Can you hear upscaling?

[71 dB]

Note: Wrote here, but refers to a deleted thread:

Nice! Troll creates a thread. I waste my time addressing the trolling. The thread gets deleted.

Discussion boards have become almost completely useless waste of time. Meanwhile my posts get copypasted to blog. Nice day...

 

[bigshot]

If moderators would moderate to keep the conversation on track, it wouldn’t keep ending up like this. A gentle nudge in the right direction early on would prevent it from becoming a car crash that requires draconian clean up much later.

Don’t worry about the comments being taken out of context on his blog. No one is reading it but him. He seems to enjoy carrying out long repetitive conversations with himself.

 

[knownothing2]

Nice! Troll creates a thread. I waste my time addressing the trolling. The thread gets deleted.

Discussion boards have become almost completely useless waste of time. Meanwhile my posts get copypasted to blog. Nice day...

Who exactly are you suggesting created this thread @71 dB? I started the thread with a sincere if naive question. I am not the square wave champ. I may have stumbled into serving as a prompt for them to grind their own axe, but their input has not helped advance my understanding. Others have, yours included, which I very much appreciate.

Perhaps there is a technical thread where people who are audio science curious can come to work through their biases and partial understandings where the discussion is at the college physics level for non-majors without calculus, and another forum where you have to qualify in with your academic and/or professional credentials.

I do get the clear sense that folks on sub forums like this one feel I am wasting their time, and sealioning them with inane questions. That is not my intent, but I continue to struggle in contextualizing my experiences and the results of my own tinkering with theory and available measurements, and I am looking for more information and discussion at a level I can understand.

Unfortunately, there is an unhealthy and widening divide in this subject area that is resulting in rampant trolling everywhere that just wastes time, elections and bandwidth. @71 dB, I feel your pain.

kn

PS - I actually took and passed college physics WITH calculus, but it was a long, long time ago.

 

[bfreedma]

Who exactly are you suggesting created this thread @71 dB? I started the thread with a sincere if naive question. I am not the square wave champ. I may have stumbled into serving as a prompt for them to grind their own axe, but their input has not helped advance my understanding. Others have, yours included, which I very much appreciate.

Perhaps there is a technical thread where people who are audio science curious can come to work through their biases and partial understandings where the discussion is at the college physics level for non-majors without calculus, and another forum where you have to qualify in with your academic and/or professional credentials.

I do get the clear sense that folks on sub forums like this one feel I am wasting their time, and sealioning them with inane questions. That is not my intent, but I continue to struggle in contextualizing my experiences and the results of my own tinkering with theory and available measurements, and I am looking for more information and discussion at a level I can understand.

Unfortunately, there is an unhealthy and widening divide in this subject area that is resulting in rampant trolling everywhere that just wastes time, elections and bandwidth. @71 dB, I feel your pain.

kn

PS - I actually took and passed college physics WITH calculus, but it was a long, long time ago.

I don’t think @71db is referring to this thead or your posts. There was another thread sunjam derailed that was deleted until he complained to the site wide mods who restored and then locked the thread.

Personally, I think your posts have been fine and focused on finding a better understanding of how things work. It’s not your fault that the trolls then attempt to derail a perfectly reasonable set of questions.

The question I have is why the mods allow such obvious trolling here which would be quickly addressed anywhere else on HF. If HF doesn’t want discussion of audio science, then just get rid of this subforum altogether and let the advertisers and their customers have at it without anyone questioning some of the absurd claims.

 

[Ryokan]

Why not ignore

The question I have is why the mods allow such obvious trolling here which would be quickly addressed anywhere else on HF. If HF doesn’t want discussion of audio science, then just get rid of this subforum altogether and let the advertisers and their customers have at it without anyone questioning some of the absurd claims.

Maybe that's the trade off for it being allowed, when genuine posts are ridiculed the less attention and credence others give it, until only a relatively few people visit, others having the excuse that it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

 

[bigshot]

It isn’t hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is the admins aren’t doing it.

