[dalethorn]

 

Dubious parties such as Dolby labs , NHK Japan, BAS, AES, Harman and various Universities, dubious research often using self-confessed audiophiles, engineers, tonnmeister students, audio salesdroids, audio reviewers and other audio professionals, dubious research that has often gone through a rigorous anonymous peer review process. Dubious research such as 100+ years of psychophysics research ?
 
The laws of physics and the ability of humans to discriminate between stimulae are indifferent to the cost of audio items.
 
If you read the reviews in Stereophile you will find multiple examples where their golden eared reviewers are incapable of detecting grotesque flaws in expensive audio kit, flaws that are trivially exposed by their bank of routine tests. You put trust in that lot , seriously ?
 
Reviewers like Harley and Fremer ?
 
Harley whose only audio credentials were that he won an essay writing contest and whose articles contained so many material inacccuracies that he was routinely corrected by The Audo Critic, whose ramblings about jitter were so inaccurate that Aczel commissioned an article by Bob Adams (Analog Devices) specifically to undo all the damage he had done ?
 
Fremer a reviewer whose inability to detect a broken cable and who gave glowing reviews to a CD/DAC combo with 25% distortion below 50hz and which never achieved a flat FR at any frequency ?
 
This lot you trust ?

I trust me, and my 200-plus IQ, to sort out who's lying and who's not. I see you deliberately avoided mentioning J. Gordon Holt. Hmmmmm. For the record, I don't hear differences in amps as a rule, sometimes in loudspeaker cables, very definitely in headphones. But even though Holt is dead, I trust his senior pals like Atkinson. If you want to pick out Harley or Fremer, that tells me a lot about your perspective. It's not a perfect world. You have to learn to read between the lines. Especially here.

 

[dalethorn]

 
Actually audiophiles fared quite poorly in terms of ability to reliably and consistently pick out differences compared against Harman's internal listeners, even though their overall preferences were the same. Unless of course Sean Olive's Harman funding counts him as a 'dubious partner'.
http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2008/12/part-2-differences-in-performances-of.html
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/download.cfm?ID=12206&name=harman

Anyone who's paid by the music or hi-fi industry or their academic partners are suspect. But it's hard to get an "authoritative" report from ordinary joes, yes? Well, actually, there is one way, and it's lengthy, arduous, and boring to most people. You have to stick around a long time and learn, and listen for yourself. And if you choose to trust someone, trust but verify. And I don't broadly class audiophiles as poorly anything. Musicians, maybe. Not audiophiles. They're the people who care about sound.

 

[fiver]

 
Quote:

 

Dubious parties such as Dolby labs , NHK Japan, BAS, AES, Harman and various Universities, dubious research often using self-confessed audiophiles, engineers, tonnmeister students, audio salesdroids, audio reviewers and other audio professionals, dubious research that has often gone through a rigorous anonymous peer review process. Dubious research such as 100+ years of psychophysics research ?
 
The laws of physics and the ability of humans to discriminate between stimulae are indifferent to the cost of audio items.
 
If you read the reviews in Stereophile you will find multiple examples where their golden eared reviewers are incapable of detecting grotesque flaws in expensive audio kit, flaws that are trivially exposed by their bank of routine tests. You put trust in that lot , seriously ?
 
Reviewers like Harley and Fremer ?
 
Harley whose only audio credentials were that he won an essay writing contest and whose articles contained so many material inacccuracies that he was routinely corrected by The Audo Critic, whose ramblings about jitter were so inaccurate that Aczel commissioned an article by Bob Adams (Analog Devices) specifically to undo all the damage he had done ?
 
Fremer a reviewer whose inability to detect a broken cable and who gave glowing reviews to a CD/DAC combo with 25% distortion below 50hz and which never achieved a flat FR at any frequency ?
 
This lot you trust ?

 
But they've been doing it for 50 years!
 
I bought expensive power cables based on an article there and my soundstage increased!  I bought the copper instead of the silver because copper is warmer.  Everything is more transparent now!
 
Now give me my 24 bits!  I don't want to hear about this Shannon Nyquist lady, she couldn't understand what might be lost with 16 bits only there are things that cannot be measured and I trusts my ears over hers.  Come to think of it, instead of 24 bits how about 10,000 bits.  Or maybe a million!  If 16 is better than 8 than a million has to be better than 24. 

