[arnyk]

   
 I find the recent Grateful Dead Studio Remasters to be far superior sounding - to me - than any previous release (and there have been a lot). Now, whether that's because they're high-res, or simply because they're the latest re-master, or because a little more effort was spent to make them sound good because they're "an audiophile release", doesn't specifically influence my decision to buy them; I'm buying them because they sound better for whatever reason. I would also note that many of the recent high-res re-masters DON'T sound any better to me than any other versions that are available - for whatever reason - but I'm basically taking that same gamble whenever I buy any re-master, whether it's high-res or not (which is why it's always a good idea to follow the reviews).

 
Problem is Keith for all of your past and present brave talk about testing, you appear to cherry pick your testing methodology (IOW, sighted and and all of the other common audiophile testing errors thrown in for good measure) so that the only evidence that you gather agrees with your well-known agenda.

 

[castleofargh]

  when you mistake bitrate and sample rate, several times, even though we all explained it to you.

 

   
Until then I'll just remind you all that 320k PCM < 1400k PCM < 3000k PCM < 5600k PCM.  That's available bandwidth at the various resolutions.

and once again I don't know if you really lost it or if you're the troll of the year doing it on purpose to get me banned.
obviously I can't say what you wrote here is wrong, because yes a bigger number is bigger and even if your numbers are a very poor choice, they have the same unit for once.
 
but last post you went with streaming speed and bitrate as the true value that tells us something. the very next post you're now talking bandwidth. so which is it? I won't make up your mind for you.
but maybe this will help, the first one was a silly claim because any lossless compression would prove you wrong by making a superior file smaller when sent. this time all I need to do is give you a 3bit/192khz track and you'll say it's better than a 16/44 because it has the bigger bandwidth.
once more you try to convince us of something with examples you didn't think through. who on earth would take you seriously when you do that?
 
as a personal request, if you could keep around all the annoying little letters you usually find after the K, you know bps, hz, B... they hold a sentimental value and I'm sad when they're forgotten.
 
 
oh and obviously the all idea that we should listen in the format chosen by the guy doing the master is just another half backed justification.
1/ when you're a pro you pick a working format that is the best you can use because you know you will degrade the signal while working on it. you know you might just end up with a guy who didn't play as in testing and only some extra dynamic range will salvage the track. that's IMO the kind of real life reasons that make a pro pick a high res format to work with. just like I wouldn't shoot my pictures in 800*600 jpg even if I knew the guy only wanted them for facebook.
 
2/ now the very obvious flaw in your idea, all the old stuff were mastered on tapes. so I guess everybody's an idiot for buying the vinyls all those decades ago. it was made on tapes! and we're bigger idiots now for buying the digital versions!
my grandma had some vinyls of classical performances at the time recorded on wax cylinders, what an idiot she was. "you should hear it and buy it "as wax!
and the guy worked on 24bit, but after a few years they had to transfer it onto other tapes, and then digitalize it, now the original track has lost some bits of resolution in the process, I guess we should just throw it away as the guy doing the mastering intended it to have at least 6 more bits... there is no way your caricature of a reason can resist the ruthless attacks of real life.
 as a pro you get the best stuff available at the time. your argument makes no sense outside of saying not to upconvert a 16/44 to 24/96. but that wasn't the message you were trying to get through. right?
 
 
 

  when experts that work in sound, that mix sound, that make sound, that have worked their whole lives in recording studios tell you that you are misguided and just not hearing correctly you run to ABX test results to make yourself feel better.   

I see plenty of those on hydrogen and a few here (when not banned)saying that you're the one who's wrong. guess we don't look up to the same guys.

 

[KeithEmo]

   
To be fair, deaths due to anaphylaxis really don't have false positives. The point of a statistical test is to have enough sample to meet the false positive/negative rates that will, in your own mind, convince you of a course of action. It is true that we'll probably never be able to tell if 0.00000001% of humans can hear hi-res, but we can be pretty darn sure that less than 1% can. And we can certainly tell *for ourselves on our own equipment* if we can hear difference, to within our tolerances for error. Just saying "oh we can never be sure so f' it" is basically poo-pooing the whole field of statistics, after all.
 
