[FFBookman]

Keep running people through those stupid tests and you'll continue with this horrible sounding "perceptual coding" world of lowest common denominator audio. Netflix streams 6Mbs to most of the residences in america but 1.4Mbs of audio should be reduced to 0.25Mbs?
 
That's why effective bitrate is the only true measurement of the format, assuming it's the same encoding.
 
If you have stereo PCM data - at what native resolution was it recorded at? What was it mixed and mastered at? That is the resolution it should be heard at. Simple. 
 
Downsampling is only done for convenience, aka storage size and bandwidth used.  Always has been this way.
 
Quality vs convenience is as old as time itself. 
 
 
No studio I have ever been in, including the cheapest bedroom jobby, records at less than 1.4Mbs/sec. Most pro studios record at well over 2Mbs/sec per track.
 
Reducing that is done for economic reasons only.
 
 
Keep changing the subject and applying all this BS to me and my motivations. I'm not rich, I don't own high end gear, I don't listen to loudness wars stuff, I don't think vinyl is the best format ever, I don't think the earth is flat evolution doesn't exist. Your name calling is petty.
 
I simply think reducing things "for the consumer" because no one cares is ancient thinking, and those of you on this board that continue to push this out of context argument about what people can and can't hear are ultimately hurting all of us.
 
It's digital - it's all bandwidth. Storage, real-time transmission, and ultimately cost is all determined by bandwidth used.

 

[jcx]

you should talk with Monty about his Ogg Vorbis development - what he could hear with training, how he qualified the listening abilities of the core testers - how many standard deviations beyond "average hearing", how many didn't make the cut
likewise the Harmon "Golden Ears" free hearing test is only the preliminary screen for their internal listening testers
 
I would say your "because no one cares" claim is a strawman 

 

[castleofargh]

  Keep running people through those stupid tests and you'll continue with this horrible sounding "perceptual coding" world of lowest common denominator audio. Netflix streams 6Mbs to most of the residences in america but 1.4Mbs of audio should be reduced to 0.25Mbs?
 
That's why effective bitrate is the only true measurement of the format, assuming it's the same encoding.
 
If you have stereo PCM data - at what native resolution was it recorded at? What was it mixed and mastered at? That is the resolution it should be heard at. Simple. 
 
Downsampling is only done for convenience, aka storage size and bandwidth used.  Always has been this way.
 
Quality vs convenience is as old as time itself. 
 
 
No studio I have ever been in, including the cheapest bedroom jobby, records at less than 1.4Mbs/sec. Most pro studios record at well over 2Mbs/sec per track.
 
Reducing that is done for economic reasons only.
 
 
Keep changing the subject and applying all this BS to me and my motivations. I'm not rich, I don't own high end gear, I don't listen to loudness wars stuff, I don't think vinyl is the best format ever, I don't think the earth is flat evolution doesn't exist. Your name calling is petty.
 
I simply think reducing things "for the consumer" because no one cares is ancient thinking, and those of you on this board that continue to push this out of context argument about what people can and can't hear are ultimately hurting all of us.
 
It's digital - it's all bandwidth. Storage, real-time transmission, and ultimately cost is all determined by bandwidth used.

it's you who's changing the subject. nobody here has hatred toward highres, and nobody is pushing for low resolution if it doesn't serve any benefit. the simple basic truth is that highres costs more than cds and we don't hear a difference. a 32giga µsd costs nothing, a 128giga is still pretty expensive(unless you buy a fake one on ebay). and I don't really notice the difference between the 16/44 flac and the max vbr mp3 , so why would I pay more for the same number of songs in higher format but no audible benefit? it's all about not being an idiot throwing money out the window for something I do not hear.  the day I can hear a difference I'll buy highres, a bigger hard disc and get bigger µSD cards. for my pictures I need more space and see the difference when I shoot in raw, so I have several big capacity compact flash. because it serves an actual purpose outside of me masturbating on my bigger stuff.
just like the day I find a pizzeria that makes consistently better pizza, I'll go there and get those. but I won't go buy a pizza that cost 10more bucks again and again when it tastes like the cheap one I'm used to eat.
it's not a conspiracy or trying to drag audio down, it's common sense. but you buy what you buy, I buy what I buy, and it's really not a problem at all.
 

