16 ms·

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been cr

by gwern 4y ago

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and Esposito’s own lists of the best sounding analog albums...“One of the reasons they want to excoriate MoFi is for lying,” says Howarth. “The other part that bothers them is that they’ve been listening to digital all along and they’re highly invested in believing that any digital step will destroy their experience. And they’re wrong.”...And Randy Braun, a music lover, Hoffman message board member and lawyer in New York, hopes that, in the end, the MoFi revelation will prove what he’s been saying for years, that the anti-digital crowd has been lying to itself: “These people who claim they have golden ears and can hear the difference between analog and digital, well, it turns out you couldn’t.”" Hard to imagine a better A/A-test.

allears 4y ago
That's a little simplistic. You can certainly tell the difference between a good analog recording played on a high quality system vs. an MP3. But once you throw enough samples and bit depth at it (more than are on a standard CD), you get quality that's equivalent to, or better than, most analog media.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >(more than are on a standard CD) Sorry, but CD (16bit PCM) has better dynamic range than vinyl. The best vinyl systems can have dynamic range of around 80dB. 16bit PCM is 96dB.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Unless it’s brick-wall normalized during mastering.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      Sure but that's got nothing to do with the CD itself. Except in that you would not be able to brick-wall a vynil at all so you don't.
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      That's a real thing, to be sure. The Loudness Wars have completely ruined any number of otherwise decent recordings. The worst I ever heard was Dropkick Murphys's "The Meanest of Times" which had the dynamic range of an air conditioner in Phoenix. Still, you can always take a great analog recording, pipe it into a good ADC, and listen to that sample forever without degradation. I think almost everything can play FLACs now.
      - Tsiklon 4y ago
        Metallica's Death Magnetic was another truly dreadful example of the loudness war - Thankfully a better mastered release came out in 2015. I've just got my hands on this release and comparing it against my original copy it is a night and day improvement - especially on "All Nightmare Long".
        bayindirh 4y ago
        Yeah, the first release was pure clipping, no music. I remember listening to it and saying? “Did all we wait for this? C’mon”.
        nikau 4y ago
        Hah I had the same experience, I thought some idiot had recorded it via their soundcard line in or something. Eventually got the better mastered version which was leaked from guitar hero or something.
    - vosper 4y ago
      Which is not an issue with the digital format, but with the mastering.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Telling this out loud upsets a lot of people, but I’m on the same boat with you. A good lossless album, regardless of the medium played through shows a significant difference in soundstage given the system can handle the resolution thrown at it when compared with a MP3/M4A file.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > Telling this out loud upsets a lot of people, but I’m on the same boat with you. It "upsets a lot of people" in the same sense and for the same reason as telling them drinking alkaline water cures cancer.
- TylerE 4y ago
  I suspect the real reason is that vinyl largely escaped the ravages of the loudness war, because physics. (And also much of the digital gear in the 80s when the first wave of CD releases was pretty crappy)
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    And the standard equalizer you need to apply during record/playback of the medium.
- jrajav 4y ago
  44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headroom to reproduce any kind of sound for playback purposes. Any more is just placebo.
  - doix 4y ago
    So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off in your filter. The above is mostly accurate, hopefully someone else will comment and tell me how I'm wrong and correct the inaccuracies. Edit: to anyone reading this, read the replies if you want the correct explanation. To everyone that replied, thank you :).
    - kazinator 4y ago
      You are correct; with a 96 kHz sampling rate, you don't need such a brick wall filter. But then you dohn't have to actually keep the data at 96 kHz; it can be reduced to 44, this time using a digital filter. A sharply cutting off analog filter is expensive to produce. It has multiple stages to create the multiple poles. High precision resistors and capacitors have to be used to get all those circuit stages to line up. The filter will have phase distortion. That's the basis of "supersampling": sampling at a higher rate with a simpler filter with less of a cutoff, then completing the job with a digital filter to get to the target sample rate. This can be done in reverse, in reproducion. Take, say, a 48 KHz signal, and digitally interpolate it to a higher sample rate like 96 KHz. That is fed to the DAC. The filter after the DAC then doesn't need such a steep cutoff after 20 KHz. A greater bit depth can be used; like 16 bit samples interpolated to 24 bit at a higher rate, fed to a 24 bit DAC. The digital filter or interpolator doesn't care about accurate resistors, capacitors or drift in component values over time or due to heat; it does the same thing with the same data every time. Digital filters can look at future values also. The state of an analog filter is determined by only the current and past values of the signal; but digital signal processing can delay the signal a little bit and look at a "box" around the current value. I think that is key to preserving phase relationships.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  The highest-of-high end analog tape with Dolby SR and the works is still objectively inferior to vanilla 44.1 kHz / 16 bit PCM.