Some of us would be just fine to have, say, 32/192 as a standard for audio. Whatever. But the point is to have a standard, and one set upon scientific principles and statistical studies. That was supposed to be what 16/44.1 got us, and what it seems to get us in blind testing. So hopefully one can understand the skepticism to the mantra of hi-res, which seems to be to push up numbers purely for the sake of pushing up numbers.

 
I agree entirely.
 
My point with the peanut butter was to set a sort of criterion for reasonability. While I certainly don't recall being nervous the first time I ate peanut butter, and I might be surprised if someone were to tell me they had such a severe allergy to it, I still wouldn't automatically fail to believe someone who said they were that allergic "because nobody is". And, likewise, just because the majority of humans don't seem to be able to hear a difference between a high-res file and a 16/44k file, you're going to have to present me with some truly overwhelming statistical evidence before I accept that "nobody can". (Many of the arguments I'm hearing here sound a lot like: "Peanut butter doesn't bother me, and none of the fifty people we tested were allergic, so I'm pretty sure those allergies are a myth - probably started by companies trying desperately to trick people into buying higher priced non-pb spreads".)
 
As for Red Book as a "standard" - I think that it is seriously flawed. For one thing, even modern technology, with DSP-based digital filters, and oversampling, has difficulty delivering good performance near the Nyquist frequency. Therefore, I have trouble believing that any CD hardware that was practical and available back when the standard was established could really deliver frequency response flat to 20 kHz, without significant phase errors and distortion. This also might explain why many early CDs seemed to not sound very good. And, even if I were to agree that "most humans probably can't hear anything above 20 kHz", I would still expect a viable standard to include a safety margin. (Can you imagine trying to establish a top speed for automobiles at 60 mph "because nobody is allowed to go over 55 anyway"?)
 
The stories I've heard (oft repeated) seem to suggest that the standard was established based on the fact that it would allow a 70 minute concert to be recorded onto the amount of space that was currently available on a disc - and that, as long as those two requirements were met, nobody was interested in establishing how practical it was, or in adding a bit of safety margin. In other words, the so-called standard was set based on political and business rather than scientific reasoning. (We can get our concert on a disc, which we can manufacture today, and it squeaks by inside the bare minimum of what people should be able to hear.) This isn't exactly what I would call "a standard based on careful research"... and, to me, it simply doesn't seem worthy of defense. (If we really believe that the limits set by 16/44k are "just barely good enough", then let's posit a standard at 24/96k, so we have some safety margin and some room for error.)

 

[Thad-E-Ginathom]

In my school life, I failed most of the exams I took. I conclude that exams must be really, really stupid.

 

[KeithEmo]

   
Problem is Keith for all of your past and present brave talk about testing, you appear to cherry pick your testing methodology (IOW, sighted and and all of the other common audiophile testing errors thrown in for good measure) so that the only evidence that you gather agrees with your well-known agenda.

 
Actually you're sort of right - however, in point of fact, I'm not making a specific claim regarding high-res files at all. I do specifically claim that certain specific high-res files sound better than their supposedly equivalent standard-res versions, but I'm not saying that I'm convinced that they sound different because they're high-res, and I'm certainly not presenting any evidence to that effect. I'm perfectly open to the possibility that they may simply sound better because the company selling them expended a little extra effort on the mastering, or even that they deliberately made sure to degrade the quality of the 44k version so that an audible difference would exist. My claim is simply that nobody has done a test that is thorough enough to prove the fact one way or the other... and that none of the tests being quoted ad nauseum really is sufficient.
 