That's why effective bitrate is the only true measurement of the format, assuming it's the same encoding.

and every time it's not? ^_^
you're making all that argument to conclude with something useless. if it's the same encoding then anything can let you measure the format. bit rate, sample rate, how whatever number is bigger in one format... what point are you making here? if it's 16/44pcm vs 16/48pcm, I also know everything I need to know, how is bitrate a better measurement?
 
 

and those of you on this board that continue to push this out of context argument about what people can and can't hear are ultimately hurting all of us.

????? What are you talking about? what we hear is out of context?

that's the kind of total nonsense that's been turning you into a very annoying troll. you're doing this to yourself don't blame us for getting fed up by your nonsense and answering in kind.
when you pretend to understand something you don't, and try to explain to the very guy who developed ABX in audio(Arny) how abx is wrong. when you claim you hear the difference in highres while all tests I know of, or have done myself, seem to show the opposite. when we offer you ways to demonstrate you can hear the difference, and you respond by systematically rejecting all controlled testing methods offered to you with the most ludicrous reasons. like saying that abx is testing memory. or bringing emotion into the mix when the subject is testing for audible differences. who's the one running away and changing the subject?
when you mistake bitrate and sample rate, several times, even though we all explained it to you. if you didn't understand what we were saying or simply didn't trust us, any wiki page would have made it clear that your reasoning was using 2 different units and so was irremediably wrong. but you persisted with your total denial, never admitted to being wrong even once when the occasions really were not lacking. it's not even being wrong that's a problem, we all are wrong several times a day. it's how you pretend to educate us on subjects you don't understand, and how you never admit to being wrong yourself even with the nose pushed against your own crap. that's what's making you pretty insufferable in those threads.
 
try posting something really factual and with a point that is really related to your argument, like maybe something you can actually back up with evidence for once. and offer those evidences without us having to ask. or simply try to present your opinions in ways that don't look so damn much like claims. do that and I swear I'll give you all the respect your posts deserve. just like the day you show me a way to test highres that's not a joke, and I do hear a difference, I'll start replacing all my audio files with higher resolution. but empty claims and fallacies, that you can stop, I would really appreciate.

 

[Don Hills]

   ...

 
(Applause)

 

[dprimary]

And

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/tetrachromacy.asp

You can't test for tetrachromacy on a computer screen as a computer screen is not capable of generating the range of colours needed to test for the condition.

 
I have not been able to find any information on the extended color space they are looking for. There is displays with greatly extended color spaces, none of them are cheap.
 
Here is another article with more detail http://unreasonablydangerousonionrings.com/2015/03/03/you-are-not-a-tetrachromat-and-this-graphic-is-********/
 
so far it seem researchers have found only one women with the proven ability.
 
Which seems to be one more person in the world then is that can prove they can hear over 24k. In reality 20k is an outlier in ability, not an average that audiophiles seem to think it is. 
 
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Absolute_Threshold_of_Hearing
 
Find one person that prove they can hear the difference between 48k and 96k and there is going to be plenty of people that will want to understand what is going on. 

 

[FFBookman]

castle of argh -- that's a lot of words to admit it's all about convenience and about what you think you can hear, and the value judgement you make on whether you want your music files as a full format or otherwise reduced somehow.  you did not mention quality or quality measurements, only convenience.
 
scream kick and yell all you want, you know i'm right. quality ≠ convenience.
 
if the music is tracked at 16/48 you should hear it and buy it at 16/48.
if the music is tracked at 24/44 you should hear it and buy it at 24/44.
if the music is tracked at 24/192 you should hear it and buy it at 24/192.
if the music is tracked as 256k mp3.... oh wait, no one does that. not even horrible modern popdubrap is created at such a low resolution. 
 
if you think you can save drive space because you can't tell the difference, then reduce them yourself.  take them as far down as you want to, no one cares! LAME is right.
 
this debate is about a consumer format, a standard (16/44) whose time has come and gone, and you types that hang around here convincing yourself the rest of the world is stupid because no one can detect more than 1.0Mbs of stereo vibration coming at their body. 
 
when experts that work in sound, that mix sound, that make sound, that have worked their whole lives in recording studios tell you that you are misguided and just not hearing correctly you run to ABX test results to make yourself feel better.   
 
i think the whole lot of you have a real listening problem and can't find the obvious tells 
 
If Arny helped develop the ABX listening test no wonder he's arrogant and nasty towards me -- i have said that that test is horribly misaligned with that use case, giving such useless results that normally calm people get into huge flame wars about those results.  Many of us won't touch one of those ABX hi-res challenges with a 10 foot pole because it walks you directly into the trap of the ABX test - nothing sounds better than anything else because it can't be proved repeatedly through ABX tests of the masses.
 
