@joebloggs ... philosophically I disagree with having any kind of dynamics processing on your playback setup. But I admire your tenacity in building such a monstrosity anyway. :) Is this for a surround system?

Sounds like maybe Foobar tried to force windows to switch to a low/unusual samplerate (say 8khz or something) and into mono in a way that W10 didn't like. If there was any other audio device that was also trying to maintain an incompatible sample rate, or stereo output, I could imagine that...

Thanks. We really think that it would backfire if we try to hide anything. This thread is a good example. @Nirmalr7 was able to find court documents that seem dramatic or at least interesting upon a cursory reading. Another TM holder is accusing us of all sorts of things. If we had been...

Hi, sorry, I have been very lax about staying on top of head-fi posts lately and I apologize for that. I can't comment in too much detail obviously, as the case is ongoing, but the trademark filings we made were in no way fraudulent - if they were, they would have been overturned years ago...

Just want to chime in that expectation bias has a very, very serious effect on what you hear. When it comes to your ears... "trust but verify". More than once I've spent time turning knobs on VST plugins (say an EQ or a 'vintage tape sound' type plugin) and found that the change in sound was...

Good lord, I had been staying away from this thread because I have work to do... but I couldn't let that slide. This is ridiculous trolling, you can't be serious. Um, but as someone who makes their living from spending on consumer audio... um... please do keep going with this and spending...

Agree about the "musical genius" thing, even if I don't always love what he does with his talent, it's undeniable. I had the same feeling where I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the music at first, but he's a phenomenon either way. I'll give Djesse a few more listens... :)

This is a little late but the LAME development community used to conduct a buttload of ABX tests, just about every time they released a new encoder preset I believe it was subjected to ABX testing of fair rigor. So if you want to see how this can be done over time, that would be a good example...

Two other reasons: Lots of energy in subsonic frequencies being present in the mix throws off compressors / limiters in that they will change output based on inaudible stuff. It can also cause clipping in a digital file by increasing the total signal amplitude without increasing the audible...

This might be an issue of semantics around the word 'tone'. In my mind, a "tone" needs to be perceived as a unitary and continuous sound. I would say that 15hz is clearly "slower" than 20hz but not necessarily "higher" because I personally don't get a pitch out of 15hz. But YMMV of course...

Technically, yes, in theory all transients include energy down to DC, although again it depends to what extent the attack of the drum hit resembles a "true" impulse. And, it won't be very easy to detect since it's transient in nature, so I think the difference would be feeling that the bass...

This is not quite right. All transients (drum hits in particular) contain all frequencies from DC to infinity, to the extent that they resemble a true zero-duration/Dirac impulse. So the less highpass filtering (or... any filtering at all) you have, the better transients will be, generally...

If I jack up the output of my headphone amp, a lot of IEMs can create some perceptible effect at 15hz. To me it basically sounds like a rapid flapping / whooshing noise. I think it's actually just periodic pressurization of my ear canal and not what might be (if any such sound can be)...

I know exactly what you mean, but I think 99% of this effect has got to be due to things other than ultrasonics. For one thing, the sound from a live band is coming from several sources around the stage and the directionality is totally different than loudspeakers. This alone - even if SPL...

As far as people listening at levels well above reference... I can confirm that it is disturbingly common. We sell some headphones that (I estimate) are capable of over 100dB SPL at the ear opening... and we have a handful of people complaining they don't go loud enough. We sell a portable...

Don't have any of those things handy. I have a DAC that may do 96khz, but I sincerely doubt its analog ouputs are any good up past 20khz. Also, we'd have to independently establish the noise floor of each piece of gear at / above 30khz, etc. Not to mention find some transducers that are...

I actually think it's a really hard test to do and I don't know if I own any equipment capable of doing a valid test. I mean ... even to find a recording or two where the cymbals (or breaking glass or whatever) aren't just totally submerged in noise would be a project in and of itself. You...

@KeithEmo I can at least say that IMO the primary reflection points relative to the listening position are the most important to treat. You can do this literally by having someone walk around with a mirror held near the wall while you sit in the listening position, and mark anywhere you can see...

I think the real problem is a disconnect on this proposition. Keith (and I personally) and a few others find ultrasonics fun to think/talk about, regardless of whether there's any practical application today. This is mostly because they're the only thing you can discuss materially improving...

I meant headaches in the sense of "problems if you're trying to actually reproduce ultrasonic recordings", not a literal headache. But yeah, if I'm getting a headache from an actual ultrasonic noise I imagine other things are going wrong too. :)

Earlier ITT we discussed the fact that most audiophile-oriented companies don't have any logical incentive to publish results on these topics. If consumers already believe the products have high performance, then proving ultrasonics are important won't affect sales. Proving ultrasonics aren't...

I guess if we want to assume the technology from Total Recall or The Matrix becomes real at some point, then we should definitely be doing ultrasonic recordings now, just in case. ;)

@gregorio thanks for the detailed response. I think we all acknowledge the inverse square law applies to all sound (or non-sound like ultrasonics), I guess that should go without saying. But your point about the higher noise floor above 20khz is a good one. When I tried the "filter, then...

Hmm, this suggests a way to guess whether such a test is plausible without having to get out of our chairs and build this rig. Do we know any SPL thresholds or similar data from those experiments that could be generalized to other audio? It should be easy enough to estimate the SPL of...

Yes, but roughly speaking, if something were audible at -12dB it'd still be audible at -14dB. Anyway, I am NOT saying ultrasonics are audible, but if they did have some value in the recording , like _________________ (this space left intentionally blank)... then we can't completely discount...