesting. Note that when you look directly at an object, you can discern colors and detail better. BUT, you are actually better at detecting movement and changes from your peripheral vision.
I am inclined to believe that the ear works under similar premises. Changes and differences between systems and recordings are difficult to pin down when directly concentrating on them.
I note significant differences between many components, but I rely more on how I emotionally feel after a long period of listening. And, well, that is not a 100% measurable factor, and prone to outside influence from many different factors.
Not the emotional thing again!
> Brad Meyer and David Moran of the Boston Audio Society have (once again)
> proven that we are all deaf.
Don't let it be forgotten that E. Brad Meyer was doing blind tests at
AES Conventions in the early 1990s to "prove" that TDK's latest cassette
tape formulation produced recordings that could not be distinguished by
ear from the original CDs. :-)
See my "As We See It" essays in the September and October issues of
Stereophile, which outline the results of some blind tests that come up
with different conclusions.
The Pioneer player used in the Meyer/Moran tests has a measured dynamic
range with hi-rez recordingsd no better than CD, so perhaps it is not
surprising that they ended up with negative findings.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Atkinson wrote:
"Don't let it be forgotten that E. Brad Meyer was doing blind tests at
AES Conventions in the early 1990s to "prove" that TDK's latest cassette
tape formulation produced recordings that could not be distinguished by
ear from the original CDs. :-)"
As I pointed out elsewhere, the only purpose of that test was to surprise people about how difficult it was to pass it. It also proved that I was fairly good at choosing and setting up analog tape decks at the time; the bias and EQ were tweaked periodically throughout. It also proved to be a revealing look into the way people listen and perceive stuff.
There were those who could and did pass the test, which was to get 5/5 identifications correct; we kept track of them and listed the numbers on a tally board. About 3.1% of the subjects should have done this by chance, but the tally was about 7%; some of them were really doing it. I talked to these people when I could, to learn what they were listening for (though they couldn't always tell me, which was interesting in itself). One guy I remember had just finished mastering his classical CD (we let people use their own source if they had one) and he was really good. Tomlinson Holman stopped by, listened to some soft piano music, and got 5/5 in a jiffy by listening to the soft notes fade to noise through the Dolby C encoder.
I don't remember whether you heard about this test from someone else or whether you came to New York for that convention, John. I know you didn't get 5/5 while I was on duty. -- E. Brad Meyer
and the original poster was talking pokies,the article on the BAS site refers to a much earlier AES article, and to a test that was to be conducted in 2004, It is unlikely that the article in question utilised a single player.Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
...(mind you, these were not DBTs)... saying that a certain Audio Technica cartridge (I forget which) rendered LPs so well, they sounded like master tapes!
This was on a Saturday morning radio show about audio called Shop Talk, which preceded even Car Talk on WBUR-FM in Boston. Other participants (the founders) were Peter Mitchell and Richard Goldwater. It was fair fun, I admit, and I even bought the cartridge -- which eventually was replaced in their estimation by a Sonus, which I also bought. But sound like mastertapes? No way!
clark
Nowhere near as close to mastertapes as where, according to you, we get by marking our CDs with a green ink pen, sanding their edges, and smearing their tops with hand cream?
TL
That is one of the sore points of the paper - the equipment is not at all described. How did you determine that?
Neither does the purported article on the BAS site refer to same AES paper, it refers to an article published in the AES magazine earlier than october 2004!In other basic premise given for knocking the paper is erroneous, Nuff said.
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
That information came out
.
> That is one of the sore points of the paper - the equipment is not at all
> described.
To my regret, I have not yet read the paper as my JAES has not yet arrived.
> How did you determine that?
Earlier in this thread, it was stated that the BAS homepage listed the
equipment used by Meyer and Moran.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
For the record:
(1) The Pioneer player mentioned on the BAS site was used for a few early tests. It certainly did have a lower noise floor than the CD link and clearly revealed this by being readily detectable, because of the higher audible noise in the CD link, at elevated gain levels we used for a few tests. This is described in the paper.
(2) The high-gain tests also revealed that the Pioneer player had a slightly grainy-sounding nonlinearity in the left channel, audible only with this extremely quiet recording, and only during the room tone. We then tried an expensive ($2000) Sony player, which was clean, and did most of the tests with a Yamaha DVD-S1500.
(3) Our tests had no desired outcome. We searched diligently for, would have been happy to find, a combination of a recording, playback system and test subject that revealed sonic differences at normal listening levels, and even happier to learn how to pass that test ourselves.
(4) I did set up a double-blind test of a good cassette deck (using Dolby C) against a CD original at an AES convention in New York. There was no desired outcome there either, except to show people that if you really adjust the deck carefully (which I did frequently throughout the day), passing that test is much harder than you would think. A number of people did pass it, and the set of those that did was in interesting one (to me, if not to TDK). -- E. Brad
.