In fact, personally, I consider the question to be somewhat moot. I am quite certain that specific high-res remasters I own sound obviously better than previous non-high-res versions, and a lot of recent re-masters are being done in various high-res formats. And the fact that many of the good quality music files I encounter lately happen to be high-res is sufficient reason for me to make sure that any DAC I purchase can play them. (Because it's inconvenient to have to convert a file that I acquire so it will play on my equipment; I'd much rather have equipment that will play any file I might encounter.) I'm just opposed to seeing the spread of "information" based on inadequate testing - because I consider it to be nearly as likely to cause errors in judgment as its opposite (snake oil). 
 
(And, yes, I think it would be interesting to do some proper testing to settle the question once and for all. And, if I was still in college, and was looking for a subject for a term paper, I would probably pick that one. And, yes, I would probably be willing to take part in such testing. However, I would only do so if I was convinced that the test methodology was sufficiently well thought out to give meaningful results, and if there was a requirement that the results would be published - regardless of the outcome.)

 

[RRod]

   
And, likewise, just because the majority of humans don't seem to be able to hear a difference between a high-res file and a 16/44k file, you're going to have to present me with some truly overwhelming statistical evidence before I accept that "nobody can".

 
It's fine to want overwhelming evidence, but what counts for that is up to you, and I don't it's unreasonable for someone to ask what your standards are. For instance, a one-off 9/10 that someone reports online hardly convinces me. Someone getting 23/25 in an actual controlled study gets my attention.
 

As for Red Book as a "standard" - I think that it is seriously flawed. For one thing, even modern technology, with DSP-based digital filters, and oversampling, has difficulty delivering good performance near the Nyquist frequency. Therefore, I have trouble believing that any CD hardware that was practical and available back when the standard was established could really deliver frequency response flat to 20 kHz, without significant phase errors and distortion. This also might explain why many early CDs seemed to not sound very good. And, even if I were to agree that "most humans probably can't hear anything above 20 kHz", I would still expect a viable standard to include a safety margin. (Can you imagine trying to establish a top speed for automobiles at 60 mph "because nobody is allowed to go over 55 anyway"?)

 
I don't know enough about old ADCs/DACs to know how well they performed. Anyone care to chime in? As far as modern stuff, I've seen plenty of things that were purty-near flat from 20-20k (I would post a link but it's from a "he-who-shall-not-be-named"). That *some* early CDs sounded bad doesn't mean they all did. I just picked up a copy of the famous 1979 Telarc 1812 overture and the sonics are great. So are they from various other early ventures I have lying around.
 

The stories I've heard (oft repeated) seem to suggest that the standard was established based on the fact that it would allow a 70 minute concert to be recorded onto the amount of space that was currently available on a disc - and that, as long as those two requirements were met, nobody was interested in establishing how practical it was, or in adding a bit of safety margin. In other words, the so-called standard was set based on political and business rather than scientific reasoning.

 
I've never found a reliable source on the LvB 9th anecdote. Besides, the 44.1 standard was around just a bit before the CD. The Wiki on 44100 gives some alternative theories, but that's not a reliable source either I guess.

 

[FFBookman]

castleofargh - very simple - make FLAC files, look at the total K size divided by the run-time of the song.  that's approx how many K per sec are used to render that song.
 
 if 5:00 takes 30mb it's approx 1000k per second.  this is redbook range.
 
if 5:00 takes 85mb it's approx 2800k per second.  this is the 24/88 & 24/96 range
 
if 5:00 takes 170mb it's approx 5600k per second.  this is the 24/192 range.
 
there's a little bit of overhead in the FLAC file container so i'm using approximations.
 
 
the point is that 256k mp3 is only pushing 256k at you, that's bandwidth, that's fixed at a number that 21st century laymen know.
 
i'm giving you the HD numbers on their bitrate scale and you can't accept the truth.
 
256 might be good enough for you, but it's not the same as the master. 1000 might be good enough for arnyk, but it's also probably not the same as the master.
 
i just want to purchase the best copy available, and that means no needless degradations for convenience or bandwidth restrictions.

