How to equalize your headphones: A Tutorial - Page 9

yeah, some cans are hopeless I think.....they resonate so much that they sound like a vintage synthetizer

do you know some "good" closed headphones in the $200 range? I mean that can be "fixed" w/ proper EQ...the trebles are so sparkling on my 770/600 that it's unmanageable

but probably (closed) cans simply can't be resonances-free

I'm afraid you are wrong on every level. Firstly I actually know quite a lot about synthesis as I'm an audio professional and have been for 20+ years. Secondly, what has synthesis got to do with digital audio theory?

You posted a nice couple of graphs, which give a graphical representation of the effects of quantising. Again, what has this got to do with what comes out of your DAC? You don't send an encoded digital audio signal straight to your speakers, you convert it back to analogue using a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC). The DAC recreates perfectly the encoded digital signal. This is the most basic tenet of digital audio theory and why CDs exist. Go and do a little reading and research. Here is a quote from Wikipedia: "In essence the theorem shows that an analog signal that has been sampled can be perfectly reconstructed from the samples if the sampling rate exceeds 2B samples per second".

G

Why synthesis, well if you would work with synthesizers you would know that analog synthesizers are still highly sought after, not just for their pleasant mistakes, but also for their analog qualities for creating the basic waves, on which additive synthesis is based, as audio professional this should sound familiar to you. (btw great, another person on head-fi posting a ressume)

That nice couple of graphs, were actually sines produced by dacs, and that quantising you are talking about has to do with the fact that digital systems work at the core with binary (electrical signal on or off, nothing in between), the steps (and the amount of steps) just shows the resolution, however, its never perfect (its like diving 1 by 2, and then again by 2 and so on, you'l never get 0). And this has nothing at all to do with why cd's excist, cd's work with this exact same principle! Ever think of why a cd is '16' bit? And why higher quality audio is now going to '24' bit??



The dac can never perfectly recreate it coming from this 'imperfect' source. Else there would never be a need for a better quality source (eg 24 instead of 16 bit etc.)

You are completely mistaken. I don't know where you got that image from but it's complete rubbish and has nothing to do with how digital audio works. The 3 graphs you posted are a graphical representation of digital audio. You do not listen to digital audio, digital audio will wreck your speakers or your cans and sound like a continuous plane crash! That is why all digital audio has to be converted to analogue and then this analogue signal is sent to the speaker. The reconstruction of digital audio to analogue audio is perfect! It is perfect at 1 bit or 500 bits! I'm sorry that you don't have any idea how digital audio works but you cannot argue with the theory as this theory (Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorum) is the basis for ALL digital audio equipment.

The second graph shows a reduction in quantisation errors through the use of greater bit depth but you fail to understand what then happens with these quantisation errors. Using a process called Dither, these errors are converted completely into white noise. So you end up with a perfect recreation of the waveform plus noise. The amount of noise you get is proportional to the bit depth with 16bit the noise is at -96dB with 8bit the noise is at -48dB. Both 16 and 8 bit yield a perfect recreation of the waveform but the 8bit one is noisier.

This also explains why (for the consumer) 24bit is not higher quality than 16bit, it's just a myth peddled by people who think more is better without understanding the first thing about how digital audio actually works.

Now go away and learn the basics of digital audio and stop posting nonsense!

G

well, this is going OT but I can very much hear a diff between 24/96 and 16/44.1...heck even 20bit dithered HDCD sounds better than CDDA to my ears

the reverb trails sound less "digital" and more transparent/natural...whatever on my previous cd3k or my current 770

same goes for my Cubase mixouts, there's no way you can pack all the audio data you get in 24/96 to fit in 16/44.1 IMHO

and the CDDA track on a HDCD is mostly 14bit(due to the HDCD data overheard), and they sound terrible! overcompressed, sparkling...horrible.

1: Take one of your 24/96 tracks and re-sample down to 16/48. Set the player to random and do a test.

2: The only areas that would be effected by 24/96 vs 16/44 is dynamic range and frequencies over 22k. I do not see how it is special to reverb trails (How can a sound sound digital anyway?!)