 

[evanft]

Dale has to be a troll. No one would seriously use Stereophile as a source.

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

Dale has to be a troll. No one would seriously use Stereophile as a source.

Dale has been on the Web since before the Web.  Dale sold HP proprietary computers in Beverly Hills before that.  Check my site dalethorn.com, and check my Amazon reviews.
 
I've been around the block a few times, ya hear?
 

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

But they've been doing it for 50 years!
 
I bought expensive power cables based on an article there and my soundstage increased!  I bought the copper instead of the silver because copper is warmer.  Everything is more transparent now!
 
Now give me my 24 bits!  I don't want to hear about this Shannon Nyquist lady, she couldn't understand what might be lost with 16 bits only there are things that cannot be measured and I trusts my ears over hers.  Come to think of it, instead of 24 bits how about 10,000 bits.  Or maybe a million!  If 16 is better than 8 than a million has to be better than 24. 

I got several CD's this week by Mediaeval Baebes, and they say "recorded in 24-bit" whatever.  So I would like the original digital mixdowns of those, and I presume they would be 24 bits.  Then I've heard of higher bitrates or other technologies that are directed toward making hi-rez lossless music files for people willing to pay for them.  Those files would not necessarily be dithered down for CD sales, which actually wouldn't make a lot of sense anyway.
 
I get the idea that most of the people here who say "I can chop off your bits and you can't tell the difference" rarely if ever listen to decent live music.
 

 

[dalethorn]

Here's a little tidbit I thought y'all would enjoy.  It's from the Pasadena Symphony binaural recording of Also Sprach Zarathustra circa 1994, gold-plated CD:
 
"This binaural recording of the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra was produced using a Neumann KU-100 'dummy head' microphone system through an Audio Upgrades (N.Hollywood) custom stereo preamp and an Apogee (Santa Monica) AD-500E 18-bit reference A to D converter to a Sonic Solutions (San Rafael) premastering hard-disk 20-bit digital audio workstation at 48 khz sampling rate.  Editing and assembly were performed using the Sonic Solutions Macintosh-based 20-bit editing environment, monitored through an Apogee DA-1000E 20-bit reference D to A converter, Bryston 4B power amplifier, B&W 801 Matrix III speakers, and the Sennheiser 580 precision headset.  Mastering was done using the Sonic Solutions sampling rate conversion and Turbo Bit-Mapping software to a PreMaster Compact Disc created on the Sony CDW-900E CD Printer."
 
"No type of artificial signal processing of any kind was used in the production of this CD."
 
Now isn't that just amazing!  No artificial signal processing whatsoever.

 

[nick_charles]

 
Quote:

Quote:

 

Dubious parties such as Dolby labs , NHK Japan, BAS, AES, Harman and various Universities, dubious research often using self-confessed audiophiles, engineers, tonnmeister students, audio salesdroids, audio reviewers and other audio professionals, dubious research that has often gone through a rigorous anonymous peer review process. Dubious research such as 100+ years of psychophysics research ?
 
The laws of physics and the ability of humans to discriminate between stimulae are indifferent to the cost of audio items.
 
If you read the reviews in Stereophile you will find multiple examples where their golden eared reviewers are incapable of detecting grotesque flaws in expensive audio kit, flaws that are trivially exposed by their bank of routine tests. You put trust in that lot , seriously ?
 
Reviewers like Harley and Fremer ?
 
Harley whose only audio credentials were that he won an essay writing contest and whose articles contained so many material inacccuracies that he was routinely corrected by The Audo Critic, whose ramblings about jitter were so inaccurate that Aczel commissioned an article by Bob Adams (Analog Devices) specifically to undo all the damage he had done ?
 
Fremer a reviewer whose inability to detect a broken cable and who gave glowing reviews to a CD/DAC combo with 25% distortion below 50hz and which never achieved a flat FR at any frequency ?
 
This lot you trust ?

I trust me, and my 200-plus IQ, to sort out who's lying and who's not. I see you deliberately avoided mentioning J. Gordon Holt. Hmmmmm. For the record, I don't hear differences in amps as a rule, sometimes in loudspeaker cables, very definitely in headphones. But even though Holt is dead, I trust his senior pals like Atkinson. If you want to pick out Harley or Fremer, that tells me a lot about your perspective. It's not a perfect world. You have to learn to read between the lines. Especially here.

