Birdie Num Nums
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
All this talk is:
King's X - Over My Head (Video) - YouTube
King's X - Over My Head (Video) - YouTube
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
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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'.
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
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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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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.
... .
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.
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
(spoiler alert - the info is leaning me to say that 'CD Quality' really is 'good enough', we will see if my testing agrees) -ERD50
...If those listeners were not trained listeners, the results mean nothing to me. ...
That is one of the primary reasons Neil Young is so into this 'sound fidelity' issue. He's got his "Old Black" Les Paul running through that Whizzer and a bunch of other gear to get his distinctive heavy rock sound, and then that vintage Martin acoustic (formerly owned by Hank Williams) that emits such a warm, gorgeous tone on Neil's softer stuff. A wide range of sounds!...
I want to know how an acoustic guitar, going from a sharp staccato chord to a gently plucked, 'barely there' note sounded, one where you can just barely hear the players fingers caressing the strings, maybe a bit of fret noise as they bend the note and the string rubs across the fret, or a harmonic pluck. That is what differentiates the listening experience on great recordings/equipment, versus listening to pop music in your car. ...
I am going to make this post, then I need to get back to my TaxAct too.
We were talking about intermodulation (IM) distortions. But it occurs to me that the speakers themselves are capable of introducing plenty. Yes, and even perfectly working ones, due to the way they work.
We talked in another thread about how a speaker with fewer drivers may be better than one with many, due to less phasing difference between drivers in the crossover transition regions. So, think of a mid-bass driver that has to cover from 100Hz up to say 1KHz. When driven with two tones, one at 100Hz that requires the cone to have an excursion of a good fraction of an inch and one at 1KHz that requires a minuscule vibration, what happens with this driver? The 1KHz vibration is riding on a much larger to-and-fro movement of the speaker cone. The result is IM due to the Doppler effect, similar to a car horn sounding higher or lower depending on whether the car is approaching or receding from a listener.
The above two-tone test is very easy to experiment for myself, and I will get to that sometimes. I can excite a driver with both tones, and see if I can hear the difference compared to driving two separate drivers one with each tone. If I cannot hear the difference, I'd better be able to see the difference with a spectrum analyzer.
There are other things like taxes that must be taken care of, but the above is fun. See how an ER can entertain himself with existing toys but in a different way for so little cost?
To date three of the six (or seven) top recording companies are aboard the Pono program:Yes, there is a high end market for pretty much anything you can think of. There is a problem inherent in the Pono business plan that does not exist in any other high end market. One can manufacture Tesla autos, for example, and survive on the limited market. The manufacturer pays the price for high quality manufactured parts and makes the money back when selling the finished product.
With music, however, no technology is going to work unless there is a large catalog of music available to the consumer. That is a lot of work and needs the support of a wide range of providers. I don't know if that is going to happen. Then, unlike the automobile consumer that is replacing one auto with a better one, the music consumer is going to need to be convinced to replace their existing music catalog ... again.
Although I can see the Doppler effect causing problems in some situations, I think it may be kind of bogus for many. Real sounds have a time waveform. It is that time waveform that should be reproduced. And it can definitely be reproduced by a single driver without "Doppler distortion", although conceptually a single driver would seem the worst case for Doppler.
...A speaker system designed for phase coherence will minimize errors in the time waveform. A speaker with an infinite number of drivers, one for each frequency if you could do such a thing (an FFT speaker!), would be a real mess to get time aligned. Even though Doppler-wise it might be ideal, it might never come to life.
Magneplanars were well known as particularly phase coherent, able to come close to reproducing actual squarewaves, unlike almost all other speakers amazingly enough. Dunlavy's were the only cone speaker I found that could match the Magneplanar's sound, with the added benefit of playing louder and deeper.
This discussion fascinates me!
I did a blind test with DW (whose senses are more discriminating than mine) with two 192 Kb/sec MP3 files ripped from the Let it Be Naked CD using the default mp3 encoder in windows media center and the LAME encoder using Exact Audio Copy. I was surprised that even I could tell the difference - but since I knew which was which, I asked DW to listen to them. She thought the LAME encoder resulted in a more "rounded" and "warmer" sound & liked it better.
Who knew that the method of ripping CDs could make a difference!
.... My plan is to import these into Audacity sound editing program, and convert them to 16,15,14,13,12,11,10 bit versions. Then I'll put those in a playlist, set it to 'shuffle' and see if I can ID any of the various bit rates. I can make this double blind by making notes, and doing something to record which ones came up in the rotation (or maybe just add a voice announcement at the end of each file, after I've graded them).
If I can't reliably pick out 13-14 bit recordings from 16 bit, then I doubt I'd pick out 24 from 16. It must be diminishing returns. ...
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So I did a quick test of 16 bit versus 12 bit (4095 steps) rez. On a quick listen, there wasn't anything that jumped out at me. ... there definitely is an audible difference, but maybe still on the subtle side* ( *see below).
But if the difference between 12 and 16 bits isn't something that just smacks me in the face, I doubt I will hear anything going form 16 to 24. Recall that going from 12 to 16 is DOUBLING the available steps 4 times over again. My gut is telling me that 16 bit really is at the edge of diminishing returns.
...
So I will do more testing in the future, going to all the bit depths between 12 and 16, but just thought I'd update at this point.
-ERD50
Call me skeptical, but a 69yo who has been standing in front of guitar amps cranked to eleven for the past 50+ years likely cannot hear any discernible difference...
Engineers at Neil Young’s company admit doubts on music player | New York Post
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There is absolutely a very noticeable difference between SACD and CD, at least on my system. I have a hard time listening to a regular CD now. I just wish SACD had "survived" so I could have replaced all my CD's instead of just a few....I know, there are places to buy SACD's but what I mean is I wish they survived so that everything was available in SACD.