And I've set about designing a better test format instead of trying to fight through those that parrot the useless results.
 
Until then I'll just remind you all that 320k PCM < 1400k PCM < 3000k PCM < 5600k PCM.  That's available bandwidth at the various resolutions. What the artist and producer choose to do with that bandwidth is up to them.
 
I am against artificial bandwidth restrictions on my music.

 

[RRod]

 
That's available bandwidth at the various resolutions. What the artist and producer choose to do with that bandwidth is up to them.
 

 
Just because they choose a format doesn't mean the music itself needs what the format can provide, especially given that it's destined for the filter that is the human ear/body. Once again you simply assume that every part of the chain can make use of potentially infinite resolution, which isn't even close to being true.

 

[money4me247]

lol, only on headfi wld failure to pass a controlled doubleblinded test mean that the test is flawed.

everywhere else (esp in scientific communities) it means that differences arent very noticeable or significant.

 

[OddE]

  castle of argh -- that's a lot of words to admit it's all about convenience and about what you think you can hear, and the value judgement you make on whether you want your music files as a full format or otherwise reduced somehow.  you did not mention quality or quality measurements, only convenience.

 
-I beg to differ. As has been explained to you numerous times by numerous, exceedingly patient people the point is not convenience - and neither is it what Castleofargh can or cannot hear.
 
The point is that study after study after study finds that human beings are not bats. We simply cannot hear the extra information (potentially) provided by upping the sample rate. We cannot. Or, at the very least, no-one has as of yet proven or even substantiated on the claim that some people have extraordinary hearing abilities. Not one. Neither will we be able to appreciate the increased dynamic range potentially provided by increasing the bit depth; what we have is already plenty more than our ears can handle without suffering permanent damage.
 
While people may buy their music fifteen times over up to 128 bits/14MHz for all I care, in a forum dedicated to science, you had better be able to back your opinion with more than subjective opinion and hot air. You aren't. THAT is what irks people more than anything - well, at least, that is what irks me more than anything.
 
That being said, I am eagerly awaiting your new and improved test methodology. Should you be able at some point to demonstrate that hi-res actually makes an audible difference, I'll be all ears - pun intended.
 
I'm just not holding my breath waiting for it to happen.

 

[KeithEmo]

  you should talk with Monty about his Ogg Vorbis development - what he could hear with training, how he qualified the listening abilities of the core testers - how many standard deviations beyond "average hearing", how many didn't make the cut
likewise the Harmon "Golden Ears" free hearing test is only the preliminary screen for their internal listening testers
 
I would say your "because no one cares" claim is a strawman 

 
I would add to that, in this day and age, that "the extra cost of streaming or storing high-resolution" is also a straw man. The last USB hard drive that I bought cost me $116 for 3 tB (that's 3,000 gB - which can hold somewhere between 500 and 1,000 complete albums at 24/96k). If you're paying somewhere between $10 and $25 for an album on CD or as a high-res download, the extra ten cents it costs you to store the high-res version is insignificant, and the same is true for the extra server space the music company has to use to store it, and the extra bandwidth you use to download it. (The major "cost" for the seller is the extra effort of creating and keeping track of multiple formats - and, if you look at most online stores, rather than try to minimize this, most do their best to make everybody happy by offering several different formats at each resolution.) The "benefit" of compressed formats like MP3, and even the benefit of Red Book files over high-res, is simply convenience; you can fit more of them onto a device with limited storage, which was probably limited to keep the size of the device down, and smaller files copy faster. The main incentive to develop formats like MP3 and AAC was to be able to claim that "you could fit your entire music collection on an iPod"; all of that other stuff about using up less bandwidth, and taking up less server space, is mostly rationalization. Being able to carry your entire album collection in your pocket, instead of having to decide which 100 albums you want to pack this morning, is a convenience feature. If anything, offering that album on AAC or MP3 costs a few cents extra, because someone had to make that copy from the master, and someone had to add it to the shopping cart.
 
