[lamode]

  You can't ABX test for music quality.
 
ABX test is poison to the way we consume music.

 
Complete nonsense.
 
If you can't hear a difference between A and B then by definition they are inaudibly different.
 
If there was a "night and day" difference between 24 and 16 bit audio, people would have no problem passing an ABX test.
 
Your argument is bordering on ludicrous.

 

[lamode]

  No free lunch.  128k bitrate doesn't sound like 256k. That sounds worse than 320k. That sounds worse than 600-1400k bitrate (CD). That sounds worse than 24bit files which can push nitrates as high as 4000k.

 
Again, a nonsense argument. Increased data rates may MEASURE better but at some point they will stop SOUNDING better to the human ear as the limits of human hearing are surpassed.
 
All that matters to humans is the minimum format required to achieve that. Any more data is just wasted bandwidth.

 

[StanD]

   
Again, a nonsense argument. Increased data rates may MEASURE better but at some point they will stop SOUNDING better to the human ear as the limits of human hearing are surpassed.
 
All that matters to humans is the minimum format required to achieve that. Any more data is just wasted bandwidth.

Unfortunately we are not all Übermensch. 

 Neil Young must be very disappointed of me.

 

[lamode]

  Then buy a couple things at 24bit and after digesting it for a few weeks come back here and tell me how you can't hear any difference at all.  Then I'll say "sorry" for you and move on, I suppose.

 
He already told you that he couldn't hear the difference between 14 and 16 bit in a test, so you can deliver your apology now.
 

 
These are very difficult problems, this 3D listening. Much harder than waveform math.

 
More nonsense. I'm beginning to sense the presence of a troll.

 

[lamode]

  Do you care that your results are useless because your ears can't do direct comparison tests with music quality?

 
LOL, you do realize that you suggested a few posts ago that listening to 16 and 24 bit files side-by-side would reveal a big difference, right?
 

 

[lamode]

   
But my 65 year old father in law and the rest of his friends he's played it for all hear 24bit improvement on the pono player. One guy heard it in 5 seconds, said "it's like the whole thing". His other friend, also in his 60's, said "it's like being in a recording studio".

 
Oh good grief, this isn't funny any more. Please stop trolling.

 

[StanD]

   
Oh good grief, this isn't funny any more. Please stop trolling.

You should see him carrying on in the I love Pono thread. 

 

[lamode]

  I find it's soundstage suspect, it's center undefined, and it's mid-high's completely unnatural and crispy. Its sub-lows are OK but it's mid-lows (like bass guitar or standup) are weak.  So producers worked ways to compensate for this.  Also, are you really going to hear a 24bit advantage if all your plug-ins operate at 16bit, if all the samples are 16/44 and if most of your digital instruments all create 16/44?  No.

 
You forgot to add that the relative humidity goes up, a distinct 4kHz peak is audible, and that if there is a full moon, the treble sound-stage is compromised, and if the power generation station which feeds the recording studio is nuclear, the mid bass slows down, (except for the first Wednesday of every month of course!) and that if anyone in the recording studio is wearing a digital watch, there will be a high-frequency pulsating noise which only golden-ears can hear, and if the mixing desk sits on a carpeted floor, the bass will sound woolly, and if there is blue wallpaper in the studio, vocals will sound more forward, and if the singer is weather leather shoes, there will be less sibilance, and if the recording studio is more than 200 metres above sea level, the midrange will sound lifeless, and if any of the microphone jacks are chrome plated, there will be a high frequency ringing, and if there is an airport near the recording studio, there will be more jitter, and if there is a polypropylene capacitor anywhere in the circuit, even digital circuit, the dynamic range will be reduced by 0.7dB.... Did I miss anything?

 

[StanD]

   
You forgot to add that the relative humidity goes up, a distinct 4kHz peak is audible, and that if there is a full moon, the treble sound-stage is compromised, and if the power generation station which feeds the recording studio is nuclear, the mid bass slows down, (except for the first Wednesday of every month of course!) and that if anyone in the recording studio is wearing a digital watch, there will be a high-frequency pulsating noise which only golden-ears can hear, and if the mixing desk sits on a carpeted floor, the bass will sound woolly, and if there is blue wallpaper in the studio, vocals will sound more forward, and if the singer is weather leather shoes, there will be less sibilance, and if the recording studio is more than 200 metres above sea level, the midrange will sound lifeless, and if any of the microphone jacks are chrome plated, there will be a high frequency ringing, and if there is an airport near the recording studio, there will be more jitter, and if there is a polypropylene capacitor anywhere in the circuit, even digital circuit, the dynamic range will be reduced by 0.7dB.... Did I miss anything?

Yes, Iran has secret plans to make portable nuclear reactors to power Ponos.