 

[bfreedma]

Why not ignore


Maybe that's the trade off for it being allowed, when genuine posts are ridiculed the less attention and credence others give it, until only a relatively few people visit, others having the excuse that it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Ignoring is definitely part of the solution but the question of why this subforum operates under different moderation standards remains. I think the second part of your post is fairly accurate. Outright banning of any discussion of science would be a bad look for HF and would probably receive more negative attention than having this subforum exist in isolation.

 

[Ryokan]

It isn’t hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is the admins aren’t doing it.

It's not always obvious for everyone.

 

[XTF1]

I don’t have enough history to assess how the mods manage this subforum. However, in other parts of Head-Fi, if one post contains a hint of what looks to be science, it is unceremoniously flagged and the poster is directed toward the science subforum… Ok… except members here still have to deal with what that hint of science, and 99% subjective garbage, non-scientific opinions.

 

[71 dB]

Who exactly are you suggesting created this thread @71 dB?

I edited my post to make it clear what I was doing.

I started the thread with a sincere if naive question. I am not the square wave champ. I may have stumbled into serving as a prompt for them to grind their own axe, but their input has not helped advance my understanding. Others have, yours included, which I very much appreciate.

Well, I am glad if this thread you created to further your understanding has done so.

Perhaps there is a technical thread where people who are audio science curious can come to work through their biases and partial understandings where the discussion is at the college physics level for non-majors without calculus, and another forum where you have to qualify in with your academic and/or professional credentials.

I am willing to explain these things (to my own ability which of course has its own limits) on anyone with any background. This is the sound science forum and it can be assumed people here are not totally illiterate scientifically. You don't need to know everything, but you should be able to learn. If you don't know/understand some concepts, it is totally okay to ask. People here gladly help.

I do get the clear sense that folks on sub forums like this one feel I am wasting their time, and sealioning them with inane questions. That is not my intent, but I continue to struggle in contextualizing my experiences and the results of my own tinkering with theory and available measurements, and I am looking for more information and discussion at a level I can understand.

My frustrations reflect the overall insanity that has been going on here lately. Sorry, if something I have said has made you feel unfairly targeted. I'm often lazy about keeping records as to who is saying what. I may bark at the wrong tree sometimes.

Unfortunately, there is an unhealthy and widening divide in this subject area that is resulting in rampant trolling everywhere that just wastes time, elections and bandwidth. @71 dB, I feel your pain.

It's okay. We just have to keep going.

kn

PS - I actually took and passed college physics WITH calculus, but it was a long, long time ago.

That's much better than nothing. My university years are also far in the past and most of the stuff has been forgotten (a lot of it wasn't audio or acoustics related).

 

[bigshot]

I don’t have enough history to assess how the mods manage this subforum. However, in other parts of Head-Fi, if one post contains a hint of what looks to be science, it is unceremoniously flagged and the poster is directed toward the science subforum… Ok… except members here still have to deal with what that hint of science, and 99% subjective garbage, non-scientific opinions.

That’s because the forum keeps getting co opted by loudmouth contrarians who want to argue basic things like the scientific method and controlled testing, and extremely specific, cherry picked irrelevancies that they flog over and over, ignoring all replies. They liberally sprinkle their argumentativeness with disrespect for individual posters, the forum, and science as a whole.

 

[BS5711]

The lion’s share of the place is a mass advertisement and I know from first hand experience that posts will get pulled if one dares question the ridiculous lack of transparency in many threads.

Come to the sound science forum and arguments and garbage content seem to dominate because any schmuck can say what they like and set out to just create conflict and it is tolerated to the point of it being borderline comical. I swear there must be an understanding out there that the sound science forum is fair game and good for a laugh.

 

[bigshot]

I’ve been here a long time. Sound Science didn’t used to be like this. We are definitely under attack.

 

[gregorio]

I also often consider an underlying question when audibility is established, and that is to confirm the cause instead of making one up on based on vague correlation. Rob's a sort of model example of that issue. He talks about doing things that even he recognizes shouldn't be humanly noticeable. But when he concludes there is an audible difference anyway, he doesn't look for other causes, like his test being flawed, or other causes that are within the domain of humanly audible changes.