...but feel encouraged to "comment" anyway? Based on what, exactly?TL
> ...feel encouraged to "comment" anyway?
I think you are misreading what I wrote. I made no comment at all on
the Meyer/Moran tests or conclusions. I merely pointed out: 1) that this
is not the first series of blind tests E. Brad Meyer has been involved
in where a null result appeared to be the desired outcome; and 2) that
the source player used, if it was indeed the Pioneer as noted by other
posters, has a measured dynamic range no better than 16-bit CD, so could
hardly be expected to preserve the hi-rez aspects of the new media.
As I said, my copy of the new JAES issue has not yet arrived. When it
does, I will certainly comment on it if necessary. If that's okay by you?
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Well, all sophistry apart, what you did is basically prejudice its value before even familiarizing yourself with it.I'm also curious where the evidence is that "a null result appeared to be the desired outcome" in this research, since, like you, I haven't read the paper, either.
And yes, thanks so much for asking; we all appreciate reasoned, well-informed, and fair commentary where we can find such.
TL
Why would you choose a dynamically crippled player for such a test if you truly sought a fair and objective answer to the question?
rw
There is absolutely zilch evidence that they chose a dynamically crippled player, The reference to a Pioneer 563A refers to a open day blindtest that BAS conducted way back in October 2004.Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
Unlike any serious "peer reviewed" test worthy of consideration, the systems evaluated were not stated at all. For all we know, they used an iPod.
rw
a
that leaves two possibilities: he is either incompetent or willfully deceptive. Take your pick.
rw
i lean towards 2
...who has done some work already along these lines. (Once upon a time he was selected as one of America's "Top Young Scientists".) Many there will be, who won't care to hear this, but give it a shot.
____
I don't know about the specific tests in the Boston silliness, but to my
way of thinking, the fairest test would be to take high quality digital
material (e.g. 96 Khz 24 bits - no non-linear 1 bit SACD stuff) and
make specific versions of it that are degraded. For example, down
convert to 44.1/16 and back up to 96/24. Then play the two files back
through the highest quality available equipment and see if there is any
difference. There will be NOTHING ANALOG that is changing, just the
digital signal itself. Furthermore, there is nothing different about
the digital signal processing into and out of analog. So the difference
between the original and degraded material can be definitively
understood. (And the polarity will be the same as well.)
Now, here's the rub. I did part of this test last year while mastering
an album. Specifically, I went from 44/24 down to 44/16. We conducted a
"triple blind" test. Triple blind, in that not only the experimenter or
the subject knew what was being compared, but even more, none of us knew
that there was actually an experiment underway!
[Note: I developed this same technique in the late Eighties, and presented it in a paper to the 91st AES Convention in 1992; I have taken flak for my impertinence ever since, although none of my antagonists cared to re-analyze my results.]
That is until the
subject (the producer for the album, I was the engineer) complained that
the sound quality was poor. How could this be? The sound quality the
day before had been agreed to be good. What had changed was the word
length. The particular method used to down convert from 24 bits to 16
bits had introduced a low level of distortion -- something that should
have been completely inaudible, but it was actually the difference
between music that was pleasant to listen to and music that was harsh
and unlistenable. Ultimately, we had to get down to 16 bits so we could
make a CD, so after trying several different methods of dithering and
noise shaping we finally came up with a 16 bit version that was acceptable.
Now the theory says that all that changed between the good reduction and
the bad reduction was the low order bit. This was below 0 db spl in the
listening room, at 1 meter from the speakers. (The gain was calibrated.)
We were listening in a room full of computers with fans and whirring
disks, and a noise level of perhaps 45 db or more. So how could the low
order bit have mattered?
Theoretically, it couldn't have mattered. The intellectuals will say we
were deluded. The artists know better. The intellectuals will dismiss
this as "anecdotal evidence". This is, of course, the paramount
buzz-word they use to dismiss results that disagree with Kuhn's "Normal
Science", that is to say their favorite theories.
Now I've thought about this quite a bit -- because this gets to the
heart of the problem that began when digital audio first came into
existence. If one could take tests like this and cast them into a form
that would convince a reasonable fraction of the flat-earthers perhaps
some progress could be made. In other words, make a double blind test
based on the kind of sonic differences that seemed so significant to me
last year.
But I don't think this will work. Why? Because double blind testing
won't be able to distinguish what we were hearing. The problem was that
listening to the polluted music was giving us a headache. It took some
time to recover before we could appreciate the unpolluted music. In a
rapid sequence of blind testing our malaise would have continued and
would have been falsely applied to the unpolluted music as well as the
polluted music.
