What do you audiophiles think about Pono music?

[NW-Bound]

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Originally Posted by springnr Honor Roll of well-mastered pop CDs, pretty much nothing after 1990. ...iTunes radio - some hopeful news Dynamic Range compression: Are The Loudness Wars Over? Sampling Theory For Digital Audio is a good article on digital sampling rate.

The list of CDs is interesting. I will be sure to check some out, now that I am trying to move beyond the rank of casual listeners.

About the article on Digital Audio, it is good. But, but, but speaking of Nyquist sampling theorem, there's something that still bothers me when it applies to audio signals and its universally accepted bandwidth of 20KHz. Let me try to explain further.

If the signal is truly bandwidth limited at 20KHz as commonly accepted as the human hearing limit, then there should be no problem with the CD sampling rate of 44.1KHz. However, a signal that has a fast varying amplitude contains higher harmonics than indicated by its fundamental component. An example is given on page 7 of the article as a burst of a 3KHz sine wave, which is not properly reproduced from the sampled data points. An abrupt change in amplitude means that the signal has higher BW than seen in its fundamental components.

So, my questions are the following.

1) Is 20KHz adequate to describe the BW of the sounds generated by known instruments? Do the crash of the cymbals, and the sound of a percussion music piece require a higher sampling rate to capture their sharp attacks, even though their fundamentals are below 20KHz?

2) And if the above is true, and the waveforms are not accurately reproduced because harmonics above 20KHz are missing, can the listener tell even though he cannot hear above 20KHz? Can he tell that the fast-attack waveform has been "smeared"?

I ask the above questions as a layman, and would think that these have already been researched and answered. Please enlighten me. Note that these questions are somewhat academic for me, as my hearing is subpar.

[M Paquette]

Please remember that there are more losses in the path from performance to digital recording than data compression, and that data compression may be lossless!

When a recording master is being made, losses are deliberately introduced from shaping the frequency range from each microphone or pickup, adjusting levels to alter (generally reduce) the dynamic range of the performance, and in the case of a fair amount of pop music, by adding deliberate distortion, performing signal processing, and mixing multiple previously recorded performances together in novel ways. Bandpass filtering is done to meet whatever limits are specified for the master recording.

(And then there are all the wacky RIAA and similar pre-emphasis/de-emphasis/equalization curves, and the variations whipped up by CD mastering shops to 'improve' the sound. Maybe someone was worried about the laser light wearing out the pits...)

This may all be done on a digital or analog board, each with it's own advantages, drawbacks, and artifacts.

The digitized master might be compressed with one of a variety of lossless methods, like ALAC, ATRAC, HD-AAC, or one of the MPEG-4 lossless coders. Lossless compression allows for the entire digitized master to be recovered with bit-for-bit accuracy, without compression artifacts.

There are also lossy compression methods, like good old MP3 encoding. These filter the digitized master recording in various ways to produce something that is more easily compressed, at the expense of introduced artifacts and lost information compared to the original digitized master recording.

The point being that playing with compression only touches one spot in the long, tortured path audio takes from the singer's lips to your ears...

[Birdie Num Nums]

From the updated Pono Music Kickstarter site (currently ~$4M above its original $800K goal, with still 23 days yet to go!)

[NW-Bound]

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Originally Posted by M Paquette .... When a recording master is being made, losses are deliberately introduced from shaping the frequency range from each microphone or pickup, adjusting levels to alter (generally reduce) the dynamic range of the performance, and in the case of a fair amount of pop music, by adding deliberate distortion, performing signal processing, and mixing multiple previously recorded performances together in novel ways. Bandpass filtering is done to meet whatever limits are specified for the master recording...

But would musicians like Neil Young who go the extra steps beyond the conventional ways be able to get us some better "true-to-life" music? Again, my hearing would not let me judge, but let's say if I do an objective measurement of his recordings, would I "see" something different?

By the way, I recently saw that the Studio L890 speakers by JBL have a tweeter dedicated to reproducing sounds above 20KHz. Above 20KHz! Are they kidding? What is that all about? JBL has been in business for a long time, and I would hesitate to call them a fool or a scammer.

[springnr]

Monty's Demo Pages
I like this video.... it uses test equipment I'm familiar with from back in the day. ;>)

Xiph.Org Video Presentations: Digital Show & Tell

[M Paquette]

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Originally Posted by Birdie Num Nums

1411-9216 Kbps? Finally, a recording format that preserves the Medium Wave and Short Wave content of audio recordings!

"It was like a heavy veil lifted off of my ears!"

Yah. Right.

