Quote:
Originally Posted by StanleyB1 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I spent endless hours trying to make mp3 sound impressive and almost as good as 16 bit audio when played via my DAC? You think many cared? Nope. The iPOD generation is not into bit accuracy. Never mind about buying a bit accurate headphone...
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I am beginning to think we worry too much about bit-accuracy for practical day to day audio purposes. I have spent several amusing hours this weekend doing some D to D recordings.
I ripped a CD track (5 mins 37 seconds) into wav format. Then I connected up two different USB soundcards (Behringer UCA202 set to 16/44.1 and DS, and Edirol UA-1EX) to my laptop, connected them together d-out to d-in with the cheapest optical cable I own.
Then I played the track back in Cool Edit pro from one card (Behringer) and recorded it on the other (Edirol) using Audacity. Then I trimmed the new track down to the same size (exactly the same size in samples). I loaded up the tracks in Cool Edit pro did a 65K FFT analysis of the spectra for the tracks and loaded the results into a spreadsheet.
Interestingly the Left channels were identical, this puzzled me so much that I repeated the experiment, same result , left channels on original and recording were identical , but there were minor deviations between the right channels, puzzling but there you go.
ave.......-0.00008712 db
min.......-0.11727905 db
max......0.05999756 db
Maybe a difference of .1db would be just noticeable , however on the original track the intensity of this specific frequency was - 144db and in any case this is an acculmulated 0.1db difference over the length of a 5:37 track.
In terms of db variations between original and copy there were few notable instances.
>0.1......1
>0.05.....3
>0.01.....158
>0.005...608
Visibly the waveforms were identical in shape and intensity zoomed down almost to sample level
needless to say I did an ABX on these, the result was 50% viz guessing.
So using possibly the worst setup imaginable USB....Optical.......Optical......USB two different pieces of playback/record software , two cheap USB devices and a bog-standard optical cable I got a recording that was audibly utterly indistinguishable from the original.
so why worry ?