3: Considering 24/96 contains MORE data vs 16/44 it is easy to understand why you couldn't fit the former in to the latter : P

Hahaha, 20 years in professional audio industry?? You are a child!

Anyway I'm not going to argue with you, because you are obviously some 12y old kid saying he is an audio professional just like the rest of the 10% people on head-fi. For the people that are interested, just do a google search on 16bit vs 24bit, there is a reason why it is rapidly becoming the new studio standard, its unmistakenly superiour for mastering and processing purposes.

http://www.tweakheadz.com/16_vs_24_bit_audio.htm

There are 3 reasons why you cannot hear a difference between 16bit and 24bit. 1. No DAC on the market can reproduce 24bit resolution. 2. No commercial recording has ever or will ever be released which uses more than about 12 bits of the available resolution and 3. If anyone did release a recording which used the full 24bits and there was a DAC which could reproduce it, it would probably kill you or at the very least make you permanently deaf!!

If bit depth made a difference to audio quality how do you explain the fact that DSD recording (SACD format) has a resolution of one bit. So obviously, using this logic, the 1bit SACD format is orders of magnitude more inferior than CD!!

vvanrij's - I say again, go away and learn the facts. A dithering quantiser leads to a perfect recreation of the waveform. This is not new science it's been around for decades and is the basis upon which digital audio exists. What are you going to do now, try to convince me that digital audio doesn't exist? What is it that you think dither does?

G

He may be brash but from what I have read he would appear to be correct.

hehe, at least you're not b*tching like the 2 other guys are doing to one another

well yeah, I'll pick 24/96 over 16/48 anyday, even in blind tests.

it sounds EXACTLY as the chart that was posted earlier, there is simply more audio data in 24/96 over 16/48....I don't even see what the fuss is all about

resample a 16/44.1 track to 8/22050, that's the same thing....except that yada yada theorum that says that 44.1K is already overkill.

well Rupert Neve has built the most sought after mixing consoles, and he has never believed in 16/44.1 being "enough"....he believes that freqs out of the audible range actually have a big role to play on transparency....but well, each to his own as they say

I also used to work as a studio sound engineer, but it's no good talking about these things here

SACD: Sure its 1 bit, but its 2.822MHz/1bit!!
And there are plenty of 24bit dac's out there...

Anyway this is turning into a 24bit vs 16bit discussion, and I was talking about that your 16bit DAC system cannot reproduce a perfect sine wave!

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f7/44-...z-1bit-107761/

And this is my final post in this thread concerning this, because I don't want to 'thread-crap' piccolo's post here

So greggorio, I am not going to comment on your posts anymore, if you want to have the last word, you can have it. I'm quite sure your one of those guys that has to have the last word.

oh well, we'll never agree I think.....and we're threadcrapping Piccolo's (soon to be) sticky

Wow, someone who can quote Google, a real expert, for a 5 year old possibly!!

24bit for recording isn't becoming the standard, it has been the standard for more than a decade and I've been using greater than 16bit for professional recordings since 1992. For recording and mixing there are benefits to using 24bit. But for playback there are none!! You can't play it back anyway, you show me a single DAC on the market which can reproduce 24bits of dynamic range or for that matter, show me a single human being who could survive it!

G

We are talking about bit depth, not sample frequency. So are you saying that at 1bit SACD is as good as 16bit CD?

You show me any DAC on the market which has a dynamic range of 144dB or greater. If your DAC does not have a dynamic range of at least 144dB it cannot reproduce 24bits of resolution. If it could and you tried to use it, you would go deaf pretty much instantaneously.

It's not about agreeing or agreeing to disagree. You cannot disagree with a provable fact or rather you can but you would be labeled a nutter. For example, you could also disagree and say that the Earth is flat. What I'm talking about here isn't rocket science it's basic digital audio theory, how can you get it soooo wrong?

G

I would wager most of the quality transducers out there (specifically headphones) cannot reproduce sounds outside the audible range with accuracy. What is the point if the data cannot even be reproduced?