7 ms·
I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the aut
by PascLeRasc 8y ago
I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the author's ad hominem attacks he seasons this stinkpiece with.
I can't stand seeing frequency response charts and scientific measurements in articles about audio. Like my favorite audio reviewer says [1], I listen to music for enjoyment and I talk about audio in subjective terms like "warm", "lush", "wide soundstage" - not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff". I don't go to a restaurant and demand to see pH tests or measure the temperature of my steak myself. I'm not going to do blind A/B listening tests because I don't care about that. If you told me you liked one wine, would it be appropriate for me to say "No you didn't. You don't have taste buds that can tell the difference between that and any other wine."? Of course not.
Music is an entirely subjective experience and trying to distill it down to data is both condescending and telling of how little an author cares about music. Even if you don't care about subjective experiences of audio, why are you so bothered by letting people like what they like? How does it affect your life that I listen to music encoded at 24/196?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo
- newaccoutnas 8y agoUmm, Nyquist-Shannon Theory? Listening to 24Bit 192Khz can actually damage the cillia in your ear
- IWeldMelons 8y agoBingo! Exactly, Nyquist theory. But no one can make a truly good, brickwall filter at this frequency. It is much easier to make a lot less steep frequency response, whilch would start at 22 khz and would slowly go down all the way to 96 kHz. By the way, how would it damage the ears if it was thoroughly filtered?
- blattimwind 8y agoExcept that audio DACs are generally oversampling; for example, an output filter for the AD1955 DAC is only needed to reach -3 dB at 100 kHz, even if you are feeding it a 48 kHz PCM signal. This allows these DACs to produce essentially zero energy in the frequency band from Nyquist cutoff of the input signal to filter cutoff.
- gugagore 8y agoThis resampling adds some latency, right? Ideal resampling adds infinite latency---the sinc function has infinite support.
- blattimwind 8y agoYes, but it's not much. To stay with the example given above, group delay is less than 1 ms at 48 kHz fs, largely indepedent of oversampling factor (2-8).
- vortico 8y agoResamplers these days take advance of our faster computers to use near-brickwall filters, like a 1024-point windowed sinc. With this, you can create a steep filter from 20-22 kHz with better than -100 dBr attenuation beyond the Nyquist frequency. This is enough to stop worrying about the aliasing caused by the bandpass filter. I've never heard of what newaccoutnas is talking about, but I guess if a high-frequency sound is ridiculously loud, the energy could be absorbed somewhere in the cochlea. I've only heard of experiments of subsonic hearing damage, not supersonic.
- gugagore 8y agoDo you know what frequency is typically for the resampling? Anything like 192kHz?
- vortico 8y agoDo you mean what sample rates mixing/mastering engineers work in? They're usually 44.1 or 48 times 1, 2, or 4. Software/hardware DSP effects sometimes oversample interally up to 16x. If you're asking what the ADCs use, they usually have an analog filter circuit for each input, sample at 4 or 8x to digital, and then digitally decimate to 1x, all in one $5 ADC chip.
- IWeldMelons 8y agoWell, there are several things to keep in mind. 1. The sharper the frequency response the worse ringing in the phase response. 2. Human hearing is a mystery and the near ultrasonic freq may actually have some influence on the perception of the music. 3. You need to use analog filters before the ADC and after the DAC anyway, and it is so much easier to implement with a much less steep freq response, if used with higher sample rate. I mean, you sample it at 192 and the filter it down to remove anything above 96. There is no point to resample all the time up and down.
- apcragg 8y agoThat's true for IIR filters but not FIR filters, which modern (This century) signal processing uses. A 1024-point windowed sinc will have linear phase across the entire passband, that's one of the main reasons we use FIR filters.
- boomlinde 8y agoListening to 16bit 44.1 kHz can also damage the cilia in your ears. Whether it actually does, in both cases, of course depends on the recorded material and the playback gain.
- sp332 8y agoThis was basically a PSA back when Neil Young was pushing the Pono music player and store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)
- floatingatoll 8y agoTidal still sells on this basis too.
- vortico 8y agoSo you think our senses transcend what tools have the ability to measure? Maybe that was the case in 1970, but in 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range. Saying otherwise is an appeal to what is called audio mysticism and is caused by placebo and confirmation bias, which was mentioned in the article.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoYes, that's what I think. I don't believe that hearing is completely understood scientifically. You're welcome to disagree.