 

[efeuvete]

Sorry buddy. It's exactly correct. There is nothing magical or different about the instrument noise you're talking about. Sound is sound and it's as simple as that. All of it can be sampled the same way (by your ears too, not just by ADCs).

If you don't believe me, explain how your ears can physically hear these sounds that are impossible to sample.

I'm not a math expert at all but I've always thought that this condition in Nyquist theorem:
"Strictly speaking, it only applies to a class of mathematical functions whose Fourier transforms are zero outside of a finite region of frequencies"
means that Nyquist theorem only applies to periodic functions (Natural noise is not a periodic function, it has no waveform).
Of course, I can be wrong.

 

[RRod]

 
I'm not a math expert at all but I've always thought that this condition in Nyquist theorem:
"Strictly speaking, it only applies to a class of mathematical functions whose Fourier transforms are zero outside of a finite region of frequencies"
means that Nyquist theorem only applies to periodic functions (Natural noise is not a periodic function, it has no waveform).
Of course, I can be wrong.

 
It means that you have to have band-limited signals. Since they are bandlimited, they cannot also have finite support in the time domain (i.e. be time-limited). But our signals, of course MUST be time-limited, because we don't capture an infinitely long sound wave. Thus we cannot *perfectly* bandlimit; there will always be some high frequency content we don't actually get out and that gets aliased. But we can make that of such small magnitude as to not matter.

 

[Greenears]

You forgot to add that the relative humidity goes up, a distinct 4kHz peak is audible, and that if there is a full moon, the treble sound-stage is compromised, and if the power generation station which feeds the recording studio is nuclear, the mid bass slows down, (except for the first Wednesday of every month of course!) and that if anyone in the recording studio is wearing a digital watch, there will be a high-frequency pulsating noise which only golden-ears can hear, and if the mixing desk sits on a carpeted floor, the bass will sound woolly, and if there is blue wallpaper in the studio, vocals will sound more forward, and if the singer is weather leather shoes, there will be less sibilance, and if the recording studio is more than 200 metres above sea level, the midrange will sound lifeless, and if any of the microphone jacks are chrome plated, there will be a high frequency ringing, and if there is an airport near the recording studio, there will be more jitter, and if there is a polypropylene capacitor anywhere in the circuit, even digital circuit, the dynamic range will be reduced by 0.7dB.... Did I miss anything?

Crystals

The machine that goes "ping"

Directional silver ethernet cables

 

[richie037]

Those audiopholes believe it's this simple, if it was, i would allready havy done it years ago. One audioidiot site said lossless mp3 and flac...... There ain't no such thing as lossless dig audio. Losless when you trigger it to 0 or 1 say it all and the endresult may sound better, but don't you think they just colored the sound in the dsp . But themain purpose everybody try to do is recreate to cutaway harmonics when started using comprised files... Buy a good audio enhancer and chand the sound until you like it or play records on a good system instead of digital succery. No , the real good cd player until 1990 could play a cd way better then these days, with there toriod and fill metall bi servo drived lasers. But via a pc your sounds sucks if you use the standard lg things. For 2 thousand your cd player sound perfect.... no cambridge stuff....But a soundcart of mine has a phono input and i don't here a lot difference with bitrates, and it ain't a technics 1200, just a normal axiom system and with a preamp between it using line input with another card, you keep a glassy sound but a converter which you buy ain't a studio converter, so gives your upscaling a warmer sound, and as it sounds better, who cares. But the mastering used for the better cd's and vinyl is done by using the tape..... Downside..... the vinyl ain't cheap and to call it hi-fi..... First they overpower cd's and vinyl and when mastered right on heavy vinyl it's hifi...... , def. of hifi.

 

[StanD]

Huh?

 

[stv014]

Originally Posted by FFBookman /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
Going back to analog material allows us to hear music without any digital trickery, without any digital compensation for other degradation. It allows to hear real instruments, real analog reverbs, real room delays, real instrument timbre, analog EQ, and of course fine, professional microphones and recording techniques.
 
My entire belief is that 24bit PCM sounds closer to the analog tape masters than does 16bit PCM. So when I do listening tests I try to keep my material pure and obvious, and avoid modern material with it's multiple layers of deception.

 
Some older analog recordings may sound better than some newer digital ones, but that is mainly because of better recording and mastering. If you converted them to CD format, and compared that to the original under controlled conditions (which you will probably not do), you would likely have major difficulties telling them apart.
 
24 bit PCM only sounds closer to analog tape than 16 bit PCM if the analog tape does not have much worse noise floor than the lower resolution PCM, which I guess is not something that frequently happens in practice. Additionally, the music itself needs to have enough dynamic range to make it possible to hear the noise floor in the first place.
 
In any case, if you do not mind increasing the size of PCM audio by 50%, and you want to do this primarily for better sound stage and imaging, then those bits are better spent on adding an extra channel for depth information than making quantization noise that is already inaudible in 99% of cases even more inaudible.