There may be a way out, but it's very high budget. Perhaps PET scans of
the brain of listeners will show different neural activity when
listening to low and high quality audio. They may give external
("objective") access to some of the subjective aspects of perception
that are not readily available to the consciousness of many subjects.
PS No high end equipment here. A $59 external sound card, plus 20 year
old amplifier and speakers that originally cost under $500. These
differences could be heard on cheap headphones as well.
It is Tony Lauck, ex scientific bigwig at Digital Equipment Corp (late, lamented). And a classical music devotee of considerable note, now doing some of his own recording.
And I still have (temporary) possession of a tape he made of a Boston Symphony stereo broadcast of the Mahler Second back in 1958, made off two separate FM stations, for which momentous occasion he obtained two Citation tuners!
Disclaimer: I have known Tony for forty-five years, was best man at his wedding *and* gave the bride away, etc. etc. Plus we were active together at the college radio station, and he essentially taught me audio, although I had known a good deal already.
Further disclaimer: He was closely acquainted with E. Brad Meyer at prep school, then later at college the three of us hung together, and after graduation became housemates for a while, several years in the case of Brad and me.
Brad Meyer went on to become a writer for Stereo Review.
clark
Having a bit of a background in this, I really must object to your continued oversimplifications and terminological abuse of philosophy of science in general and Thomas Kuhn's work in particular in your efforts to lend an aura of seriousness to your obscurities. I severely doubt that you've read more than an Amazon.com blurb of even his main text, so please drop the references; they're unpertinent and only make your case look like a hodgepodge of someone slightly disintegrating. Let's talk about things on their own terms: yours is a case not of an alternative or "victimized" theory or a theorema making heroic claims to equal footing, but simply of nonsense naturally waved off, sort of something like the necessary quotient of noise in any environment. Neither would I call anyone in your camp an "artist." That's offensive, too, having a real one as my partner.Which all makes me wonder how "young," "top" and in any way involved with "science" your (typically) anonymous buddy might have ever been.
And that somewhat related "triple blind" sillyness can only be talked about in the one and only fashion it's been addressed when and if anyone has bothered to comment: as a joke. All it assures us of is ignorance and miscomprehension, and it's not the first time the point is broached here, either.
You just keep repeating these in the hopes of finding fresh audiences, I guess.
TL
...who post here posing as adults, occasionally the rule must be lifted.
"Having a bit of a background in this, I really must object to your continued oversimplifications and terminological abuse of philosophy of science in general and Thomas Kuhn's work in particular in your efforts to lend an aura of seriousness to your obscurities."
Oh my, such faux -grownup lingo! ("I really must object" actually sounds more prissy , but let it pass, let it pass.)
Had the writer not let his typically rancorous animosity blind his vision, he might have noticed that it wasn't I who composed the entry.
"Yours is a case not of an alternative or 'victimized' theory or a theorema making heroic claims to equal footing, but simply of nonsense naturally waved off." Mercy!
"You just keep repeating these in the hopes of finding fresh audiences, I guess." Oh this person is such a jester. I laugh. L!
clark
Maybe it is an age issue after all.;-)
of many test naysayers that all "double blind" testing involves rapid ABX switching. That is not an inherent requirement of blind testing. One can concoct a testing scenario where you are given whatever amount of time you wish to listen to one configuration before listening to the other.
The only requirement is that the test subject remain blind to the specific item under test (the first blind), and that immediate test administrator who has contact with the test subjects also be blind (the second blind.)
The only goal of any blind testing is to remove the conscious and subconscious influence that specific knowledge of the item under test brings. Remember that such biases don't always follow the lines of expectation.
If there is a valid difference, it will show up repeatedly over time. The problem is that such tests are never easy to set up to the satisfaction of the varied interests. In fact, a certain segment of the audio world wouldn't even want firm results. Uncertainty offers them far more security than the chance that tests might not go their way.
Rather they addressed the highly unrigorous experimental procedure and the unjustified assumptions made about various conversions. And, as someone else stated, the cheap crap used for digital operations.
The DBT thing is entirely separate, and I deliberately avoided it.
clark
I'm disappointed to see anyone post something on this subject, since it invariably results in yet another endless round of bickering.
"I'm disappointed to see anyone post something on this subject, since it invariably results in yet another endless round of bickering."
People have opinions on the subject. And a lot of disagreement. I don't think it's been awful.
But then again, I've never had a problem with being shouted at. So some may perceive me as being "desensitized" to the bickering you cited......
In regard to the bickering, I've thought for quite some time there should have been a forum here for "hot-button" issues ("DBT", "snake oil", digital issues, etc.), to shield those who cannot stomach the flamethrowing.
