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I believe, as the article is implying, that much of what stereophiles perceive as quality is merely signal color of one sort or another, once you reach beyond t
by reason-mr 6y ago
I believe, as the article is implying, that much of what stereophiles perceive as quality is merely signal color of one sort or another, once you reach beyond the basics of clean signal paths and input sources.
I worked my way though college by sound engineering/DJing in a major european city. The signal paths in studios at that time were complex meandering things all adding minor or not-so-minor levels of color, and now can all be substantially replaced by something like a "Universal Audio" DSP box, which is capable of reproducing 99% of the sonic/tonal qualities of the classic equipment. I can't, however, shake the assertion that old, analog, recordings have a certain quality and warmth to them that to my ears sounds amazing, and we have moved so far from this with crappy compression algorithms and equipment which mostly does not match 90's HiFi, unless you spend a lot. Particularly, anything processed at CD quality, seems tinny to my ears. Recording at 192KHz seems to be set to overcome this however.
- ghaff 6y agoWe've sacrificed quality for convenience in a lot of domains. MP3s are an obvious example. (Although many of us realistically can't tell the difference.) And many/most listen to music through cheap earbuds rather than expensive speakers/headphones. Or take phone calls. Some may remember Sprint's hearing a pin drop commercials to advertise the quality of its network. Now, many of us don't even have landlines and just deal with the drops and other problems of cellular phones and IP video calls.
- reason-mr 6y agoTruth. Mp3's sound horrid IMO.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoNew truth: at sensible bit rates, most people cannot differentiate mp3s and wav in double blind tests. New truth: at very high bit rates, almost nobody can.
- TylerE 6y agoAnd frankly, if you replace MP3 with a newer decent codec like Vorbis or AAC that doesn't have obvious glaring issues, "very high" isn't all that crazy high either. That said, disk is cheap, and FLAC is easy piece of mind.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoDisk is indeed cheap. The time to re-rip 1000 CDs, however, it not :(
- ghaff 6y agoYeah. I have a big bin of CDs in my attic, many/most of which I ripped as medium-quality MP3s. Realistically, given my so so hearing, I'm not going to go redo all those at this point--especially given that so much of my music listening is streaming at this point anyway.
- dublin 6y agoThat's true, but psychoacoustic compression models like MP3 work precisely because they're throwing out what most people can't hear. That said, people are different, and some people can hear the difference. My ears are probably only average, but my eyes are (or were) significantly "faster" than average: Until I was well into my 30s (fortunately, this has faded with age!), fluorescent lights were pretty much just like a disco strobe to me - as a teen I could literally see them flashing, even though the phosphors moderated it a bit. (The 2000's flirtation with those wretched CF twisty bulbs brought this roaring back, as almost all of them flashed enough to be really annoying to me.) Just like there are some (very rare) women who are tetrachromes, it's reasonable to expect that there are some with "golden ears". The cool thing about Bob Carver was that he didn't just rely on his (obviously very good) ears, but also on his knowledge, intuition/insight, and equipment. Just amazing. Thanks to OP for this.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago> it's reasonable to expect that there are some with "golden ears". I'm not convinced, but I will graciously concede that it could be so. This would not, however, justify the claim in the GP that "MP3s sound horrid". Also, I would say that from reading the article, I don't think Carver relied on his ears much at all.
- m0zg 6y agoI can easily tell the difference using good headphones. You just need to know what to look for. Once you know, you can't help but notice. The difference is the transients, especially the cymbals and the snare. If it's muddy, you're listening to compressed audio.
- cpach 6y agoWhen it comes to phone calls, I vastly prefer calling with Facetime Audio/Whatsapp/Messenger instead of the cellular network. The difference in audio quality is enormous.
- ghaff 6y agoTotally depends for me. There are days when my Internet is awful, days when my cellular is awful, and days when both are. Both are less consistent than when I had a landline.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago1) 192kHz is almost entirely snake oil. It uses 4x the CPU cycles and 4x the storage capacity for no measurable difference when it comes to human hearing. 2) 96kHz vs 48kHz does allow for some small but probably worthwhile improvement in the behavior of the anti-aliasing filters used in the analog->digital converters. 3) I have a theory that has been shot down by some highly respected DSP people but I retain it nevertheless. In Ye Olde Analogue domain, most of the distortion that occurs will be somehow related to harmonics, because of the nature of the analog electrical signal and the components it passes through. In the New Digital Goodness, there's no inherent reason why any of the distortion will be fundamentally harmonic. Consequently, if either type of signal pathway introduces any distortion at all, the analog one will tend to be "musical" because of the harmonic aspects at its core, whereas the digital one will be something else. I'm not arguing about the amount of distortion etc. Anybody who knows anything about this stuff knows that Ye Olde Analogue pathways were full of distortion, but that either we grew to love it or it was just inherently musical enough that we loved it from the beginning. The sound of that old analog gear you love? Yes, that's right, you love the distortion it adds.
- Gibbon1 6y agoOn your third point. I remember a very good article on control theory which had a hard and often missed point. Which is digital sampling creates far more noise in the phase domain than the amplitude one. For control loops this is important because stability depends on phase. The upshot is you need a higher sampling rate than you would naively think. Bob Pease also had some articles on audio. I think he would agree that open loop analog circuits often produce harmonics that people like. And digital and feedback controlled ones tend to produce harmonics people HATE.