I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm a 60 year old male exposed to weapons noise, turbines, and a nasty decompression accident, so my hearing tops out at 8 KHz, and has some dead spots below that.

I'd love to meet anyone human who can tell whether or not 1000 KHz tones are present in a proper double-blind test. Heck, I'd be impressed with detecting 100 KHz tones...

This is a Very Silly Music Spectrum.

[ERD50]

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Originally Posted by M Paquette ... When a recording master is being made, losses are deliberately introduced from shaping the frequency range from each microphone or pickup, .... The point being that playing with compression only touches one spot in the long, tortured path audio takes from the singer's lips to your ears...

Absolutely. And it seems the most 'realistic', 'natural' sounding recordings I have were recorded with the simplest of techniques, usually just two mics and minimal processing (and some great sounding ones were low budget affairs - often, just keeping the engineer out of the way is the best thing for the sound).

Sure, the path will always affect the signal to some degree, we can't repeal the laws of physics, but it really seems to me that with moderately high end equipment these days, one can easily tell a 'natural/minimalist' recording from a processed one. So the resolution (of all types, not just 'bits') seems to be there to a fairly high degree, or it would all smear together.

Along those lines, I recall seeing/hearing an opera singer on TV (Andrea Bocelli), and he sounded fantastic. So I got his CD out of the library, and I couldn't listen to it! The voice was so processed, it sounded all 'tizzy' to me. So fake! What a terrible thing to do to what I believe is a very good voice. But the TV fidelity was so poor, that I either could not hear that 'tizzy-ness' and/or his voice was not so processed on the TV show.

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Originally Posted by NW-Bound ... About the article on Digital Audio, it is good. But, but, but speaking of Nyquist sampling theorem, there's something that still bothers me when it applies to audio signals and its universally accepted bandwidth of 20KHz. Let me try to explain further. ... So, my questions are the following. 1) Is 20KHz adequate to describe the BW of the sounds generated by known instruments? Do the crash of the cymbals, and the sound of a percussion music piece require a higher sampling rate to capture their sharp attacks, even though their fundamentals are below 20KHz? 2) And if the above is true, and the waveforms are not accurately reproduced because harmonics above 20KHz are missing, can the listener tell even though he cannot hear above 20KHz? Can he tell that the fast-attack waveform has been "smeared"? I ask the above questions as a layman, and would think that these have already been researched and answered. Please enlighten me. Note that these questions are somewhat academic for me, as my hearing is subpar.

Well, our dear old friend Fourier tells us that an impulse such as that can be defined by its component sine waves. So I guess this gets circular - if we (you and I at least) cannot hear a steady-state sinewave > 20KHz, and those impulses are made up of shorter bursts of > 20KHz, then what would lead us to think we could hear a burst of > 20KHz, but not a steady state? So I lean towards thinking that it does not matter.

But I'm hesitant to completely rule it out, the ear/brain is a complex beast. I know some will claim that these higher freqs have some effect on us, one explanation being that our non-linear ear/brains create IM products between say a 27KHz tone and a 13KHz tone, creating a 14KHz difference tone that we 'hear'. Now if this is occurring between our nerve cells and our brain, it isn't something that we can measure (AFAIK), so who knows? But it seems a test could be set up - gate that 27KHz tone on/off and do we hear a difference in the 13KHz tone?

But it has made me curious, and maybe I'll try digging up some recent studies (or finish my taxes!). But the pragmatic side of me says if this effect exists, it must be very, very subtle - or if we were suddenly subjected to it, would we jump up and say "Yes! That is what is missing in a recording!"? Could be?

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Originally Posted by Birdie Num Nums From the updated Pono Music Kickstarter site (currently ~$4M above its original $800K goal, with still 23 days yet to go!)

Interesting, but it is misleading to refer to those bars as 'quality'. They represent how many bits of info are stored. It is very difficult to say how much each increase in bit population correlates with 'quality', and there certainly diminishing returns. Plotting that on a log scale would likely be a better (but still crude) representation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by NW-Bound But would musicians like Neil Young who go the extra steps beyond the conventional ways be able to get us some better "true-to-life" music? Again, my hearing would not let me judge, but let's say if I do an objective measurement of his recordings, would I "see" something different? By the way, I recently saw that the Studio L890 speakers by JBL have a tweeter dedicated to reproducing sounds above 20KHz. Above 20KHz! Are they kidding? What is that all about? JBL has been in business for a long time, and I would hesitate to call them a fool or a scammer.