 

[KeithEmo]

(I'm replying to RRod's replies to me - I can't seem to get the quote mechanism to handle it correctly. RRod's replies will be in regular text, and my replies to them after - and flagged with >>'s
 
Originally Posted by RRod
 
It's fine to want overwhelming evidence, but what counts for that is up to you, and I don't it's unreasonable for someone to ask what your standards are. For instance, a one-off 9/10 that someone reports online hardly convinces me. Someone getting 23/25 in an actual controlled study gets my attention.
 
>> I agree, and what I consider sufficient depends on the circumstances. If I'm buying a bottle of wine, I'm perfectly willing to go with a majority of reviews on a wine blog; after all, it'll be gone tomorrow anyway. However, when someone is telling me that "there is absolutely no difference between a high-res file and a CD", here's what that means to me..... If they're right, I get to save $5 by buying the CD instead of the high-res download. If they're wrong, I save $5, but end up enjoying that song just a little less than I might have. Even worse, I'll have to buy it all over again when I find out my mistake or, even worse than that, the good copy might no longer be available by then. Paying $5 more today to buy the high-res version that just might possibly be better seems like the safest bet there to me.
 
I don't know enough about old ADCs/DACs to know how well they performed. Anyone care to chime in? As far as modern stuff, I've seen plenty of things that were purty-near flat from 20-20k (I would post a link but it's from a "he-who-shall-not-be-named"). That *some* early CDs sounded bad doesn't mean they all did. I just picked up a copy of the famous 1979 Telarc 1812 overture and the sonics are great. So are they from various other early ventures I have lying around.
 
>> A lot of early CDS sounded rather bad - probably for a variety of reasons. However, the requirements of "properly" converting analog to digital include absolutely filtering out ALL content above the Nyquist frequency before doing the conversion. That means that, in order to make a CD without really bad distortion, you must use a filter that is flat to 20 kHz, yet is down at least 80 dB at 22 Khz. In the days of analog filters this was virtually impossible to achieve, and so some compromises were always involved, which prevented the reality from performing anywhere near the theoretical performance. (Oversampling avoids this requirement, but oversampling wasn't available as a technology when the red Book standard was written.)
  I've never found a reliable source on the LvB 9th anecdote. Besides, the 44.1 standard was around just a bit before the CD. The Wiki on 44100 gives some alternative theories, but that's not a reliable source either I guess.
 
>> Yeah, I've heard a lot of variations on the story. However, I'm pretty sure that sample rates significantly above 48 kHz weren't readily available at the time. This means that when they tested "whether Red Book standard was audibly identical to the original" what they were really testing was whether it was audibly identical to an analog master tape. However, today we have "originals" that are far better than analog master tapes, and most people I know don't believe that analog master tape is "audibly identical to the original". (And the fact that a CD could be made to sound indistinguishable from 1970's vintage analog master tapes, when played through 1970's vintage amplifiers and speakers, really doesn't convince me that they're "audibly indistinguishable FROM THE ORIGINAL". In short, I'm not convinced that "the best equipment in 1976 was audibly perfect - and any and all improvements claimed since then are either snake oil or wishful thinking".
 

 

[KeithEmo]

  castleofargh - very simple - make FLAC files, look at the total K size divided by the run-time of the song.  that's approx how many K per sec are used to render that song.
 
 if 5:00 takes 30mb it's approx 1000k per second.  this is redbook range.
 
if 5:00 takes 85mb it's approx 2800k per second.  this is the 24/88 & 24/96 range
 
if 5:00 takes 170mb it's approx 5600k per second.  this is the 24/192 range.
 
there's a little bit of overhead in the FLAC file container so i'm using approximations.
 
 
the point is that 256k mp3 is only pushing 256k at you, that's bandwidth, that's fixed at a number that 21st century laymen know.
 
i'm giving you the HD numbers on their bitrate scale and you can't accept the truth.
 
256 might be good enough for you, but it's not the same as the master. 1000 might be good enough for arnyk, but it's also probably not the same as the master.
 
i just want to purchase the best copy available, and that means no needless degradations for convenience or bandwidth restrictions.

