[dalethorn]

 
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You seem like anything but a skeptic. . .
 
So the argument is that the process of converting 24 -> 16 causes issues. Can someone explain this to me in detail (just trying to learn). downsampling is a lossless process though right, so whats the point of having 96khz or whatever?

I take what I can get.  What I get is lots better than what I had 15 years ago.  But I want the original master and nothing less.  There may be a reason the guardians of those masters wouldn't want them released unaltered, but I don't have access to any of that information, and wouldn't trust what I read anyway.  Eventually we will learn what Apple is intending to do, or maybe we won't.  Maybe all we will get is the tracks, and we'll have to decide whether to pay the premium for them.
 
One thing is certain: If you do get a couple of their 24-bit tracks and compare them to the 16-bit tracks you got from them (or elsewhere), and you can't hear a difference, that doesn't mean there is no difference that you could hear later with new equipment.  And not to forget - it's always possible for someone to upsample and tell you that it's a 24-bit original.  Or maybe they just won't tell you anything.  Apple is really good at that.

 

[dalethorn]

 
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You should be able to do an ABX then, and that would go a long way to convincing non-believers. But others in this thread claim that no successful ABX has ever been done.
 

You're saying that no difference has ever been heard with any change of speaker cables?  Not from ultra-thin wires to heavy cable?  Capacitance is not an issue?  Wow.

 

 

[dalethorn]

 
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The experiment had only one premise and one conclusion.  The premise was that there was an audible difference.  The conclusion was to get some background on what might be causing that difference.  The difference was not subtle, like the CD -vs- 24-bit thing.  It was huge.
 

See here's the problem: every cable believe says that.  However when proper testing methodology is followed these differences vanish in almost all tests to date (the phono cart being the one case where it hasn't).  This is why testing methods are extremely important, they can eliminate potential impression bias either from listening to someone else or seeing/feeling/knowing what cable is used (which also creates bias).
 
I wonder if Uncle Erik still plans on doing his DBT test at Can Jam (or whichever he's planning on heading to) with the brined/paper clip cables still.

Seems that "almost all tests" is the relevant comment.
 

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

Not that I'd be one or that I'd ever be able to hear a difference, I'm too poor to be "an audiophile", I consider myself not even an enthusiast, maybe a hobbyist. But the tech and capability is here, why not use it? Well for one it'd render older CD players etc. useless, and of course it's a bit of a drag if they want people to pay up for such luxuries though. I get my music in CD's anyway.
 

 Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  What we can't hear clearly today on our $500 rig we could hear tomorrow on our $1500 rig.  Or wait ten years and the $1500 rig's qualities will be available for $500.

 

[Satellite_6]

Quote:

 
You're saying that no difference has ever been heard with any change of speaker cables?  Not from ultra-thin wires to heavy cable?  Capacitance is not an issue?  Wow.

 

 
I'm refering to 16 v. 24. :-/
 

 

[haloxt]

Dalethorn, do you agree that a properly implemented DBT prevents the test subject from giving false positives?

 

[Shike]

Quote:

 

I take what I can get.  What I get is lots better than what I had 15 years ago.  But I want the original master and nothing less.  There may be a reason the guardians of those masters wouldn't want them released unaltered, but I don't have access to any of that information, and wouldn't trust what I read anyway.  Eventually we will learn what Apple is intending to do, or maybe we won't.  Maybe all we will get is the tracks, and we'll have to decide whether to pay the premium for them.
 
One thing is certain: If you do get a couple of their 24-bit tracks and compare them to the 16-bit tracks you got from them (or elsewhere), and you can't hear a difference, that doesn't mean there is no difference that you could hear later with new equipment.  And not to forget - it's always possible for someone to upsample and tell you that it's a 24-bit original.  Or maybe they just won't tell you anything.  Apple is really good at that.

 
The problem I have is the premise that there may be a difference if you keep upgrading your equipment -- you could keep upgrading and no difference may be found ever.
 
In terms of why they don't release the originals, I think it has a lot to do with market success.  I suggest you look at the loudness wars, it's a much more worthy topic that's backed by audible and measurable differences having a substantial impact on much quality.  More so than the 24/16 debate could ever have.
 
Lastly, in terms of cables.  SPEAKER wire has also had measurable and audible impact if the gauge is high enough and the long run enough.  Interconnects have yet to show similar findings.  Headphone cables are too hard to DBT on most models, and using two of the same headphone can cause issues due to manufacturing tolerances, however measurements don't show signs of potential audibility like the speaker wire or super long phono cart wire.
 
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Seems that "almost all tests" is the relevant comment.

 
The key point to this though is not only was it audible in DBT, it was measurable (same as insufficient gauge of speaker wire, thanks for reminding me).  In other cases it's not the case (see above).
 
Understand one thing though, it wasn't the brand of cable that made the difference: it was gauge and length.  If the cables are basically equivalent no differences are found.

