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Oh geez they could have left this statement out: "When I wrote my previous article, class-D audio was fairly new, and audiophiles were still arguing about wheth

Oh geez they could have left this statement out: "When I wrote my previous article, class-D audio was fairly new, and audiophiles were still arguing about whether class-D amps could sound as good as class-AB or class-A units. Nobody is having those arguments anymore." Those arguments are still front and center when it comes to amplifier design, both on the manufacturer and consumer sides.

AceJohnny2 8y ago
Tangentially, the placebo effect is everywhere. If it can affect tasting (wine) and hearing (audiophile gear), I'm surprised not to have noticed its affect in discussing photography. Will "computational photography" (as touted in the latest iPhones) that alters photos based on criterion of perceived quality end up bringing these kind of inane discussions there too? Edit: Never mind, I didn't factor in all the arguments about Photoshop altering.
- taejo 8y ago
  While there are endless debates about manipulation, when it comes to actual capturing of images, the photographic community (in my experience) has a healthy dose of "the best camera is the one you're carrying" and "a great photographer can take great photographs with any camera but even a great camera won't help a lousy photographer take great photographs" to go with its love of gear (who can help but love gear?)
  - beat 8y ago
    Camera nerds are the worst. They're worse than audiophiles, if that's possible. Good photography requires nothing more than a bit of reason and observable standard practice, applied to aesthetics. You don't have to look hard to find someone with a $5000 camera/lens combo who doesn't know what the Rule of Thirds is or how to apply it. Last weekend, I was in DC, and snapping pictures of the Washington Monument on my phone. My sister was shocked at how good they were. It's not hard, really.
    - airbreather 8y ago
      Girl at work has 20k camera with 100k megapixels, but then again Huawei just asked to use her pics for their phone screen savers, so...
- rectang 8y ago
  I made my living as a mastering engineer for two years... To do good work in mixing and mastering, it's important to study the human perceptual mechanism and its propensity for illusion, and it's also important to understand masking effects and how to amplify certain components long enough to tweak them before dialing them back to recede into the gestalt. It's also important to understand that in sound reproduction the vast majority of the distortion on the analog side comes from transducers (microphones and speakers), not amplifiers. (I'm not even going to bother with the article, because amplifiers aren't an important problem: buy something decently engineered and overpowered, and you're basically all set. Then worry about your speakers and your room, because they're the hard part.) But it's likewise crucial to grok that the distortion introduced by digital components is disproportionately disturbing because it is enharmonic. And that practically speaking a lot of the damage that gets done in practice happens because people don't handle gain staging right and often don't understand the fundamental principle of preserving high resolution throughout production and only exporting to lower resolution as a final step. In summary, there are a whole lot of interesting conversations to have on the subject of audio and how perception relates to production. But it's basically impossible to find a community to discuss these subjects with. Either it will be overrun by audiophiles and their pseudoscience, or well-meaning but undereducated skeptics will dominate the discussion with plausible but misguided debunking. So every once in a while I throw up a piece like this into the middle of a giant discussion, with about as much hope as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean.
  - ericdykstra 8y ago
    This is pretty fascinating. I can't add to a discussion, but I would certainly read more about this if you have produced it somewhere. I'm also curious, what made you leave your job as a mastering engineer?
    - rectang 8y ago