 
Thank you for stating that very clearly....
 
Today's technology makes it relatively simple for me to own a perfect digital copy of the original master version... and, since it is identical to the original, I know, beyond any doubt, that it will sound exactly the same. We all agree that reducing the sample rate, or performing any sort of conversion, is going to result in a copy that is less accurate to the original, but we don't seem to agree at what point the difference will become audible. Therefore, to me, it makes the most sense to simply stick with the perfect copy of the original. We can all agree that a perfect copy will absolutely definitely be audibly identical to the original. (I don't find the extra storage space or bandwidth to be an issue, and I don't mind paying an extra dollar or two for the added insurance of not having to worry about it, so I don't see much reason to try and find out how much accuracy I can discard before it becomes audible.)
 
(In the old days, back when we had analog master tapes, and masters, and mothers, and pressing masters, we had an endless chain of loss - where each generation was a little less accurate than the previous one, and getting one generation closer to the original cost a lot of money. I know that I personally regretted the fact that I couldn't afford to buy a copy that sounded as good as the one the mixing engineer handed to the pressing house. Well, we've finally reached a point where, thanks to modern technology, I CAN buy a copy that has the very same bits as the one he handed to the mastering house. I personally think that's a good thing, and I have little desire to figure out, in absolute detail, exactly how much of that extra quality I can sacrifice before it becomes audibly noticeable. Is it really so awful to pay an extra dollar or two for "quality that you might not need"?)
 
 

 

[old tech]

 

True, many old CDs were not that great but I don't think it has anything to do with 44.1 or the earlier ADC/DAC technology.  It that was the case it cannot explain all the great sounding CDs released around the same time period.  I have quite a few early CDs which sound great, and sometimes the defitinitve version of that album.  Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Joan Armatrading, Dire Straits and so on.  I suspect the real reason why there were many bad ones had more to do with the lack of mastering to the format (often using an EQd version of the vinyl mix-down) in a rush to the market than any percieved deficiencies in redbook or the technology supporting it.  I suspect there would be more poor CDs over the past 15 years than the first 15 years due to overcompression and loudness.

 

[RRod]

 

 
Yeah a good inline replying method eludes me :/
 
Hi-res price is tangential to the point of having tests and statistical outcomes from those tests that we deem as good enough evidence for audibility. And audibility is apropos to any conversation on the benefits and pricing of hi-res, because if we can't actually hear a difference with blinders on, then such non-benefits shouldn't be touted as rational for charging us even $1 more.
 
Re old equipment. Whatever attenuation old players actually managed, it's still true that many people simply don't need bone-flat response up to 20kHz, because our hearing drops off before then. I mean really, how bad could a filter that's aiming for 19k and allows aliasing up to 24k going to sound to those of us who are struggling to hear 18k at normal listening levels? But I was -1 for the first batch of CD releases, so people with personal experiences with the earliest equipment should chime in.
 
It's true, I expect a modern 24/192 master to outperform tape in every way. This still doesn't change the fact that quantizing many tracks to 14bit does squat to the signal, and that people who actually hear 20kHz seem a rare breed.

 

[Don Hills]

   
Yeah a good inline replying method eludes me :/
....

 
I cut and paste the original quote as many times as I wish to divide it, then delete the irrelevant parts from each.
 

... (The rest of your post.)

 
Like that...
It can get cumbersome if you're quoting a long post. We need to be able to put the cursor in the quoted text and click a button labeled "split quote here."

 

[RRod]

   
I cut and paste the original quote as many times as I wish to divide it, then delete the irrelevant parts from each.
 
 
Like that...
It can get cumbersome if you're quoting a long post. We need to be able to put the cursor in the quoted text and click a button labeled "split quote here."

 
Thanks; good to know that at least works. I tried doing my own cuts by hacking the divs in the source, but it didn't like that.