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

I'm refering to 16 v. 24. :-/
 

If it makes any difference, I can tell you that the analogous arguments were all the rage between Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Audio, and Stereophile more than 30 years ago.  Stereophile won and they are doing very well.  The others are long gone.  The bottom line is, there's a difference between 16 and 24, and I want 24.  Every so often since the dawn of recording, the pros have been saying "you can't tell the difference".  And every time they've been wrong.  This time it's the same thing.  Audio is extremely complex.  You can't boil it down to frequency response, phase response, "near-perfect" square waves, etc.  When the 24-bit master is down-sampled, something bad will happen.  There are too many factors.

 

 

[Shike]

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If it makes any difference, I can tell you that the analogous arguments were all the rage between Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Audio, and Stereophile more than 30 years ago.  Stereophile won and they are doing very well.  The others are long gone.  The bottom line is, there's a difference between 16 and 24, and I want 24.  Every so often since the dawn of recording, the pros have been saying "you can't tell the difference".  And every time they've been wrong.  This time it's the same thing.  Audio is extremely complex.  You can't boil it down to frequency response, phase response, "near-perfect" square waves, etc.  When the 24-bit master is down-sampled, something bad will happen.  There are too many factors.

 

See, the problem I have is that you're making claims again with insufficient evidence.  This sub-forum asks for proof when you're saying you can tell a difference, usually from a peer reviewed journal or at least something resembling an accepted testing methodology.  There are various other sub-forums around here that will allow you to make a claim without requiring any evidence whatsoever.  On this one we are allowed to ask and will do so.
 
Electrical and acoustic properties are quite well understood today, and in every case where a DBT has proven truly positive (not a false positive) we've been able to measure it.
 
You'll notice when Currowong said he was doing it for piece of mind I didn't ask for proof whatsoever, because that's important to him.  If you're doing it for the same reasons (I don't know if there's a difference, but I rather be safe than sorry) then that's completely cool by me.  I treat my DAC the same way.  On the other hand I'm not going to say 500PS of jitter is audible, because there's nothing out there to suggest it is (and in fact there's evidence contradictory to such a claim).
 
Do you see what we're getting at here?

 

[dalethorn]

 
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Dalethorn, do you agree that a properly implemented DBT prevents the test subject from giving false positives?

I would agree to participate in a test, like a poll watcher, just to observe the conditions.  It's kind of amusing to recall many of those tests, and summaries of them afterward, noting all of the imperfections and compromises in the equipment that may have skewed the results.
 
Some people here have already noted that very noticeable differences have been proven with loudspeaker cables where the cables differed from very thin to heavy-duty.  Then they say that with small wires, like in headphones, such differences in audibility have not been proven.  Which means that we're talking about audibility thresholds now, not absolutes.  And when it comes to audibility thresholds, things change.  The equipment changes, and new generations of audiophiles learn to spot differences that previous generations either didn't hear, disregarded as irrelevant, or just hadn't developed the experience basis to identify new or newly-discovered distortions.
 
As to false positives, I recently downloaded as many test tones as I could find on the Web, and ran through them with my headphones listed below.  What was amazing was the quality of those tones, all supposedly sinewave (ignoring pink and white noise and other such things).  They sounded quite different, and I could clearly hear a 12 khz tone with one sample and not another, regardless of volume.  So things can get very complex in testing, and compromises have to be made, which almost always invalidates the tests.
 

 

[Shike]

 
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Some people here have already noted that very noticeable differences have been proven with loudspeaker cables where the cables differed from very thin to heavy-duty.  Then they say that with small wires, like in headphones, such differences in audibility have not been proven.  Which means that we're talking about audibility thresholds now, not absolutes.  And when it comes to audibility thresholds, things change.  The equipment changes, and new generations of audiophiles learn to spot differences that previous generations either didn't hear, disregarded as irrelevant, or just hadn't developed the experience basis to identify new or newly-discovered distortions.

See, that's the interesting thing though.  When we were able to hear it it was also measurable.  As such when it measures flat and isn't distinguishable in a DBT the most likely conclusion is that it is going to be below the audible threshold regardless of associated equipment.  The issue is well understood by current physics and nothing has operated outside of it in this context.  Changing the brand, geometry, outer coating, colors, etc. haven't produced the same result, yet some of these are claimed to make a difference.  As such these need to be held to the same scrutiny as the previous tests, and when they are they tend to fail to produce the "night and day" difference that reviewers use to describe them.

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

See, the problem I have is that you're making claims again with insufficient evidence.  This sub-forum asks for proof when you're saying you can tell a difference, usually from a peer reviewed journal or at least something resembling an accepted testing methodology.  There are various other sub-forums around here that will allow you to make a claim without requiring any evidence whatsoever.  On this one we are allowed to ask and will do so.
 
Electrical and acoustic properties are quite well understood today, and in every case where a DBT has proven truly positive (not a false positive) we've been able to measure it.
 