      The profession of audio production is extremely competitive because there is a perpetual oversupply of labor. The total amount of money in the music industry is also deceptively small compared to its high public profile. I left the field (back in about 2003) because although I felt that I was good enough to compete and survive, I didn't love it enough to grind out a life as a workaholic and just get by. Most of my writings from that time were forum posts with the perspective of the well-meaning but undereducated skeptic and wouldn't be that interesting to read today. Also, what was probably my best writing happened in forums which don't have public archives which have survived 15-20 years later. (Which amuses me as a former mastering engineer because one of our primary objectives is long-term archival.) PS: not "enharmonic", "non-harmonic" dammit. The point is that while analog distortion is mostly harmonically related, digital distortion is not and therefore is much more poisonous in small quantities. Mixing especially (though mastering is similar) is all about making changes near or below the threshold of perception which sum to a cumulative perceptible effect.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Whenever I see the term audiophile I mentally replace it with "over priced bullshit" It's just someone being sold snake oil.
- ken 8y ago
  It's already here, for displays. I've seen lots of internet comments claiming I need the >450ppi screen on the new high-end iPhone, not the miserable old cheapo 326ppi one.
deleted 8y ago
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01100011 8y ago
I think it might boil down to your philosophy on sound reproduction. Do you want accuracy with some potentials for ugliness if you clip, or do you want coloring and musical distortion? I don't think AM radio sounds good at all, but it is sometimes emotionally comforting to listen to. Fidelity isn't everything. That said, many high end audio folks are straight up whack jobs.
milesvp 8y ago
I'm not convinced audio engineers are having that argument anymore (which is more the audience of IEEE). I get the impression from an engineer I know who's specialized in digital signal processing, and who's done a significant amount of analog work, that anyone who's still having some of these arguments doesn't understand some of the basic maths of the problem space. That basically, you can always digitally encode an analog signal at a higher resolution and fidelity than you can reliably read said signal at any given technology level/pricepoint. Which means that using an ADC -> DAC pipeline will almost always give you better audio output with better signal to noise ratios than strict analog -> analog systems (though possibly at the cost of latency). Where it gets tricky, is the arguments for how things like tube amps sound. There is nothing that analog components add to a sound that can't be simulated with digital transforms, but the trick is figuring out how various analog components effect the signal. For instance, my friend found that certain tube amps would overdrive components and force them out of spec, and this caused a non linearity in the response of the signal coming from the component that gave the amp it's distinctive distortion effect. Once he figured that out he was able to reproduce the effect digitally. Incidently, he's found that some guitar amps can never be made today, because they were built around a specific batch of a given component, and newer batches didn't have the same out of bounds responses. But this seems to be why so many people are still so big into analog amps, because it takes considerable effort (and apparently engineering skill) to reproduce some of the classic sounds. Mind you, I'm biased by one of the best engineers I've ever met, so I could be wrong about the general consensus with audio engineers. I'm also mostly using a sample size of 1, though I have corroborated some of his assertions with some of the blogging I've read on the topic. One of the best (I wish I'd bookmarked), was a good overview of encoding by a prolific codec writer, who pointed out that even though a digitized sine wave looks lossy at a low sample rate, it's trivial to rebuild that sine wave perfectly, with just the digitized version (so long as the sample rate was above some multiple of the Nyquist frequency?).
- raphlinus 8y ago
  Likely that was xiph on why excessively high sample rates don't do much for the listening experience: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