kstrauser 4y ago
That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations. In fact, part of the record player spec is the "RIAA equalization"[0] that attempts to account for the fact that vinyl isn't good at recording a wide range of frequencies well. On recording, you cut the bass and jack up the treble. On playback, you boost the bass and reduce the treble. Without that, vinyl would be even worse than it is today. It's absolutely, 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD. I don't, but that's fine: it's purely a preference thing. But to claim that vinyl is objectively better in some way is just ludicrous. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
- jrajav 4y ago
  Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Exactly. If you like that warmth, awesome. There's not a thing wrong with that. It's when people confuse "warm" for "better" that the problems start.
  - mod 4y ago
    Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      Yup. Boost the mids on your EQ and you're halfway there.
nerfbatplz 4y ago
Not only can you not tell the difference between analogue and digital, you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3. Most audiophile mania is poorly informed at best and astrology at worst. http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
- MivLives 4y ago
  Badly transcoded mp3s are the worst. For most artists I couldn't tell the difference between a v2 and a flac. There were a few who you could but they're mostly not what people are listening to (intentionally very noisy artists). Realistically if I just heard them blind I don't think I would have cared.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3 I'm not sure what you mean by "properly transcoded," as though there's a scourge of bad encoders out there and everyone has nutty encoding practices, but I really, really bet you can. Listen to an mp3 of a rock/pop track. Try to focus on the cymbals. See if you can isolate them aurally from the rest of the music. Can you hear how mp3 encoding completely munges high frequencies to sound like digital glass breaking? Then you shall finally understand why mp3 encoding has always sucked, and Napster really, really should have won.
  - Nav_Panel 4y ago
    ^ yeah exactly. Also, you really do need a pretty good sound system to hear it. I was with the poster above you for a long time, but then I did blind A/B testing on my buddy's $10k monitors, and the difference was clear. I wouldn't call it "night and day", but I had no trouble distinguishing even 320 MP3 from FLAC on his system by focusing on the very high frequencies (3/3, small N I know I know, but I felt like I could've gone on indefinitely). The MP3s lost some clarity in the highs which led to less dimensionality/sense of space ("soundstage"), because our spatial hearing is very attuned to minute transient differences in high frequencies in particular. But you need to be listening on a system that is adequately equipped to reproduce very high frequency transients accurately, which most people don't have access to.
apohn 4y ago
>The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. Don't worry, the crisis will not last long. Audiophiles will find a way to get over it and buy some better cables that would have revealed they were using a Digital source all along.
- user_7832 4y ago
  > Don't worry, the crisis will not last long. Audiophiles will find a way to get over it and buy some better cables that would have revealed they were using a Digital source all along. You don’t need to attack any person or community - especially given that rich people buying expensive stuff is hardly hurting others directly. Please make good faith arguments.
  - bambax 4y ago
    > especially given that rich people buying expensive stuff is hardly hurting others directly Superstition is always bad.
    - user_7832 4y ago
      If superstition is always bad, I take it you're also annoyed/angry at Wayne Gretzky or Serena Williams? Or any athlete engaging in superstition? (https://thevarsity.ca/2022/03/20/athletes-superstition/ https://thevarsity.ca/2022/03/20/athletes-superstition/)
      - bambax 4y ago
        I have never heard of Wayne Gretzky; Google tells me he's a hockey player. I don't think I have ever seen a match of hockey in my entire life. I'm not annoyed by what I don't know. But the "superstitions" that the linked article mentions, are rituals, lucky charms. They're much less dangerous than going around pretending that something exists, that provably isn't there. Audiophiles are moon-landing deniers. Some might think it's funny or harmless. I think it's terrifying.
throwawaycities 4y ago
> Hard to imagine a better A/A-test. In part it goes to prove Mark Twain’s quote that it’s easier to fool people that to convince them they have been fooled. So many people build their identity around being something like an audiophile and something like this demonstrates the are mostly frauds…not all of it is a bad-faith fraud either which makes it so much more difficult for those people who believed they had a genuine passion and talent to accept. On the other hand there are people who really don’t give a shit and just shill themselves in a given industry to make money as self-proclaimed experts. It’s part of a sickness social media pushes on people where they think they are brands…as opposed to actual humans. These people have no allegiance and will readily move on the the next money making opportunity so long as they can…probably high priced wines.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by gwern 4y ago