I didn't word my earlier post well, since I'm not the least bit concerned about flames. It's more a matter that this is one of those issues that has been debated forever-or at least for the 30 years or so I've been involved with this hobby-and has no resolution, so we get subjected to an endless rehash of the same old tired arguments (on both sides). It takes up a lot of space and goes nowhere. And, yes, I can just skip it, but it seems to me that the time and effort could be better expended on topics that might actually be informative rather than merely uselessly argumentative.
But I do like like your idea of a separate board: Why not call it "Dead End Alley?"
That's better than anything I've come up with!!! .....
would argue Prop Head serves a similar function.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Isolation Ward is for subjects like Brilliant Pebbles and vacuum tube motherboards. Also repetitive threads initiated by the same posters on subject matters like absolute polarity.
Prop Head is for scientific matters like why one amp topology is better than another or why a new performance parameter better correlates to subjective performance. Or why we prefer the sonics of vacuum tubes.
And naturally, both forums have their flameouts as well.
I was thinking of a general board for heated discussion, that would not necessarily fit into far-out tweaks for Isolation or scientific matters for Prophead. Those who don't mind the heat just go to that board regularly, and those who do mind it won't have to worry about flame wars ruining their enjoyment of the normal forums.
.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Things 5, 10, 20 years or more ahead are bound to draw the fire of knuckle draggers, mossbacks and chest beaters. What else is new?
All Things Argumentative?
Doc S.
...where they feel safe to post pictures of their cats.
Geez Luiz, Todd!
clark
And lacking in diligence, in being able to find these claims and anecdotes.....
"Claims both published and anecdotal are regularly made for audibly superior sound quality for two-channel audio encoded with longer word lengths and/or at higher sampling rates than the 16-bit/44.1-kHz CD standard."
Funny, I've been claiming the contrary..... I've almost never preferred 24/96 or SACD playback over 16/44 CD.....
And what I've read recently, and discovered first-hand, a lot of people have even been wondering if anything beyond 320 kbps MP3 is overkill..... I personally think not, but when it comes to resolution in digital audio playback, until "fatiguing high rez" is addressed and fixed, I wouldn't go beyond CD.
for pretty much confirming what I said about you being oblivious to opinions contrary to your own; previous observation (link) was re: CD technologies yet clearly (here) we witness just another manifestation of same.
I suppose I should recommend you spend some time at Hi-Rez but I suspect after reading any number of testimonials from the high-rez fans you'd still be posting about not having encountered any such "claims and anecdotes".
Oh wait, just thought of a new angle... here's a little thought experiment for you. Ask yourself why the high rez formats have attracted supporters. Is it bacause:
A. They find the sonics to be superior compared to Redbook CD?
B. They are attracted to the vast catalogs of music (new and re-issue)available in the high rez. formats compares to the "slim pickings" that now accurately describes what is avialable on CD Reedbook?
C. They just want one player that will do it all? Including playing their DVDs since after all they believe everything sounds the same anyway.
Challenge yourself Todd... but do ease up if you sense something about to snap in the old grey matter, wouldn't want that!
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
"Oh wait, just thought of a new angle... here's a little thought experiment for you. Ask yourself why the high rez formats have attracted supporters. Is it bacause:
A. They find the sonics to be superior compared to Redbook CD?"
Several have claimed that..... I don't agree, but otherwise no problem.
"B. They are attracted to the vast catalogs of music (new and re-issue)available in the high rez. formats compares to the 'slim pickings' that now accurately describes what is avialable on CD Reedbook?"
If you say so..... I don't think it's the case.....
"C. They just want one player that will do it all? Including playing their DVDs since after all they believe everything sounds the same anyway."
I might get one if it can also play vinyl..... [-;
"Challenge yourself Todd... but do ease up if you sense something about to snap in the old grey matter, wouldn't want that!"
I'm not sure what you want..... You may want to re-phrase..... Thanks.
"Oh wait, just thought of a new angle... here's a little thought experiment for you. Ask yourself why the high rez formats have attracted supporters. Is it bacause:
A. They find the sonics to be superior compared to Redbook CD?"
> Several have claimed that..... I don't agree, but otherwise no problem.
You just finished saying you'd not seen any such claims! Are intentionally playing the fool, or what?
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
"You just finished saying you'd not seen any such claims!"
I've seen them.... I've only had a hard time finding them with great regularity......
"Are intentionally playing the fool, or what?"
I guess you'll have to determine that..... I think you've already come to that belief anyway.....
We obviously listen to different kinds of music. In my world, available music in digital formats is distributed as 100%/0% for CD/High Rez.
It's probably cost-prohibitive for small labels to do SACD, especially considering that some albums are limited to only few hundreds or thousands copies.
If SACD were readily available, it would be like it was for me when CD first came out. I may have had a player by now, but I'd be on this huge learning curve, once again, in determining which players are any good (if they exist), and which recordings are as well (if such recordings exist). But the lack of selection makes me think it isn't worth the trouble. At least for now.