Sorry castle but I don’t buy that. In many cases there is no question of what should or shouldn’t be humanly noticeable or in fact anything related to audibility, human or otherwise. It’s a question of basic physics and engineering, which he appears to understand very well, except when it relates to one of the marketing points of his products! Regardless of how perfectly you design something in the digital domain, there is always an absolute limit in the analogue domain (IE. At least thermal/Johnson noise) and regardless of how well you design something in the analogue domain, there is always an absolute limit in the acoustic domain (the equivalent of Johnson noise, Brownian motion). If something in the digital or analogue domain falls below the absolute limit in the acoustic domain then it doesn’t matter if you have infinitely perfect hearing, you cannot hear it because it doesn’t exist as sound. Ergo, ANY question of audibility is moot. So, as Rob Watts does know basic physics and engineering he’s deliberately lying.

Am I correct in understanding that folks here generally conclude that the Chord scaler devices, including the currently available Hugo M-Scaler, shouldn’t affect the experience listeners have using a well designed and measuring oversampling DAC?

Yes, although the general conclusion goes significantly beyond “shouldn’t”:
Firstly, there was considerable robust research by the DAC chip manufacturers and industry bodies demonstrating no audible effects of typical linear phase decimation or anti-image filters by the mid to late 1990’s.
Secondly, there’s no reliable evidence to the contrary, EG. No one has ever reliably demonstrated they can hear the effects, given reasonable listening conditions to audio recordings.
Thirdly, the theory of psychoacoustics indicate the effects should be outside the thresholds of audibility.
And lastly, more recent research, utilising new brain measuring/scanning technology, demonstrates that the auditory cortex does not even respond to the effects of typical anti-image filters: “High-frequency sound components of high-resolution audio are not detected in auditory sensory memory” - Nittono, published in Nature 2020 (link here). And by the same author a year later “Auditory brainstem responses to high-resolution audio sounds: Effects of anti-alias filters” - Where he traced the whole auditory path from cochlear to brainstem, specifically investigated the ringing effects of the typical filters and again, there was nothing!
I think we’ve passed the point where we can rationally conclude anything different and we’d need some extremely robust evidence to the contrary to revisit it!

And also conclude that the level of effort in terms of code Watts puts into these devices is entirely unnecessary?

It’s not “entirely” unnecessary. It’s clearly completely unnecessary in terms of any audible differences/benefits but it is necessary in terms of marketing. The marketing has obviously worked, as even a poster in this thread has demonstrated!

G

 

[castleofargh]

Sorry castle but I don’t buy that. In many cases there is no question of what should or shouldn’t be humanly noticeable or in fact anything related to audibility, human or otherwise. It’s a question of basic physics and engineering, which he appears to understand very well, except when it relates to one of the marketing points of his products! Regardless of how perfectly you design something in the digital domain, there is always an absolute limit in the analogue domain (IE. At least thermal/Johnson noise) and regardless of how well you design something in the analogue domain, there is always an absolute limit in the acoustic domain (the equivalent of Johnson noise, Brownian motion). If something in the digital or analogue domain falls below the absolute limit in the acoustic domain then it doesn’t matter if you have infinitely perfect hearing, you cannot hear it because it doesn’t exist as sound. Ergo, ANY question of audibility is moot. So, as Rob Watts does know basic physics and engineering he’s deliberately lying.

I don't know. Of course, I do not believe for one second that... let's take his funniest statement, just changing something at -250dB can be audible. That's not happening in the real world, and we know it.
But while he slowly but surely pushes toward infinity for some particular variable(like in the previous example with dither), is it entirely impossible for consequences to appear in his system well above -250dB?
I've always been told that engineering was a balancing act, where people try to mitigate issues while trying not to create too many new ones.
To give a concrete but unrelated example of my mindset. Take the original paper supporting that ultrasounds change audio from our favorite Japanese guy, and what later was suggested to be the appearance of louder IMD thanks to generous ultrasonic content. It's not something I initially considered. The positive results were not strictly speaking about people hearing the extra ultrasonic content, but they were hearing something, and it was a result of the ultrasonic content. So it wasn't false to say that the hires file sounded different.
I do not know that Watts finds himself in such a situation, but I find logical to at least consider it as one of the possible explanations. Of course, I'm not discarding, non-conclusive testing, BS marketing, or gremlins. I'm just wondering if perhaps, while playing the forever more game, he might disrupt something else in the signal path?