6 ms·

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and

Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers. There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.

Retric 5y ago
I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.
nicoburns 5y ago
The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Yep, it was a sad day when they switched from vinyl 45 singles to digital.
numpad0 5y ago
> A/B test by actually hiring a quartet That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
- coliveira 5y ago
  This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.
  - simias 5y ago
    >There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized. And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way. Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.
    - qart 5y ago
      > That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile. The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
taylodl 5y ago
Meanwhile I'm listening the output of an amplifier playing a distorted guitar. I might listen to an acoustic guitar, and there might be a small horn section. Of course there's going to be drums. So it's super-simple to tell if it's live or a recording - the volume levels are going to be insanely different!
com2kid 5y ago
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD. The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible. That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps. After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them. Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps. Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway. That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.
VT_Dude 5y ago
Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/ https://bacch.com/
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene. Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
- dmix 5y ago
  I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers. It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.
simondotau 5y ago
> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.

Retric 5y ago

I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.

nicoburns 5y ago

The more realistic scenario where it might actually make a difference is DJs playing on huge high-end club soundsystems where compression artefacts might not only effect what you can hear, but the reverberations you can physically feel, and where there might be post-processing effects applied to the source material that show up the compression artifacts.

karmakaze 5y ago
Yep, it was a sad day when they switched from vinyl 45 singles to digital.

numpad0 5y ago

> A/B test by actually hiring a quartet That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.

coliveira 5y ago
This may be true about popular music, because this is how we came to know this style of music - live performances (without proper sound engineering) sound worse. It is completely the opposite for classical music. There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra.
- simias 5y ago
  >There's still no way to replicate the sound quality of being close to an orchestra. That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment? If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized. And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way. Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    If you've never heard an orchestra in an auditorium with proper sound design you're in for a treat. Two or four speakers are simply a poor alternative to dozens of live performers around you.
  - qart 5y ago
    > That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why? Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile. The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.

taylodl 5y ago

Meanwhile I'm listening the output of an amplifier playing a distorted guitar. I might listen to an acoustic guitar, and there might be a small horn section. Of course there's going to be drums. So it's super-simple to tell if it's live or a recording - the volume levels are going to be insanely different!

com2kid 5y ago

> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD. The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible. That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps. After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them. Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps. Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway. That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.

VT_Dude 5y ago

Theoretica Applied Physics and BACCH Labs audition this exact demo -- A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating the musicians playing with the speakers silent and the musicians silently air-playing and with the speakers playing. With a perfect image you literally cannot hear the difference. https://www.theoretica.us/ https://www.theoretica.us/ https://bacch.com/ https://bacch.com/

Dah00n 5y ago
Unless you have bad hearing everyone would be able to hear the difference on speakers and live unless live is defined as someone playing far away on a scene or something, no matter how expensive equipment you have. It is impossible to have it sound like musicians playing in the same room. To even come close you would need several speakers per instrument playing in multiple directions and some playing sounds of the people moving, breathing and talking too. Not even a simple snare drum being hit at intervals can be reproduced by a normal stereo setup to sound as if it were in the same room unless it's at distance. Remember, we play music at home so the definition should be an orchestra two to three meters away, not an orchestra ten to twenty meters away up at a scene. Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
dmix 5y ago
I found a video in one of those links from Princeton. It's a narrative of this guy developing 3D sound that works in normal 2 channel laptop speakers. It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  This is pretty old hat now. IRCAM was experimenting with spatialized sound on a stereo medium already back in the 1990s. The software they came up with was used e.g. for the Deutsche Grammophon recording of Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons where sound is moved around the hall.

simondotau 5y ago

> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.