I think my initial ordeal with CD is why I'm so hesitant with new formats. Even more so than the limited selection of recordings. (If I thought SACD sounded fabulous, I'd definitely be using one now, and talking about it like I talk about Don Allen's products.) Remember, I once thought there was no such thing as "good-sounding CD playback" as well, until that "Wadia 7/9" experience. The only difference with high-rez is that it won't be likely that I'll purchase anything until such experience occurs, if it were to happen.
go too far down the road with the Dumb and Dumber routine one of you might want to look up "sarcasm" in a dictionary.
Just a suggestion.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
there are those that believe only double bind testing can reveal true differences, and that in actuality those differences are mostly vanishingly small, or non-existant anyway.
Then there are the rest of us.
I thought the whole thing got banished to another forum, because it is unresolvable.
For myself, I have heard systems assembled with the wire is wire, bits is bits approach and they fall into two catagories ... zip chord wired nightmares, or an obvious contradiction (I know it doesn't matter, but that doesn't stop me from buying good wire and interconnects and a premium CD player).
What I do know, if that no amount of rancorous arguments are going to sway ANYONE who has already formed an opinion about this matter.
All it does is inflame bitterness.
Doc S.
The flames will come soon enough, I'm sure.
I posted this on HydrogenAudio fully a day before Mr. Hansen did. Touche! ;P
but this one is SURE to spiral into groin kicking and spitting.Sigh
Doc S.
d
If there's anyone with an intimate knowledge of "poorly conceived experiments," it ought to be you, to be sure. It is the one indisputable area where you can show a true track record and where you have shown some serious "hoots-pah," if you don't mind my quoting from a post of your own.The fact alone that all the usual suspects so quickly rally behind their opinion leaders vocally attacking this piece and the issues behind it (without probably even having bothered to read it) makes me convinced that it must address itself to something valuable and valid.
TL
"The fact alone that all the usual suspects so quickly rally behind their opinion leaders vocally attacking this piece and the issues behind it (without probably even having bothered to read it) makes me convinced that it must address itself to something valuable and valid."
You are easily "convinced" it seems, after all that the "piece" addresses "something valuable and valid" should be determined by the content of said "piece" as certainly nothing authoritative can be ascertained based merely on the observation of it being attacked by individuals who may not even have bothered to read it!
You would appear to share much with those that you are quick to ridicule.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Nice observation...
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
FWIW, here is a rather simple test that I did. I have a rather good outboard ADC that puts out its digital signal to the USB input of my Mac laptop computer. I made three different kinds of recordings. Using my Ayre CX-7e, I took the analog signal out, passed it through the ADC and made a CD-R. Using my TT and the output of my phono stage (an ARC PH 5), I made CD-Rs of some vinyl discs. Finally, using a Sony SACD player (by no means a high-end SACD player) in two-channel mode I did same thing with SACD playback, taking the analog out and converting it to CD-R. I listened in all cases to the CD-R with the Ayre, since the Sony is obviously much poorer on RBCD- no surprise there. The rest of the chain consisted of an ARC preamp, a Plinius amp, and Vandersteen 5 speakers.
The result: The CD-Rs of both the vinyl and CD recordings were very close in sound quality to the original, though I could hear the differences without a great deal of difficulty. At times I found it difficult to hear differences between the vinyl and the CD-R of it. I was a bit surprised how close the copy of the CD was, with the extra ADC steps, but it was quite good. However, it was very easy to hear the difference between the original SACD and the CD-R made from its analog signal; the CD-R was obviously inferior. This is a rather ordinary SACD player. My conclusion: RBCD encoding is capable of doing very well with the information content in vinyl and CD playback, but it clearly falls short in handling a signal derived from a SACD source. One can easily hear the difference between the RBCD standard and SACDs. One can debate all sorts of things about how I did this, but it was a comparative test. Using exactly the same setup to make RBCD recordings of analog signals, those derived from SACDs were obviously not as good as the original, while the other two were much closer to the original. One can argue about the vinyl result and what it means, and I won't get into that here, but I think the SACD result is pretty clear, and it agreed with what I was hearing directly.
Joe
is that I really enjoy listening to music in analog, PCM and DSD digital forms...
Doc S.
I have plenty of recordings in all three formats and enjoy them all. I rarely make CD-Rs, but my wife wanted a copy of an SACD for her car player. It was in the process of making that that I discovered that RBCD didn't do as well in capturing the sound quality of SACD, which wasn't a surprise. However that RBCD copy of the SACD was quite enjoyable to listen to. It was better in sound quality than a lot of CDs that I have.
Joe
moving back and forth between vinyl and digital, tubes and SS ... I wish I had the room for a pure vintage system ... each is a somewhat different experience, which adds to the overall experience.