- vortico 8y agoYeah, this is what I can't fathom. We can detect exoplanets with telescopes with 0.01 arcsecond accuracy, hear whale calls 100 miles away with an array of low frequency transducers, and model the shape of structures by forcing seismic vibration and measuring the response to 1 part in 100 million. We can image the HIV virus and detect DNA changes due to cancer. It's unlikely that we don't understand everything we need to know (or even 1000x more than we need to know regarding this debate) about cochlea, a macroscope object that undergraduates can study with a primitive microscope.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoI don't mean to shift the goalposts, but neuroscience isn't completely understood, and that's what I mean by hearing and how music makes you feel.
- vortico 8y agoCompletely true, but the auditory nerve only "knows" what the mechanical part can respond to. If we don't understand how sound information is interpreted by the nervous system, we can still answer the question "is any neural/electrical/chemical signal whatsoever produced by a stimulation of a frequency or amplitude?"
- ferongr 8y agoIf you really had any qualifications, that anti-scientific rant made the irrelevant.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoWas this comment machine-generated? Every comment by your account is negative and unsubstantial.
- gilrain 8y agoSorry, I read your comment twice... do you actually dispute any of the points made in the article, or are you simply wishing that people didn't care?
- mikeash 8y agoIf two wines were chemically identical but someone claimed that one of them tasted “warmer” than the other, would you just go with that?
- PascLeRasc 8y agoSure. I don't need to invalidate someone else's experience.
- mikeash 8y agoWhat if they were wasting a bunch of money on it and trying to convince others to do the same?
- PascLeRasc 8y agoHow is it a waste if it's one person spending their money on something they enjoy? You're not compelled to also do that.
- mikeash 8y agoA reduction in their ignorance would make them enjoy the other choice just as much, but for less money. They’re spending more just because they don’t know the facts. I consider that a waste.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoYou're projecting. You think someone doesn't know the facts, but they know for a fact that they personally enjoy some certain wine or speakers or whatever. That's not ignorant.
- mikeash 8y agoIf the hypothetical person knows that the wines are identical but still buys the more expensive one and enjoys it more, then fine. Does that really happen? Even if they’re ignorant, I don’t care how they enjoy themselves. The problem is when they start writing guides and reviews encouraging others to follow their ignorance.
- floatingatoll 8y agoI have a hard-won TDS meter that lets me measure the total dissolved solids in a cup of coffee. Like music, coffee is an entirely subjective experience. Like music, distilling it down to data does _not_ implicitly destroy the experience. Judging a cup of coffee good or bad solely based on data is impossible. Maybe this cup is intentionally overextracted and that song is intentionally overmastered. That doesn’t guarantee that the coffee or song are good or bad, it simply helps you understand why you do or don’t like it. After making a thousand cups of coffee with a TDS meter, I can predict what would make a cup of coffee better without needing the meter anymore, and I’ve learned that I care more about enjoying coffee than I do about perfecting it. If you sat through a blind test of a thousand songs, and at the end discovered that you _can_ distinguish 16/44 from 32/384, you might still _choose_ not to care. Most people don’t want every cup of coffee to be competition grade because it’s really expensive (density sorting), really difficult (dual-wielding flow-restricted kettles), and the payoff isn’t worth it every day to them. Maybe that’s how you’d feel after A/B testing 1,000 songs, as I did after pouring 1,000 cups. Maybe not. For most people, knowing that 16/48 is indistinguishable or better than 32/384 will save them thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of audio setup, tuning, design, repurchasing, etc. For a few people, it’s worth it to them to go competition, either in coffee or in music. That’s certainly their right, but it’s not at all guaranteed to make them any happier than they would be with 16/48.
- andybak 8y ago> "Health is an entirely subjective experience and trying to distill it down to data is both condescending and telling of how little an author cares about medicine." Would you accept that argument from someone purporting to provide medical advice?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 8y agoThere is the law of diminishing returns on audio quality, as in everything. Empirical data collection is not a thing to be avoided however. Given that, your rant seems misplaced, and I can't help but think engineering is not the field for you.
- teilo 8y agoI'll just respond by quoting the article: Why push back against 24/192? Because it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people. The more that pseudoscience goes unchecked in the world at large, the harder it is for truth to overcome truthiness... even if this is a small and relatively insignificant example.
- FireBeyond 8y ago> not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff" And yet just yesterday I was reading an audiophile magazine review that discussed a pair of $4,000 headphones and how the "transition from midrange into treble had something of a falloff that was confirmed by their equipment". Music lovers listen to stereo equipment to hear their music. Audiophiles listen to music to hear their stereo equipment.