You'll notice when Currowong said he was doing it for piece of mind I didn't ask for proof whatsoever, because that's important to him.  If you're doing it for the same reasons (I don't know if there's a difference, but I rather be safe than sorry) then that's completely cool by me.  I treat my DAC the same way.  On the other hand I'm not going to say 500PS of jitter is audible, because there's nothing out there to suggest it is (and in fact there's evidence contradictory to such a claim).
 
Do you see what we're getting at here?

 
I do see, but the subject is too complex for proof.  The evidence is in your equipment and your pursuit of audiophile high-fidelity.  I don't think it's possible to prove to you that something can be heard, without resorting to "accepted authority".  As to the tests, I would suggest reading Julian Hirsch's pronouncements about measuring things back in the 1970's, and then see how far we've come since then, thanks to J. Gordon Holt and others like him.  So where does the proof come from?  Whose authority?

 

 

[dalethorn]

 

See, that's the interesting thing though.  When we were able to hear it it was also measurable.  As such when it measures flat and isn't distinguishable in a DBT the most likely conclusion is that it is going to be below the audible threshold regardless of associated equipment.  The issue is well understood by current physics and nothing has operated outside of it in this context.  Changing the brand, geometry, outer coating, colors, etc. haven't produced the same result, yet some of these are claimed to make a difference.  As such these need to be held to the same scrutiny as the previous tests, and when they are they tend to fail to produce the "night and day" difference that reviewers use to describe them.

J. Gordon Holt of Stereophile rejected Julian Hirsch's claims about measurement as far back as 1970. Holt's version is the accepted standard in today's audiophile community. Holt did not reject measurement outright, he just rejected the versions I see here.

 

[Shike]

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I do see, but the subject is too complex for proof

I'm not sure what you're saying here.  If someone is claiming there is an audible difference, but when put through controlled testing procedures it no longer exists, then something besides the hardware is causing the perceptual difference.  This is why placebo, a well documented and known psychological phenomena, is believed to be the cause.
 
 
 
Quote:

.  The evidence is in your equipment and your pursuit of audiophile high-fidelity.  I don't think it's possible to prove to you that something can be heard, without resorting to "accepted authority".  As to the tests, I would suggest reading Julian Hirsch's pronouncements about measuring things back in the 1970's, and then see how far we've come since then, thanks to J. Gordon Holt and others like him. 

 
You're going to have to link me to something specific as you could be referencing various things he's said.  I think you'll find how we're measuring cables hasn't changed in a long time, and it hasn't need to because we haven't found anything operating outside of what's expected.  When we started making opamp IC's some noted they sounded bad.  It took about half a decade if I remember to find out the cause: TIM (another type of distortion).  Today though we have opamps that sound just as good as the next amplifier indistinguishable in a DBT.  One needs to just look at the Gaincard to see the mockery that was made out of audiophilia preconceptions.
 
The thing is, if those issues existed in cables we should hear them in DBT or at least be able to measure them.  In this case neither criterion has been filled.
 
 
 

So where does the proof come from?  Whose authority?

 
Researches that publish in AES journals are pretty good when it comes to having peer reviewed studies.  I don't have a subscription so a lot of information I pull is from the abstract.  I think Nick_Charles may have a script though as he's read through a lot of them and can sometimes give us details of the test involved.
 
 
 
Quote:

J. Gordon Holt of Stereophile rejected Julian Hirsch's claims about measurement as far back as 1970. Holt's version is the accepted standard in today's audiophile community. Holt did not reject measurement outright, he just rejected the versions I see here.

 
Link?

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

I'm not sure what you're saying here.  If someone is claiming there is an audible difference, but when put through controlled testing procedures it no longer exists, then something besides the hardware is causing the perceptual difference.  This is why placebo, a well documented and known psychological phenomena, is believed to be the cause.
 
You're going to have to link me to something specific as you could be referencing various things he's said.  I think you'll find how we're measuring cables hasn't changed in a long time, and it hasn't need to because we haven't found anything operating outside of what's expected.  When we started making opamp IC's some noted they sounded bad.  It took about half a decade if I remember to find out the cause: TIM (another type of distortion).  Today though we have opamps that sound just as good as the next amplifier indistinguishable in a DBT.  One needs to just look at the Gaincard to see the mockery that was made out of audiophilia preconceptions.
 
The thing is, if those issues existed in cables we should hear them in DBT or at least be able to measure them.  In this case neither criterion has been filled.
 

So where does the proof come from?  Whose authority?

 
Researches that publish in AES journals are pretty good when it comes to having peer reviewed studies.  I don't have a subscription so a lot of information I pull is from the abstract.  I think Nick_Charles may have a script though as he's read through a lot of them and can sometimes give us details of the test involved.
 
Link?

There's info in a recent Stereophile about their recent interaction with the AES, which I belonged to in the 70's and 80's.  I hope that relationship between AES and Stereophile doesn't get too cozy, for what should be obvious reasons.