I don't worry much about whether nor not the Japanese, American, or Mofi pressing of Dark Side of the Moon is better than the CD, MOFI CD, Japanese CD, or SACD. I listen to that which I am in the mood to hear.
Someone was pressing me for which I preferred, the original Roxy Cast, or the movie soundtrack for Rocky Horror ... I said I liked my memory of the live version I saw in Canada best, and both of the recordings equally. They are just different from one another.
I find these never ending discussions about which is superior to be pointless and rancorous.
Doc S.
"My conclusion: RBCD encoding is capable of doing very well with the information content in vinyl and CD playback, but it clearly falls short in handling a signal derived from a SACD source."
You may want to find out, in a future test, if such derivation fares any better via DSD..... Which on paper synchronizes conversion between CD, SACD, and DVD-A.
I was dealing with the analog signal put out by three different devices and asking how well I could encode that signal with RBCD. For two devices RBCD worked quite well, for one (SACD original source) it didn't. I have no doubt that if I used a better digital encoding method than RBCD I would have done better with SACD, which would further strengthen the point I am trying to make (probably not very well).
Joe
"I was dealing with the analog signal put out by three different devices and asking how well I could encode that signal with RBCD."
Oh I see..... So if it was originally digital, it was sent to the DAC and then converted to RBCD.....
"For two devices RBCD worked quite well, for one (SACD original source) it didn't."
Interesting..... You may have dug up some underlying flaw in the SACD format..... It would be interesting to see if it shows up in a scope trace......
Re-digitizing a signal after a D/A can have side effects. For example, if the jitter is encoded onto analog media, and then sampled again in A/D, the jitter will be seen as "amplitude errors" in the new data. Which is noise. (The new sampling doesn't see the jitter from the previous digitization, it only sees deviations in amplitude as a result of the jitter.)
"I have no doubt that if I used a better digital encoding method than RBCD I would have done better with SACD, which would further strengthen the point I am trying to make (probably not very well)."
It's hard to say. SACD is a totally different format/conversion, involving pulse density modulation instead of data numerically depicting amplitude (pulse code modulation).
I am not claiming that I have dug up a flaw in the SACD format. Just the opposite! I am simply saying that SACD is better than RBCD as revealed by the fact I can make a very good, compelling RBCD copy of the analog signal coming out of a RBCD player, but a RBCD copy of an analog signal derived from a SACD doesn't do it justice. SACDs are better. There is something advantagous to the higher sampling rate and/or more bits of SACD that comes through in the analog signal. This thread started by citing a study claiming the opposite.
Joe
Am I surprised this pretentious (excuse me, I meant prestigious) "peer-reviewed" journal missed them? What does that say about their peers?
First, was their 16-bit/44.1-kHz “bottleneck" sonically comparable to Redbook CD? Or was it more like a CD-R, which in a wide variety of processes sounds far more real than an original CD? I mean, if you're going to claim a fair comparison...
Second, was the "bottleneck" itself designed for sonic results of any sort, or was it one of those strictly numerical things one finds from off the boards of so many digital engineers (present company excepted)?
Third, what were those "professional monitors" referenced? Yamahas? B&Ws? (Feh! to both!) And the electronics? Maybe the entire article, when it comes to my mailbox, will explain; meanwhile I fall back on an observation that was given to me long ago: Nine out of ten worst hi-fis are found in recording studios.
Fourth, consider the phrase, "students in a university recording program". Never mind that in the Boston area, where presumably the tests were conducted, I know of no "university recording program" -- these would be the very students who are learning how to use 48-96-192-channel boards and accompanying digital toys -- the very students who, along with their teachers, are mostly responsible for the very noticeable degradations in current recordings.
Fifth, was any attention paid to the polarity of the musical material?
Finally (although I do have more in mind), apparently no effort was made to include a top-rank SACD player such as the Ayre C-5xe Universal Disc Player (ahem!) or a top-rank Redbook player such as the Memory Player from Nova Physics. (Charlie, I haven't heard yours...)
I may write a letter of response to the JAES!
clark, AES Lifetime Member
Not really a comparison of different players.
We will be using the Pioneer 563A DVD-A/SACD universal player which keeps the DSD output of the disc in DSD form without converting to PCM. The conversion to 16 bit and back will be by a Sony DTC-790 DAT machine (1996 consumer model) which has been carefully checked to represent the best in conventional technology.
If you're stating that this was the source component then personally I cannot see why the study would be of any interest whatsoever to the audiophile community.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Probably not. But no statement on my part, I just grabbed the italicized announcement from the BAS homepage. Sadly though, that source component is at least as good as most of the gear used to make the recordings we love as audiophiles, so I think most of us would probably consider the DSD-converted analog output of sufficient quality to test for whether we could hear two 16-bit/44.1HKz conversions inserted in the chain. I'd confidently take the test if I had a chance to get to know the system a bit.