You know it never ceases to amaze me how (normally) gullible clever people can be, perhaps it is their cleverness that makes them feel invulnerable, I should know better, after all 2 of my 4 degrees are in Psychology (I can play that game too thanks

) . I would be wary of thinking that your high IQ gives you immunity from the normal range of cognitive biases or makes you superior at detecting falsehoods.
 
An example I give to my Bonehead IT undergraduates (The course is bonehhead IT, not the undergrads) - everybody thinks that nobody ever falls for 419 scams any more, they are blindingly obvious right, this is not what the Nigerian Ministry of justice will tell you, amongst their records are the sad cases of 16 people murdered (including 2 US citizens) and two scammers banged up recently had money orders for over $2M, Citibank almost got scammed out of $27M. The Scammers use all sorts of tricks, one of which is to present themselves as a bit hick or unsophisticated, the mark has a sense that these are people they could put one over on easily. The fact is that many are doctors or lawyers or graduates unable to get apropriate employment.
 
Also, obviously someone does not have to be knowingly lying, when you look at the advertising copy for things like high end cables, clearly some of the manufacturers genuinely believe that their items are superior to brand X. In a blind cable test a while back Jason Severinus (sp) did cable swaps, his listeners, audiophiles to a man carefully desccribed in great detail the differences between them, the cables were never actually swapped.
 
I'm not that familliar with Holt's writings though offhand I recall he said some pretty dubious things about DBT amongst the quite sensible things he opined. As for Atkinson, this a man who is a paradox, on the one hand he is quite serious about objective measurements an was a real engineer, and I actually find that part of SP very useful. On the other hand this is a man who wholly fails to understand the impact of cognitive biases and who routinely makes excuses for some exotica that turns out to be dreadful and his staff who make these gaffes. Also there are other Sterophile reviewers who show similarly poor powers of discrimination, Harley and Fremer are just the two most opinionated of them. Both are known to be highly abusive when challenged.

 

[Hi-Five]

First of all, this is hilarious, thanks for that!
 
Quote:

...I don't want to hear about this Shannon Nyquist lady, she couldn't understand what might be lost with 16 bits...

 
Second, I think I missed the part about these files (Apple is proposing) being lossless...is this really the case?  I'm such a dinosaur that I've never purchased music from any download service.  I like things that I can hold and look at and break if I feel like it.
 
I was bad mouthing the 24-bit move early in the thread because I assumed iTunes was still only selling 128kbit or 192kbit sample rate files.  In that case 24-bit seems pretty useless; you've already chopped the highs and the lows to reduce file size and now you want to boost dynamics...bah!  If Apple is going lossless then yeah, why not offer 24-bit files, less conversion always yields a better product IMO.  Any modern studio recording digitally is at least recording 44/24 if not higher, so not having to map the dynamics from 24 to 16 would be advantageous, whether this is inherently perceptable is another debate which I will not join at this time.
 

 

[powerlifter450]

Apple and Beats by Dre, what other heinous brands can one article dig up. I'll keep my "audiophile" equipment. They can keep listening to their Beats with the compressed mp3 files.

 

[Hi-Five]

Why are we (audiophiles) the "suckers" when someone will spend $300 on a headphone that, from what HF reviewers report, sounds like it couldn't hold a candle to a Beyer or Senn at around the same price?!?
 
Anyone else seen that car commercial where the audiophile is saying his tube amp can produce sounds "only dogs can hear?"  I'm all...heck yeah, my Woo does the same thing!
 
Quote:

Apple and Beats by Dre, what other heinous brands can one article dig up. I'll keep my "audiophile" equipment. They can keep listening to their Beats with the compressed mp3 files.

 

[dalethorn]

 
Quote:

You know it never ceases to amaze me how (normally) gullible clever people can be, perhaps it is their cleverness that makes them feel invulnerable, I should know better, after all 2 of my 4 degrees are in Psychology (I can play that game too thanks

) . I would be wary of thinking that your high IQ gives you immunity from the normal range of cognitive biases or makes you superior at detecting falsehoods.
 
An example I give to my Bonehead IT undergraduates (The course is bonehhead IT, not the undergrads) - everybody thinks that nobody ever falls for 419 scams any more, they are blindingly obvious right, this is not what the Nigerian Ministry of justice will tell you, amongst their records are the sad cases of 16 people murdered (including 2 US citizens) and two scammers banged up recently had money orders for over $2M, Citibank almost got scammed out of $27M. The Scammers use all sorts of tricks, one of which is to present themselves as a bit hick or unsophisticated, the mark has a sense that these are people they could put one over on easily. The fact is that many are doctors or lawyers or graduates unable to get apropriate employment.
 