Hard to say. I could make the case that reproducing sounds above 20KHz helps to assure a flat response and minimal phase shift up to/through 20KHz? It might not matter, it may just be that they found it wasn't all that hard to get the tweeter to go that high (after all, there are ultra-sonic transducers), so why not gain some bragging rights? I'll cut them a bit of slack, and say it was a bit of creative marketing rather than 'foolish' or 'scamming'.

I should shut up and go listen to some music!

-ERD50

[ERD50]

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Originally Posted by M Paquette 1411-9216 Kbps? Finally, a recording format that preserves the Medium Wave and Short Wave content of audio recordings! "It was like a heavy veil lifted off of my ears!" Yah. Right. ...

Isn't that a very flawed analogy?

If my ADC has 16 bit resolution and a 48KHz sample rate, that has nothing to do with recording frequencies in the 16*48/2 Khz range (384 KHz). That ADC can still only record signals up to <24KHz.

It has nothing at all to do with whether I can hear a 100KHz tone, it's not being recorded, it has to do with using > 64,000 bits to represent a 1 KHz tone (or any tone in the input filter's range). And (all else being equal), an ADC with 16 bit resolution will record that 1 KHz tone more accurately than an ADC with 8 bit resolution. Even if that 8-bit ADC has a 96 KHz sample rate, and the 16 bit has a 48 KHz sample rate.

That doesn't mean that I think these very high bit populations are meaningful, but we need to keep the comparisons useful.

Quote:

This is a Very Silly Music Spectrum.

Let's not fight 'silly' with 'silly'.

-ERD50

[springnr]

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Originally Posted by NW-Bound So, my questions are the following. 1) Is 20KHz adequate to describe the BW of the sounds generated by known instruments? Do the crash of the cymbals, and the sound of a percussion music piece require a higher sampling rate to capture their sharp attacks, even though their fundamentals are below 20KHz? 2) And if the above is true, and the waveforms are not accurately reproduced because harmonics above 20KHz are missing, can the listener tell even though he cannot hear above 20KHz? Can he tell that the fast-attack waveform has been "smeared"? Note that these questions are somewhat academic for me, as my hearing is subpar.

As an INTP, heavy on the I part, I know it sorta defeats the give an take of a forum, so sorry about posting links vs direct answers. Others have already disseminated the info quite well, definitely more verbose than I at any rate.

Interesting info on hearing in:

Gentlemen, meet your ears

[springnr]

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Originally Posted by M Paquette It's primarily a Marketing Department number. If someone can claim to have 192 KHz 24 bit audio decoding, they can sell more expensive cr*p to The Golden-Eared Ones, the True Audiophiles. You know, the guys who buy a couple of AudioQuest Type 4 ten foot speaker cables for $110.

Ok Ok, if you can't afford 5K for a measly cable here an there, we will sell ya the parts to make your own for ~ 1K. Happy? ;>)

Bulk Buy Sale Bonanza

[Birdie Num Nums]

All this talk is:

King's X - Over My Head (Video) - YouTube

[ERD50]

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Originally Posted by springnr Ok Ok, if you can't afford 5K for a measly cable here an there, we will sell ya the parts to make your own for ~ 1K. Happy? ;>) Bulk Buy Sale Bonanza

HAh-hah - so here's one theory on super-exotic-expensive speaker cables: they actually are designed to be BAD.

Yep, some of those things, in their quest to differentiate themselves and be 'special', can actually have some relatively high inductance, capacitance and/or resistance levels. Now wait a minute - isn't the purpose of a speaker cable to have low levels of all those? Sure, but then you won't 'hear' the cable! Why spend $5,000 for speaker cables you can't 'hear'?

So if you happen to have an overly-bright system/room, and you insert a magic-voodoo cable that slightly attenuates the highs... wow! You 'improved' the sound! Those $5,000 speaker cables really made a difference!

Of course, you could have done the same with a cheap pad on the tweeter, or with the tone control if your pre-amp has one, or any number of inexpensive and more controllable ways. But where's the bragging rights in that!

Yep, lot's of snake oil in high end audio. But I'm not really sure that a few extra bits of precision, or a slightly higher sample rate are snake oil.

And as skeptical as I am, I'm always a little wary to claim that someone else can't hear a difference in something. Being an amateur musician, even at my mediocre level I have found that you can become very attuned to very slight differences in sounds in an instrument.

I can recall that I would put a strip of felt under the strings at the tuning pegs of my acoustic guitar, because I could occasionally hear one of those little string segments at the head-stock 'ring'in sympathetic vibration when I hit certain chords loudly and sharply (staccato). It would drive me nuts. I don't think 99/100 people would have noticed it in an A/B test, and I bet many could not identify it in an A/B test even after they were told what to listen for. But it stood out like a sore thumb for me.