Let me say first that I completely agree with you on the importance of becoming familiar with the system. However that wouldn't be completely sufficient. For example I found in my experience that tests oriented around rapid switching are completely useless, i.e. I never compare that way (rapid switching between A/B) because I find I'm very insensitive to hearing differences; and I could care less what anyone has to say on the mattter, e.g. that rapid switching is a requirement based upon what is known of aural memory, bla bla bla...
Also I've have found that if I don't like the sound of a system I becomes insensitive to detecting differences; e.g. suppose testing two CD Players and the sounds sucks for both then I find it comes down to "bad is bad" vs. being able to distinguish (confidently) "bad" vs. "more bad".
Hence I'd have to be generally familiar and pleased with the system and agree with the methodology before I'd agree to become a participant in a test; were I conducting a test that's basically the criteria I'd use for screening the test subjects.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
My gawd did your leg go flying across the room after that incredible knee jerk?
You complain that the "gaps in their reasoniing [sic] are blatant " (emphasis added) and then proceed to speculate (having not read the paper) as to what those gaps might be!
The only thing blatant is the patent obtuseness evident in your post! ... something that is, though it hardly need saying, entirely independent of the question of the superiority of high def. audio formats, e.g. SACD, vs. 16-bit/44.1-kHz Redbook.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
Clark, IIRC, lives in Boston.....
Stu
you're cautioning me against sweeping generalizations. Thanks, but no worries, just be cause CJ and the BAS are co-located I assure you I'll not start questioning the integrity of the water supply, speculate about indications of (the consequences of) lack of genetic diversity, or anything of the sort.
:)
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust
not really. I just find it amusing that CJ would have something like this crop up in his backyard, while he attempts to solve the issue of polarity for the world. and he still claims polarity may be the issue too, which is interesting because you would assume having a store front in the area would have generated a group of converts sensitive to the issue he raises.
Ah well, c'est la vie.....
Stu
Or - in the homes of musicians
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
With their systems there are few pretensions, and hardly ever any sqauwky top ends. And rarely a B&W!
clark
At least they managed to narrow down instances under which differences are audible. As opposed to what folks think is audible. If anybody disagrees, they should perform their own tests and show otherwise. Recently, in a little corner of Seattle after a whole year foot dragging, some diehard vinyl guys found out they could not reliably detect differences btw a CD-copy and vinyl, so Meyer and Moran test is not necessarily inconsistent with what happens on the ground.Personally, considering the quality of John Curl's contribution here and on DIYAudio, he needs to radically change his approach, if he is to contribute anything of longterm value to the advancement of audio perception.
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
What is wrong with you people and why are you so insulting to me? What did I do to you?
I agree, ignore them. Sometimes I think some people's sole mission in life is to stir the pot and cause trouble, instead of trying to learn and share their knowledge openly with others. The lazy person doesn't bother trying.
Brian Walsh
May I ask what knowledge, exactly, is being shared routinely insulting people?
I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about, but just in case - you may want to recall the most recent performance, involving some guy from Sweden.
Let me address this: As a small manufacturer, over the years, I know that some customers need help, after their purchase, and some can just be very petty and assume that I will behave like Sony Corp or somesuch when it comes to: schematics, owners manuals, warranty transfer, etc.
Here is Charles Hansen, recently in a serious accident, and not at the factory.
Someone, from somewhere, who has gotten a good deal on some audio equipment, is VERY concerned that he gets the very most out of his most recent purchase, and he addresses a public forum, accusing Charles of not following through in some way. When Charles tries to redress the issue, the guy continues to insist that he is not satisfied. Charles, encumbered with other problems, effectively tells the guy off, by insulting himself. This should have been the end of it, but NO! Then Charles is rebuked for losing his patience.
Well let me tell you, some people tried the same thing with me, after I was totally burned out in a firestorm, 16 years ago. I had a fairly short fuse at the time, so I know that this is not out of line. This is why I offered my input to the discussion.
I followed that debacle quite closely, as you probably saw, and where you are distorting the facts is that the poster in question NEVER accused Charles Hansen of anything. Simply not true. You can go back and read the whole thread again if you wish.
The rest we can simply call differing perspectives then, I suppose.
TL
Seems like a quibble to me. Why then was Charles Hansen provoked to respond in such a way?
I presume that was the question on everyone's lips.TL
Judging by the abundance of your posts on that thread, I would have guessed you might have read Charles Hansen's post that enumerated why he lost his temper. Guess I am wrong.
Sometimes anger is an appropriate response - all of us are humans and anger is a part of our nature. Name calling maybe is not an appropriate response, and Mr. Hansen came to regret that aspect of his posts.