I think we can probably all agree that nobody needs high-res audio, and, in fact, most people are perfectly satisfied with AAC or MP3. 

 

[icebear]

 
castle of argh -- that's a lot of words to admit it's all about convenience and about what you think you can hear, ..
 
scream kick and yell all you want, you know i'm right.  quality ≠ convenience...
 
if the music is tracked at 24/192 you should hear it and buy it at 24/192.
...
 
i think the whole lot of you have a real listening problem and can't find the obvious tells 
 
If Arny helped develop the ABX listening test no wonder he's arrogant and nasty towards me -- i have said that that test is horribly misaligned with that use case, giving such useless results that normally calm people get into huge flame wars about those results.  Many of us won't touch one of those ABX hi-res challenges with a 10 foot pole because it walks you directly into the trap of the ABX test - nothing sounds better than anything else because it can't be proved repeatedly through ABX tests of the masses.
 
And I've set about designing a better test format instead of trying to fight through those that parrot the useless results.
...
I am against artificial bandwidth restrictions on my music.

 
I'm still on the fence about someone who wants to tell others
-what they can hear,
-what they should listen to
-what they should buy
-that they have listening problems
-what calm people are
-and who is about to revolutionized the science of comparative consumer research
And on top of it everybody knows he is right!
 
Entertaining though but -
Eh, honestly no ... I just decided on which side of the fence I am on and it's the other one, just getting to hit that personal peace button

 

[KeithEmo]

lol, only on headfi wld failure to pass a controlled doubleblinded test mean that the test is flawed.

everywhere else (esp in scientific communities) it means that differences arent very noticeable or significant.

 
I agree with your first statement; but the truth of that statement doesn't prove the second one.
 
A well designed test proves (or fails to prove) what it was designed to test. If I was starting a music streaming service, then my goal would be to optimize the sound quality and the rest of the overall experience for most of my customers, while minimizing my costs and maximizing my profits; this means that I would quite possibly make choices based on multiple criteria. For example, if it turns out that 95% of my customers think a 128k Ogg file sounds just fine, and 20% of them find the extra twenty seconds it would take to download the album at 24/96k to be annoying, then it would clearly make sense for me to use 128k Ogg and not 16/44k PCM to sell music to my customers. And, if I decide to start an "audiophile streaming service", my marketing department may do a survey and find out that 29% of my potential customers consider "24/96k" to be "an important consideration" when they're deciding whether to switch to my service instead of someone else's. They may also figure out that an ad campaign to convince people that "it's worth waiting for better quality" will serve to "neutralize" the annoyance most of my customers feel about the extra wait.  However, note that NONE of those is a technical consideration, and they can only be "tested" or "proven" by asking people, or by seeing how my customers react.
 
My point, as regards your statement, is that a test can be designed to show whether "most people notice a significant difference" or whether "anybody can ever detect a difference"... and those two tests serve very different purposes. What many of us here seem to lose track of is that both the design of a test, and the interpretation of the results, depend on our goal when the test was devised. If I were to test 1000 people, with 25 different test files each, and were to find out that one of those people could reliably recognize the high-resolution version of one of those files, how would we interpret that data? If I was trying to determine "if there was a significant difference", then my 1/25000 positive result wouldn't even statistically be "a blip on the line". However, if I was trying to determine "if any human can tell the difference", then my result is 100% positive, because I've found a human who can in fact tell the difference. Neither interpretation is wrong; they just serve different purposes.
 
I'm guessing that you could conduct a lot of tests that would show that peanut butter is safe for humans - statistically. However, I once worked with a fellow who was so allergic that one teaspoonful of the stuff would send him into shock - and probably kill him. Therefore, you can't say that peanut butter is 100% safe for humans to eat. Likewise, until you test an awful lot of people, under a lot of different conditions, you aren't going to be able to definitively declare that "there is no audible difference between high-res and non-high-res files. It's a lost cause. (Unless your real goal is to determine if most people can or cannot hear a difference - most of the time. (And, if that's really your goal, then an ABX test is a great way to go about it... as long as you state your goals, conclusions, and justifications clearly.)