The ear/brain are complex and tricky. But there is a limit of plausibility, and you are into snake oil land. And I bet those $5,000 speaker cables would sound so much better with a Tice Clock!

-ERD50

[NW-Bound]

OK, I am back after an hour or so of quality time with TaxAct, and a nap.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 ... Hard to say. I could make the case that reproducing sounds above 20KHz helps to assure a flat response and minimal phase shift up to/through 20KHz? It might not matter, it may just be that they found it wasn't all that hard to get the tweeter to go that high (after all, there are ultra-sonic transducers), so why not gain some bragging rights? I'll cut them a bit of slack, and say it was a bit of creative marketing rather than 'foolish' or 'scamming'.

No, it's worse. The JBL L890 speaker is a 4-way design, with the highest crossover frequency listed as 20KHz. This means their "ultra tweeter" is put there to emit sound that nobody can hear, nor contained in regular source material such as CDs and MP3 files. However, it's ready for PONO music.

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Originally Posted by springnr As an INTP, heavy on the I part, I know it sorta defeats the give an take of a forum, so sorry about posting links vs direct answers. Others have already disseminated the info quite well, definitely more verbose than I at any rate. Interesting info on hearing in: Gentlemen, meet your ears

Thanks for the link.

What I found most relevant is the following paragraph.

In 554 trials, listeners chose correctly 49.8% of the time. In other words, they were guessing. Not one listener throughout the entire test was able to identify which was 16/44.1 and which was high rate, and the 16-bit signal wasn't even dithered!

But then, the next paragraph throws some confusion back into the mix.

Another recent study investigated the possibility that ultrasonics were audible, as earlier studies had suggested. The test was constructed to maximize the possibility of detection by placing the intermodulation products where they'd be most audible. It found that the ultrasonic tones were not audible... but the intermodulation distortion products introduced by the loudspeakers could be.

Well, as I am sure that I cannot hear any of this, I am going to stick with my CDs and 320k MP3. It is depressing enough to recognize that my digitized cassettes are not worthy of the 16-bit 44.1KHz format.

[Animorph]

I found that many mods did sound the same to me at first. But you could hear differences after listening for a while and discovering the different cues. I'm wary of listening tests that don't involve a training period and limit the decision period. That's where "golden ears", trained to listen for specific cues of particular distortions, can perform better than just grabbing guys off the street and seeing if they hear a difference in a one minute sample test.

The filter required for rolling off everything above 22 kHz has very significant effects well below 20kHz, including phase effects. Higher sample rates ease the filtering requirements and can result in less modification of the audible signal. And handle any left over >20kHz stuff without aliasing. The time attack theories might be correct, though I doubt the JBL supertweeter was phase aligned well enough to create a coherent time waveform.

I could certainly hear 20kHz as a kid, and the ultrasonic alarm systems in some stores of the day used to drive me crazy. So I might have had a shot at 23 KHz or better. 100 kHz would definitely have to be secondary effects.

[M Paquette]

But then, the next paragraph throws some confusion back into the mix.

Another recent study investigated the possibility that ultrasonics were audible, as earlier studies had suggested. The test was constructed to maximize the possibility of detection by placing the intermodulation products where they'd be most audible. It found that the ultrasonic tones were not audible... but the intermodulation distortion products introduced by the loudspeakers could be.

[/QUOTE]


Good thing there aren't intermodulation products produced in a live acoustic performance.

It takes a fair amount of volume before air starts to show nonlinear behavior that could produce intermodulation... ;-)

[ERD50]

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Originally Posted by NW-Bound .... What I found most relevant is the following paragraph. In 554 trials, listeners chose correctly 49.8% of the time. In other words, they were guessing. Not one listener throughout the entire test was able to identify which was 16/44.1 and which was high rate, and the 16-bit signal wasn't even dithered! ....

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Originally Posted by Animorph I found that many mods did sound the same to me at first. But you could hear differences after listening for a while and discovering the different cues. I'm wary of listening tests that don't involve a training period and limit the decision period. That's where "golden ears", trained to listen for specific cues of particular distortions, can perform better than just grabbing guys off the street and seeing if they hear a difference in a one minute sample test. ... .

I'm solidly with Animorph on this one. I'm definitely not claiming to be a 'golden ear', but I know that my ability to discern subtleties in music is miles above the average person who only has a more passing interest in music. I'm an amateur musician, and interested in music and music reproduction, and you just learn to pick up on things. Anyone who has become very involved in a particular field is far ahead of someone with only some acquaintance with that field.