Also, obviously someone does not have to be knowingly lying, when you look at the advertising copy for things like high end cables, clearly some of the manufacturers genuinely believe that their items are superior to brand X. In a blind cable test a while back Jason Severinus (sp) did cable swaps, his listeners, audiophiles to a man carefully desccribed in great detail the differences between them, the cables were never actually swapped.
 
I'm not that familliar with Holt's writings though offhand I recall he said some pretty dubious things about DBT amongst the quite sensible things he opined. As for Atkinson, this a man who is a paradox, on the one hand he is quite serious about objective measurements an was a real engineer, and I actually find that part of SP very useful. On the other hand this is a man who wholly fails to understand the impact of cognitive biases and who routinely makes excuses for some exotica that turns out to be dreadful and his staff who make these gaffes. Also there are other Sterophile reviewers who show similarly poor powers of discrimination, Harley and Fremer are just the two most opinionated of them. Both are known to be highly abusive when challenged.

I think I mostly agree with this, not enough disagreement to mention anyway.  IQ numbers are good for blowing off the Appeal To Authority arguments - not saying you intended that - just that I tend to be the rebellious sort.  Personally I can vouch for certain speaker cable sonic differences, probably not the ones that cost more than $5 per foot.  I am quite amazed by the clear sound and deep bass that passes through some of the thinnest headphone cables imaginable, so I'd defer that one to the "experts".  Holt BTW was a one-of-a-kind guy.  There was no way to nitpick his claims or attitudes I felt, but his constant insistence on moving high fidelity toward the sound of live music rather than glamorous repro for the delight of low-budget consumers - I thought that was commendable. 

 

[fiver]

 
Quote:

Here's a little tidbit I thought y'all would enjoy.  It's from the Pasadena Symphony binaural recording of Also Sprach Zarathustra circa 1994, gold-plated CD:
 
"This binaural recording of the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra was produced using a Neumann KU-100 'dummy head' microphone system through an Audio Upgrades (N.Hollywood) custom stereo preamp and an Apogee (Santa Monica) AD-500E 18-bit reference A to D converter to a Sonic Solutions (San Rafael) premastering hard-disk 20-bit digital audio workstation at 48 khz sampling rate.  Editing and assembly were performed using the Sonic Solutions Macintosh-based 20-bit editing environment, monitored through an Apogee DA-1000E 20-bit reference D to A converter, Bryston 4B power amplifier, B&W 801 Matrix III speakers, and the Sennheiser 580 precision headset.  Mastering was done using the Sonic Solutions sampling rate conversion and Turbo Bit-Mapping software to a PreMaster Compact Disc created on the Sony CDW-900E CD Printer."
 
"No type of artificial signal processing of any kind was used in the production of this CD."
 
Now isn't that just amazing!  No artificial signal processing whatsoever.

There was no artificial signal processing, but the final product was still converted to 16 bits.
 
Not sure what point you are trying to prove.  Since you still refuse to listen to a 16 bit product and 24 bit product and tell us what the difference is with your golden ears, I'm not even sure what you are going on about anymore or what your actual goal is.

 

[fiver]

 
Quote:

 
 
Second, I think I missed the part about these files (Apple is proposing) being lossless...is this really the case?  I'm such a dinosaur that I've never purchased music from any download service.  I like things that I can hold and look at and break if I feel like it.
 
 
 

I'm not sure anyone knows for sure and at this point it's all a bunch of speculation and people having meltdowns on the internet about it.  My understanding is that the offerings will not be lossless.  But we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[dalethorn]

 

There was no artificial signal processing, but the final product was still converted to 16 bits.
 
Not sure what point you are trying to prove.  Since you still refuse to listen to a 16 bit product and 24 bit product and tell us what the difference is with your golden ears, I'm not even sure what you are going on about anymore or what your actual goal is.

Yes, I do have golden ears, and by your snide remarks, I see that you don't. Too bad for you. Maybe you listen to your hi-fi gear and just imagine that you have the best stuff, or maybe "good enough" is good enough for you. Fine - but why are you here?