Testing audiophile claims and myths - Page 95

Actually, I'd say they already are pretty entertaining...
 

I played with the equalizer like you said and the information above 15khz is barely noticeable, however it's quite noticable while music is playing.

 

 

 

Hi, did you write to the news channel about your misinformed take on ENOB's yet?

Edited by kiteki - 6/8/12 at 8:22pm

3% of the sound is more noticeable when 97% of the sound is drowning it out than when it's isolated all by itself. Who'da thunk it?!

He's not just making all ths stuff up... Noooooooooo....

 

Is it drowning it out or giving it context though - only example I can think of is if one were to take a photograph and extract only the pixels with brigthness over 90% and place that against a white background - yes its hard to see.  If that same information was adding highlights to an image where our schemas might allow us to notice them.  They may be harder to see than when isolated but they could make a noticeable change to the overall dynamic contrast of the image.  Of course this analogy is not directly comparable as we are able to focus our visual attention more easily than our auditory senses.

Fact is that it's not just concentrating on certain sounds, but a lot of information just get's lost in the auditory system before it reaches our consciousness.
For example, if you measure the firing rate of a certain auditory nerve near the cochlea (that is, before the brain stem) using a microelctrode. If you then add a tone at the central frequency of this nerve you will be able to see it fire at a certain rate. If you then add another louder tone at say 30% below the central frequency, the nerve may completely be inhibited from firing, despite the nerve not reacting to this second tone alone.
This is know as two-tone suppression, and you can imagine that this occurs a lot of times with complex waveforms such as pretty much all music.
This is before any processing has happened to the sound, and most likely this kind of suppression happens at the basilar membrane itself.

 

Did you actually try this test ? Of the following images, the top left one is the original (converted to greyscale), the top right one is limited to the range 230 to 255, and the bottom one is limited to the range 0 to 230 (and scaled to 0 to 236 to compensate for the slight loss of overall brightness). The changes to the finer details are more visible on the top right image.

 

   

 

Edited by stv014 - 6/9/12 at 3:40am

 

Of course, measurements are important and useful, and extensive objective information about a product is valuable, even if unfortunately quite rare (manufacturers' specs are usually more about marketing than providing useful information). However, it is hard to judge the relevance of the measured parameters without being able to correlate them with the actual perception of audio. What is more important, 0.005% distortion instead of 0.01%, or 500 ps jitter instead of 1 ns ? Or are all of the above inaudible and irrelevant ? Fortunately, it seems that electronics can be made transparent for simple audio playback without much investment now, but when in doubt, some way of confirming the audibility of an effect is still needed.

Edited by stv014 - 6/9/12 at 5:28am

I see no one is taking the 16kHz comments seriously.  Well I'll experiment some more in Foobar and post some screenshots with a specific song example then.

 

For the record bigshot I didn't use your name in post #1410, I just said "some guy", it could have been anyone.

 

Great work with the photos!  I think you are right that the difference is more noticeable/comprehensible when isolated against the white background, and that the removal of this detail from the highlights doesn't seem to make the modified image seem "wrong" nor all that different unless one swaps between them very quickly.  If one were to look at the two images with any decent interval between viewing each one it would be very difficult to tell them apart.  But I mean if someone showed you the second picture and pointed to the section where some of the highlight details are lost - I think you could possibly "learn" to tell them apart in a blind test given enough time and effort.  As for being more noticeable though I would have to say definitely the isolated highlights is by far more readily perceived.

 

As for analysing level of my ripped files - seems they are in fact different - maybe different record mastering or something, maybe whoever ripped the flac file (claims to be EAC) did something odd.  I might need to rip my own FLAC file to see what is going on.  Very odd.  Peak level for the FLAC rip seems to be 79%...

Edited by drez - 6/9/12 at 8:35am

I'm not suggesting this a useful analog in any way, but I'm curious, if you put the second image on a black background, what would the result look like?

 

 

Do you mean something like this (pixel values < 230 replaced with 0) ?

 

More or less, yes.

Thanks, very interesting.

The main probem is that many people don't realize that frequencies double as they go up the scale. Each octave is double the one that came before. In other words, the lowest octave we can hear is 20 to 40 Hz, which is the exact same size as the top octave we can hear- 10,000 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

The average person can hear a little less than ten octaves from 20Hz to 20kHz... 80 notes approximately. 16kHz and above is about two notes in the musical scale at the very edge of human hearing. Totally useless. Anyone who says that is important to their enjoyment of music flat out doesn't know what they're talking about.

Discussing numbers on paper without understanding what they mean is a total waste of everyone's time.
Edited by bigshot - 6/9/12 at 7:19pm

 

 

Sorry, but after reading this, it doesn't seem like I was paraphrasing you, you are indeed implicating the CD standard of 44.1kHz is too high, and 32kHz should be sufficient.

 

I can very easily tell the difference between 44.1kHz and 32kHz resampling, as can any level headed person with sufficient hearing and experimentation.

 

I've written a great number of polite paragraphs to try to put the "numbers on paper" in their correct context.

 

I did experiment with an equalizer in the way you described, and repoted the results.  You don't want to partake in any of my experiments, that's OK if you want to believe in whatever you believe, however then you should keep it to yourself.

Edited by kiteki - 6/9/12 at 7:35pm

I never said anything about the CD standard being too high. You made that up yourself.