If those listeners were not trained listeners, the results mean nothing to me. Those are the same people buying crappy systems with booming bass and shrieking tweeters pumped into double digit distortion, and think it sounds good. It's the same in any field - if you pulled people off the street to judge some craft beers, versus the guys/gals in my beer club, you'd get way different results. The guy off the street is drinking Miller Lite, and could not be relied on to detect subtle differences in brewing techniques/ingredients between two similar craft brews.

Several times, I've attended concerts with my friend and our wives, and during the intermission, me and my friend might comment on some specific sound problem. I recall once, the second acoustic guitar player was getting a huge bump in the lower mids, causing a very noticeable boom-iness when he played on the lower strings. This was not subtle to us at all, it was interfering with our enjoyment of the music. But as we talked, our wives looked at us like we were from outer space, they didn't hear anything. We were able to catch up with the performer during that intermission, complimented him on his playing, and then mentioned the boom-iness, and he agreed, and said he's trying to get the sound guy to smooth that out, and wanted to know where we were sitting, as it might be more prominent in certain areas of the hall. So it was not our imagination.


I've also found it can take time before a sound difference is apparent. See post # 4 in this thread.

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Well, as I am sure that I cannot hear any of this, I am going to stick with my CDs and 320k MP3. It is depressing enough to recognize that my digitized cassettes are not worthy of the 16-bit 44.1KHz format.

I have a different philosophy on this, and I just digitized some pretty poor quality cassettes. I went with 16/44.1 for them - compression can create artifacts, and adding artifacts to something that is already distorted can magnify those issues. And lossless FLAC is only about 2x that mp3 @ ~ 720k, not really an archiving issue with cheap hard drives, and lossless means I can always create a compressed copy with no generational loss. Maybe a small point for some uses, but the drawbacks of lossless versus reasonable bit-rate mp3 are so slight, why not go lossless?

There was some great info in some of the earlier links on bit depth and dithering that I'll review and comment on tomorrow, and maybe get motivated to set up some of my own tests (spoiler alert - the info is leaning me to say that 'CD Quality' really is 'good enough', we will see if my testing agrees).

-ERD50

[ls99]

Quote:

Originally Posted by springnr As an INTP, heavy on the I part, I know it sorta defeats the give an take of a forum, so sorry about posting links vs direct answers. Others have already disseminated the info quite well, definitely more verbose than I at any rate. Interesting info on hearing in: Gentlemen, meet your ears

Thanks for the link. Probably the most exhaustive elaboration I've ever read on sound reproduction. Being just a casual listener, the esoterica is interesting to me from the electronics point of view.

As an aside a few months ago on ebay I saw a SACD recording of a Sarah Brightman show sell for well over $800.- US. Rare it was supposed to be. Per the MIX discussion the listener's ability to identify the superior recording was less than chance.

[HFWR]

I'm also in the camp that knows music and plays an instrument, and I've attended hundreds if not thousands of performances, including as a stage or main system mixer. Given those parameters, I've heard both lousy mixing and lousy playing that others apparently didn't notice.

Having said that, years of loud stereos, loud guitar amps, loud machinery, etc. have resulted in tinnitus, and likely a diminished hearing range, though I haven't been tested. I started ripping music quite a few years ago, when storage was somewhat of a cost issue. I randomly looked at the rate for a few songs, and it ranged from 120kbs to 320kbs. Likely, on a good stereo in a quiet setting, I would notice the difference, but in the car, or with earbuds and an iPhone, I doubt there's much.

May have to do some listening tests to quantify that.

[springnr]

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Originally Posted by ERD50 (spoiler alert - the info is leaning me to say that 'CD Quality' really is 'good enough', we will see if my testing agrees) -ERD50

Pretty much, I’m just asking…. Please do not master the CD so it sounds best over FM, playing in a car, or on an mp3 player with headphones. That may well be the mass market, but the manufactures of car audio, mp3 players, etc can design their circuits to match the environment it will be used in.

I guess I might have mixed up Neil’s Archive project with PONO. PONO is likely an offshoot of that ever evolving project. From memory though when the Archive music was re mastered, the volume was not turned up and the audio compressed beyond recognition. I also thought he was asking other musicians to not allow their music to be master for loudness.

[Midpack]

Interesting discussion, if mostly over my head. But it's inspired me to get out several of the 400 CDs boxed up in our basement to listen to them. I've listened to nothing better than AAC and similar "resolution" MP3's for years - it'll be interesting to see if my old ears can detect and appreciate the difference.