And judging by the abundance of the posts assaulting this shellshocked ex-customer, I'd have thought people read his posts, too (and that includes Charles Hansen - what the hell was he thinking?). Once again, go back and read them before jumping on anyone's bandwagon. There is nothing offensive in any one of them; what's striking instead is their remarkably polite tone, intact even in the face of the inanities hurdled at him.If you guys just like to hang around looking for someone to jump on (ideally someone who's not an English-speaker, I guess, so it's not too troublesome), that's another matter, but then don't windowdress it as something nobler than what it is, using all these silly little rationalizations transparent enough for anyone bothering to read the posts in question. Find other outlets for that accumulated anger - go jogging, chop some wood, put it into productive use. Though conceptions of "human nature" are in fact anything but uniform (feel free to hold on to your own however), group attacks aren't very manly any longer, and in this case it moreover made Ayre products look like something comparable to brass knuckles in their cultural connotation.
Enough said.
TL
> > If you guys just like to hang around looking for someone to jump on
Interesting post, but you're lacking the moral high ground. You might examine how some of your own posting might fit into your argument. Your "luxury pain" post was among the most offensive I've read on AA - that's saying something.
s
Last time around I was a "troubled adolescent."
I'm confused! But it sure looks like you are even more.
TL
"Moral high ground": I'm not looking for one.
"Luxury aches": if indeed you were able to read that message you got the context.
TL
Um, I was drawing attention to your hypocrisy.
Look, I agree with you that Charles Hansen's name calling was inappropriate (hey, he said so himself). And maybe his "luxury aches", to use your indelicate words (but not your cold meaning), had something to do with his short fuse. But you would have us believe that his outburst happened in a vacuum, and that's going to have to be where we part company.
You insist on lifting those two words out of the context - why?What I said was:
Continuing to trumpet the assumed faults of Ulf here is not just highly unfair but almost unbelievably shortsighted and dumb as well. Anyone with a modicum of multicultural understanding would have seen long ago what the deal was about and stopped it right there. The rest was just nitpicking whose only tangible result will be people voting with their wallets. And I don't think you can expect too much sympathy from Scandinavians for your otherwise most regrettable condition, either; compared to what people go through in let's say Iraq, that's but luxury aches, if I take up some straightshooting of my own.
In other words, expecting Hansen's Scandinavian victim and the friends of this victim to be especially forgiving towards their offender and attacker and not voting with their wallets instead would probably be a bit far-fetched.
The "luxury" part as we see it has to do with the fact that this, after all, is about a glamorous American niche manufacturer of expensive vanity goods from a well-off Boulder, CO, neighborhood who, while attending to his own well-being at his considerable leisure on his specialty bicycle costing the annual salary of the guy from the next country, is injured while rolling down along a scenic route freely chosen for his personal pleasure and enjoyment, and is lucky enough to live to talk about it much thanks to the good insurance policy he has. Come to think of it, it might not sound like the life of the worst sufferer on this Earth, compared to all those innumerous others we read about who are destroyed by mutilations, torture, rapes, murders, diseases, and hunger for example in Iraq. In the big scheme of things, Hansen has been enjoying an elite life until now, and soon enough he'll be back at it again as it seems.
Was it really necessary to spell this out for you?
If I expressed myself awkwardly before and continue to do so even here, shouldn't you, for the sake of consistency, be applauding my manliness and "indelicate" straightshooting instead?
Note that I am not blaming the accident on him in any way, nor belittling the degree of personal suffering and inconvenience involved. On the contrary, I expressed my sympathies (and not just in this quoted passage). More than he's prepared to do with the subjects of his tirades, at any rate (and so on all three accounts).
Have a nice day.
TL
< < What is wrong with you people and why are you so insulting to me? > >
Oh, just ignore them John. Maybe it's the way they were raised. Or maybe they are trying to compensate for some other personal deficiencies.
This is all your doing! Here I was trying to retire into a quiet life, and you have to bring up my relations with the AES (that I have been a member of for 40 years). They will be sure to kick me out now! ;-)
Hey, if they kick you out, I'll quit too and we can start our own danged audio society. One that actually tries to improve the art. Kind of like AES was 40 years ago...
I'm also wondering how much of that crap would be allowed if he was just regular inmate here.
...measurements, blah, blah, blah,.....
actually listening to music for long term enjoyment?
Nah, what could THAT possibly tell us?
Oz
I've noticed that you 'subjectivists' often fall back into straw man argument, where you propose a false version of objectivist views in order to ridicule them. Why *is* that, anyway?
FWIW, do all the long-term listening you like. Please familiarize yourself as well as you can with the differences you claim to hear. Then, when you actually get around to reality-testing them, you should have no problem whatever passing those pesky blind comparisons!
Of course, if you never do get around to reality-testing the differences, don't complain if someone suggests maybe you could be imagining them.
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