24bit vs 16bit, the myth exploded!

[RRod]

You know this to be true
Or joking I cannot tell.

It says right at the top of their site. Seems like a company specifically tailoring to the type of people who think all modern sound recording is evil. I feel quite the opposite.

 

[skwoodwiva]

It says right at the top of their site. Seems like a company specifically tailoring to the type of people who think all modern sound recording is evil. I feel quite the opposite.

Golden info, man thank you.

Now WHY The @ell would I lust after this label? I have 40 of them even some of the CDs are better in musicality & sonics the anything in my 2 TBs....

 

[71 dB]

True but I don't believe that still occurs much (or at all) these days does it? The ADCs/DACs I was using more than 25 years ago were oversampling 128 times.

G

That's fair. One-bit sigma-delta modulators and all. I was talking about other kind of processing. In early 2000's I had to write a Matlab sinc-interpolation script to resample impulse responses measured with MLSSA (which had weird sample rate) to 44.1 kHz.

 

[gregorio]

That's fair. One-bit sigma-delta modulators and all.

Even by around the mid/late 1990's, the vast majority of pro ADC/DACs were initially sampling at rates of 11MHz or higher using 5 or so bits, and then decimating down to the required bit depth/sampling rates. I'm not so well versed in the history of consumer DACs.

G

 

[71 dB]

Even by around the mid/late 1990's, the vast majority of pro ADC/DACs were initially sampling at rates of 11MHz or higher using 5 or so bits, and then decimating down to the required bit depth/sampling rates. I'm not so well versed in the history of consumer DACs.

G

Sure, but if you have a MLSSA impulse response .TIM -file and you need to convolute some test signals at 44.100 Hz with it to be burned on a CD-R for playback, you need to resample the .TIM file to 44.100 Hz. Why not write a Matlab script that does sinc -interpolation numerically at astronomical precision and do also the convolution stuff while we are at it?

 

[TheSonicTruth]

It says right at the top of their site. Seems like a company specifically tailoring to the type of people who think all modern sound recording is evil. I feel quite the opposite.

By "modern sound" do you mean compress, squash, brick-wall limit and makeup gain, rinse and repeat? If so, that's evil! Production values matter - far more than vintage of mics used, or final delivery format. And the stuff we're going around in circles about on this thread, this 16/44 vs 24/88 and so on, even DOGS have a hard time hearing! What difference does it make? Grab your favorite drink, kick back and just enjoy the music!

 

[bigshot]

Audibly transparent perhaps, but:

Audibly transparent is a threshold. There's no such thing as being more transparent than transparent. Our ears are a limiting factor. We can create sound that includes all kinds of extra information, but the ears are going to ignore all the stuff they can't hear.

 

[amirm]

Audibly transparent is a threshold. There's no such thing as being more transparent than transparent.

Of course there is if you understand the practice as opposed to lay assumptions. You need headroom for processing. And threshold for distortion varies between people. In psychoacoustic studies, a range of data is gathered and shown as averages, not absolutes. You can see this even in the famous fletcher-munson graphs:

See the difference between red and blue graphs above even when averages are considered.

So to assure transparency, you need to go beyond what a study says. Perception is not a precise science.

 

[bigshot]

None of that matters if it isn’t audible. Inaudible is inaudible. Transparent is transparent. There is such a thing as “good enough for government work”.

 

[HotIce]

We are at it again, applying terms which are normally used in other perception fields, to hearing
From a visual point of view, transparency of a medium is its capacity to leave the image unchanged, when interposed between a scenery and the observer.
Applying this to hearing/audio, seems the natural fit would be to replace "image" with "frequency response".
I am pretty sure though, that the location within the FR where the changes happen, have large impact to the perception of what people (I know I am one of them) usually imagine associated with "transparency".
More specifically, an FR drop in the lower range would be much less associated with lack of transparency, compared as a similarly audible drop in the higher range.

 

[amirm]

None of that matters if it isn’t audible. Inaudible is inaudible. Transparent is transparent. There is such a thing as “good enough for government work”.

Doesn't look like you understood my answer, nor the mistake in yours.

Let me give you an analogy. If you are designing a bridge and don't want it to collapse, do you just weigh 4 of them and assume all cars passing will weigh that much and build the bridge to that spec? I sure hope not! You have to have good amount of safety margin because your data is not representative of full set of car weights the bridge has to hold.

Same is here with respect to perception tests. Here is a quote from bible of psychoacoustics,

Bottom line, you don't know with absolute precision what the threshold is. Only by leaving a good margin beyond what psychoacoustics has determined you can be confident you are below threshold of audibility.

 

[bigshot]

I believe that human perception has limits. Those limits might vary from person to person. Some may be able to hear to the absolute edge of human perception, other people may have degraded hearing that limits them to a range below that. Variability extends *downward*, not upward. There comes a point where no human on earth can hear it. That is what we call the point of transparency. If you want to claim that the established thresholds are incorrect, start gathering evidence to prove it and publish it and if you're correct and your proofs are repeatable by others, the thresholds will be modified. If you think you personally can hear things you shouldn't be able to hear, present yourself to the audiology department of your local university and suggest that they test you.

It isn't logical or practical to pile one "fudge factor" on top of another "a little bit to grow on". That is what audiophools do to convince themselves that they need one more zero on the right of the decimal point. That leads to wasting time, energy and money on sound you can't hear. There is nothing better than audible transparency. If you suspect you're missing something, do a blind comparison and see if you can hear it. I bet you can't hear beyond the established thresholds. If you absolutely must build in buffer, then just follow the thresholds using tones. Those are significantly broader than the thresholds when listening to music. But for the purposes of listening to music, that is overkill.

 

[amirm]

There comes a point where no human on earth can hear it. That is what we call the point of transparency.

Let me know when you have tested all humans to determine that....Typical psychoacoustic study uses a handful of listeners.

 

[amirm]

If you think you personally can hear things you shouldn't be able to hear, present yourself to the audiology department of your local university and suggest that they test you.

Spoken as someone who has not submitted yourself to audiology tests. If you had, you would know that they are not there to test the limits of your hearing. For example, the highest frequency they test is 8 kHz.

You seem to have no use for audio research or actual experience with the topic.

 

[bigshot]

No, I didn't mean for a checkup. I meant for research to see if we need to extend the thresholds.