 

[Ruben123]

320k PCM < 1400k PCM < 3000k PCM < 5600k PCM

Only on head fi this is true and doesn't get censored!

 

[RRod]

  I'm guessing that you could conduct a lot of tests that would show that peanut butter is safe for humans - statistically. However, I once worked with a fellow who was so allergic that one teaspoonful of the stuff would send him into shock - and probably kill him. Therefore, you can't say that peanut butter is 100% safe for humans to eat. Likewise, until you test an awful lot of people, under a lot of different conditions, you aren't going to be able to definitively declare that "there is no audible difference between high-res and non-high-res files. It's a lost cause. (Unless your real goal is to determine if most people can or cannot hear a difference - most of the time. (And, if that's really your goal, then an ABX test is a great way to go about it... as long as you state your goals, conclusions, and justifications clearly.)

 
To be fair, deaths due to anaphylaxis really don't have false positives. The point of a statistical test is to have enough sample to meet the false positive/negative rates that will, in your own mind, convince you of a course of action. It is true that we'll probably never be able to tell if 0.00000001% of humans can hear hi-res, but we can be pretty darn sure that less than 1% can. And we can certainly tell *for ourselves on our own equipment* if we can hear difference, to within our tolerances for error. Just saying "oh we can never be sure so f' it" is basically poo-pooing the whole field of statistics, after all.
 
Some of us would be just fine to have, say, 32/192 as a standard for audio. Whatever. But the point is to have a standard, and one set upon scientific principles and statistical studies. That was supposed to be what 16/44.1 got us, and what it seems to get us in blind testing. So hopefully one can understand the skepticism to the mantra of hi-res, which seems to be to push up numbers purely for the sake of pushing up numbers.

 

[dprimary]

   
I would add to that, in this day and age, that "the extra cost of streaming or storing high-resolution" is also a straw man. The last USB hard drive that I bought cost me $116 for 3 tB (that's 3,000 gB - which can hold somewhere between 500 and 1,000 complete albums at 24/96k). If you're paying somewhere between $10 and $25 for an album on CD or as a high-res download, the extra ten cents it costs you to store the high-res version is insignificant, and the same is true for the extra server space the music company has to use to store it, and the extra bandwidth you use to download it. (The major "cost" for the seller is the extra effort of creating and keeping track of multiple formats - and, if you look at most online stores, rather than try to minimize this, most do their best to make everybody happy by offering several different formats at each resolution.) The "benefit" of compressed formats like MP3, and even the benefit of Red Book files over high-res, is simply convenience; you can fit more of them onto a device with limited storage, which was probably limited to keep the size of the device down, and smaller files copy faster. The main incentive to develop formats like MP3 and AAC was to be able to claim that "you could fit your entire music collection on an iPod"; all of that other stuff about using up less bandwidth, and taking up less server space, is mostly rationalization. Being able to carry your entire album collection in your pocket, instead of having to decide which 100 albums you want to pack this morning, is a convenience feature. If anything, offering that album on AAC or MP3 costs a few cents extra, because someone had to make that copy from the master, and someone had to add it to the shopping cart.
 
I think we can probably all agree that nobody needs high-res audio, and, in fact, most people are perfectly satisfied with AAC or MP3. 

 
I would disagree, while it is a minor cost impact to stream one HD stream when you are looking at millions a streams from the streaming services. 3-4 times the bandwidth for HD is costly. 
 
Tracks for sell though should all be lossless, there is no reason to still be selling lossy audio.
 
I do agree that raw storage is cheap. Limited storage on laptops and portable devices is a larger limiting factor. Play back software is another. I have yet to find software that manages large external collections, is easy to use, sounds good, and doesn't use half the processing power just to play an audio file. Some of this software is so poorly written it uses more processing power for two tracks then multitrack software with 20-30 tracks during mix down. 
 
I could never fit my entire music collection on an iPod, it was one of the first players I could fit 8-10 albums on, vs the 2 songs on the other portable players at the time that likely did not support uncompressed formats like the iPod did. What apple did was give you choice of sound quality vs quantity, and anyone could pick the balance that was best for them.