AceJohnny2 8y ago

Tangentially, the placebo effect is everywhere. If it can affect tasting (wine) and hearing (audiophile gear), I'm surprised not to have noticed its affect in discussing photography. Will "computational photography" (as touted in the latest iPhones) that alters photos based on criterion of perceived quality end up bringing these kind of inane discussions there too? Edit: Never mind, I didn't factor in all the arguments about Photoshop altering.

taejo 8y ago
While there are endless debates about manipulation, when it comes to actual capturing of images, the photographic community (in my experience) has a healthy dose of "the best camera is the one you're carrying" and "a great photographer can take great photographs with any camera but even a great camera won't help a lousy photographer take great photographs" to go with its love of gear (who can help but love gear?)
- beat 8y ago
  Camera nerds are the worst. They're worse than audiophiles, if that's possible. Good photography requires nothing more than a bit of reason and observable standard practice, applied to aesthetics. You don't have to look hard to find someone with a $5000 camera/lens combo who doesn't know what the Rule of Thirds is or how to apply it. Last weekend, I was in DC, and snapping pictures of the Washington Monument on my phone. My sister was shocked at how good they were. It's not hard, really.
  - airbreather 8y ago
    Girl at work has 20k camera with 100k megapixels, but then again Huawei just asked to use her pics for their phone screen savers, so...
rectang 8y ago
I made my living as a mastering engineer for two years... To do good work in mixing and mastering, it's important to study the human perceptual mechanism and its propensity for illusion, and it's also important to understand masking effects and how to amplify certain components long enough to tweak them before dialing them back to recede into the gestalt. It's also important to understand that in sound reproduction the vast majority of the distortion on the analog side comes from transducers (microphones and speakers), not amplifiers. (I'm not even going to bother with the article, because amplifiers aren't an important problem: buy something decently engineered and overpowered, and you're basically all set. Then worry about your speakers and your room, because they're the hard part.) But it's likewise crucial to grok that the distortion introduced by digital components is disproportionately disturbing because it is enharmonic. And that practically speaking a lot of the damage that gets done in practice happens because people don't handle gain staging right and often don't understand the fundamental principle of preserving high resolution throughout production and only exporting to lower resolution as a final step. In summary, there are a whole lot of interesting conversations to have on the subject of audio and how perception relates to production. But it's basically impossible to find a community to discuss these subjects with. Either it will be overrun by audiophiles and their pseudoscience, or well-meaning but undereducated skeptics will dominate the discussion with plausible but misguided debunking. So every once in a while I throw up a piece like this into the middle of a giant discussion, with about as much hope as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean.
- ericdykstra 8y ago
  This is pretty fascinating. I can't add to a discussion, but I would certainly read more about this if you have produced it somewhere. I'm also curious, what made you leave your job as a mastering engineer?
  - rectang 8y ago
    The profession of audio production is extremely competitive because there is a perpetual oversupply of labor. The total amount of money in the music industry is also deceptively small compared to its high public profile. I left the field (back in about 2003) because although I felt that I was good enough to compete and survive, I didn't love it enough to grind out a life as a workaholic and just get by. Most of my writings from that time were forum posts with the perspective of the well-meaning but undereducated skeptic and wouldn't be that interesting to read today. Also, what was probably my best writing happened in forums which don't have public archives which have survived 15-20 years later. (Which amuses me as a former mastering engineer because one of our primary objectives is long-term archival.) PS: not "enharmonic", "non-harmonic" dammit. The point is that while analog distortion is mostly harmonically related, digital distortion is not and therefore is much more poisonous in small quantities. Mixing especially (though mastering is similar) is all about making changes near or below the threshold of perception which sum to a cumulative perceptible effect.
paulie_a 8y ago
Whenever I see the term audiophile I mentally replace it with "over priced bullshit" It's just someone being sold snake oil.
ken 8y ago
It's already here, for displays. I've seen lots of internet comments claiming I need the >450ppi screen on the new high-end iPhone, not the miserable old cheapo 326ppi one.

deleted 8y ago

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deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

01100011 8y ago

I think it might boil down to your philosophy on sound reproduction. Do you want accuracy with some potentials for ugliness if you clip, or do you want coloring and musical distortion? I don't think AM radio sounds good at all, but it is sometimes emotionally comforting to listen to. Fidelity isn't everything. That said, many high end audio folks are straight up whack jobs.

milesvp 8y ago

I'm not convinced audio engineers are having that argument anymore (which is more the audience of IEEE). I get the impression from an engineer I know who's specialized in digital signal processing, and who's done a significant amount of analog work, that anyone who's still having some of these arguments doesn't understand some of the basic maths of the problem space. That basically, you can always digitally encode an analog signal at a higher resolution and fidelity than you can reliably read said signal at any given technology level/pricepoint. Which means that using an ADC -> DAC pipeline will almost always give you better audio output with better signal to noise ratios than strict analog -> analog systems (though possibly at the cost of latency). Where it gets tricky, is the arguments for how things like tube amps sound. There is nothing that analog components add to a sound that can't be simulated with digital transforms, but the trick is figuring out how various analog components effect the signal. For instance, my friend found that certain tube amps would overdrive components and force them out of spec, and this caused a non linearity in the response of the signal coming from the component that gave the amp it's distinctive distortion effect. Once he figured that out he was able to reproduce the effect digitally. Incidently, he's found that some guitar amps can never be made today, because they were built around a specific batch of a given component, and newer batches didn't have the same out of bounds responses. But this seems to be why so many people are still so big into analog amps, because it takes considerable effort (and apparently engineering skill) to reproduce some of the classic sounds. Mind you, I'm biased by one of the best engineers I've ever met, so I could be wrong about the general consensus with audio engineers. I'm also mostly using a sample size of 1, though I have corroborated some of his assertions with some of the blogging I've read on the topic. One of the best (I wish I'd bookmarked), was a good overview of encoding by a prolific codec writer, who pointed out that even though a digitized sine wave looks lossy at a low sample rate, it's trivial to rebuild that sine wave perfectly, with just the digitized version (so long as the sample rate was above some multiple of the Nyquist frequency?).

raphlinus 8y ago
Likely that was xiph on why excessively high sample rates don't do much for the listening experience: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html