 

[castleofargh]

   

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

  castleofargh - very simple - make FLAC files, look at the total K size divided by the run-time of the song.  that's approx how many K per sec are used to render that song.
 
 if 5:00 takes 30mb it's approx 1000k per second.  this is redbook range.
 
if 5:00 takes 85mb it's approx 2800k per second.  this is the 24/88 & 24/96 range
 
if 5:00 takes 170mb it's approx 5600k per second.  this is the 24/192 range.
 
there's a little bit of overhead in the FLAC file container so i'm using approximations.
 
 
the point is that 256k mp3 is only pushing 256k at you, that's bandwidth, that's fixed at a number that 21st century laymen know.
 
i'm giving you the HD numbers on their bitrate scale and you can't accept the truth.
 
256 might be good enough for you, but it's not the same as the master. 1000 might be good enough for arnyk, but it's also probably not the same as the master.
 
i just want to purchase the best copy available, and that means no needless degradations for convenience or bandwidth restrictions.

 

 
Thank you for stating that very clearly....
 
Today's technology makes it relatively simple for me to own a perfect digital copy of the original master version... and, since it is identical to the original, I know, beyond any doubt, that it will sound exactly the same. We all agree that reducing the sample rate, or performing any sort of conversion, is going to result in a copy that is less accurate to the original, but we don't seem to agree at what point the difference will become audible. Therefore, to me, it makes the most sense to simply stick with the perfect copy of the original. We can all agree that a perfect copy will absolutely definitely be audibly identical to the original. (I don't find the extra storage space or bandwidth to be an issue, and I don't mind paying an extra dollar or two for the added insurance of not having to worry about it, so I don't see much reason to try and find out how much accuracy I can discard before it becomes audible.)
 
(In the old days, back when we had analog master tapes, and masters, and mothers, and pressing masters, we had an endless chain of loss - where each generation was a little less accurate than the previous one, and getting one generation closer to the original cost a lot of money. I know that I personally regretted the fact that I couldn't afford to buy a copy that sounded as good as the one the mixing engineer handed to the pressing house. Well, we've finally reached a point where, thanks to modern technology, I CAN buy a copy that has the very same bits as the one he handed to the mastering house. I personally think that's a good thing, and I have little desire to figure out, in absolute detail, exactly how much of that extra quality I can sacrifice before it becomes audibly noticeable. Is it really so awful to pay an extra dollar or two for "quality that you might not need"?)
 
 
 

@bookman you're still mixing mp3 bitrate with pcm bitrate, so I rest my case. you don't understand anything of what is said to you however how many times it's done. you're obviously a bot and an admin should remove your account to prevent more spamming of the exact same mistaken message over and over again.
 
@keith and of course you buy whatever you want, and there is nothing wrong with getting the perfect reproduction.
but I really don't see the rational behind paying for something I can't hear. if using only my human senses I fail to hear a difference and have no way to know unless I look at the numbers. how is it different from suggestion and placebo? at least when I buy a screen with a better gamut, it's something within the threshold of my senses that will be upgraded. I may find the upgrade meaningless and not worth the money, but it will be noticeable. with highres the changes are clearly outside of my hearing threshold. just like radio frequencies are outside of my hearing threshold and I wouldn't care to pay for an album that includes them just like I wouldn't pay more to have infra red on my screen. if it's outside of what my senses can get, it's outside of my subjective experience and audio is only that to me. I don't care about the life of the singer, and I don't care if there are plenty of sound at 24khz. that's not part of my experience of the music.
so while I certainly understand your reasoning, I don't share it.
 
 
 
 
my second problem with your post is the sound system. how many amps can resolve highres files at normal listening level into a real load? and of course the obvious, how many transducers can hope to get close to even cd quality? so what are we talking about here when we say perfect copy? if in the end our sound system is way below the CD resolution, and we fail to hear a difference, it's really just paying more for an idea.

 

[dprimary]

Bit rate is pretty meaningless for anything other then calculating network bandwidth and storage. 5000kbps could also be 8bit mono 655k sample rate. It could be 10 tracks of 14 bit /36k sample rate.