allears 4y ago

That's a little simplistic. You can certainly tell the difference between a good analog recording played on a high quality system vs. an MP3. But once you throw enough samples and bit depth at it (more than are on a standard CD), you get quality that's equivalent to, or better than, most analog media.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>(more than are on a standard CD) Sorry, but CD (16bit PCM) has better dynamic range than vinyl. The best vinyl systems can have dynamic range of around 80dB. 16bit PCM is 96dB.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Unless it’s brick-wall normalized during mastering.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Sure but that's got nothing to do with the CD itself. Except in that you would not be able to brick-wall a vynil at all so you don't.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    That's a real thing, to be sure. The Loudness Wars have completely ruined any number of otherwise decent recordings. The worst I ever heard was Dropkick Murphys's "The Meanest of Times" which had the dynamic range of an air conditioner in Phoenix. Still, you can always take a great analog recording, pipe it into a good ADC, and listen to that sample forever without degradation. I think almost everything can play FLACs now.
    - Tsiklon 4y ago
      Metallica's Death Magnetic was another truly dreadful example of the loudness war - Thankfully a better mastered release came out in 2015. I've just got my hands on this release and comparing it against my original copy it is a night and day improvement - especially on "All Nightmare Long".
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        Yeah, the first release was pure clipping, no music. I remember listening to it and saying? “Did all we wait for this? C’mon”.
        nikau 4y ago
        Hah I had the same experience, I thought some idiot had recorded it via their soundcard line in or something. Eventually got the better mastered version which was leaked from guitar hero or something.
  - vosper 4y ago
    Which is not an issue with the digital format, but with the mastering.
bayindirh 4y ago
Telling this out loud upsets a lot of people, but I’m on the same boat with you. A good lossless album, regardless of the medium played through shows a significant difference in soundstage given the system can handle the resolution thrown at it when compared with a MP3/M4A file.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Telling this out loud upsets a lot of people, but I’m on the same boat with you. It "upsets a lot of people" in the same sense and for the same reason as telling them drinking alkaline water cures cancer.
TylerE 4y ago
I suspect the real reason is that vinyl largely escaped the ravages of the loudness war, because physics. (And also much of the digital gear in the 80s when the first wave of CD releases was pretty crappy)
- bayindirh 4y ago
  And the standard equalizer you need to apply during record/playback of the medium.
jrajav 4y ago
44100hz sample rate is enough to reproduce well above the highest frequency even young humans can hear, and 16 bits of depth is enough for 96db of dynamic range, enough to make the noise floor of any consumer system totally inaudible. Standard CDs might not be good enough for archival and further production work (where you also need wiggle room for further processing or format changes), but they have plenty of headroom to reproduce any kind of sound for playback purposes. Any more is just placebo.
- doix 4y ago
  So it's been many years since I looked at this stuff, but the reason for higher sample rate isn't to do with humans being able to hear over 20khz. If you sample at 44khz you need a high pass filter at 22khz to avoid aliasing. Since that's pretty close to 20khz, it needs a pretty sharp drop off. Having a filter with a sharp drop off can introduce artifacts. With 96khz sampling rate, you don't need as a sharp drop off in your filter. The above is mostly accurate, hopefully someone else will comment and tell me how I'm wrong and correct the inaccuracies. Edit: to anyone reading this, read the replies if you want the correct explanation. To everyone that replied, thank you :).
  - kazinator 4y ago
    You are correct; with a 96 kHz sampling rate, you don't need such a brick wall filter. But then you dohn't have to actually keep the data at 96 kHz; it can be reduced to 44, this time using a digital filter. A sharply cutting off analog filter is expensive to produce. It has multiple stages to create the multiple poles. High precision resistors and capacitors have to be used to get all those circuit stages to line up. The filter will have phase distortion. That's the basis of "supersampling": sampling at a higher rate with a simpler filter with less of a cutoff, then completing the job with a digital filter to get to the target sample rate. This can be done in reverse, in reproducion. Take, say, a 48 KHz signal, and digitally interpolate it to a higher sample rate like 96 KHz. That is fed to the DAC. The filter after the DAC then doesn't need such a steep cutoff after 20 KHz. A greater bit depth can be used; like 16 bit samples interpolated to 24 bit at a higher rate, fed to a 24 bit DAC. The digital filter or interpolator doesn't care about accurate resistors, capacitors or drift in component values over time or due to heat; it does the same thing with the same data every time. Digital filters can look at future values also. The state of an analog filter is determined by only the current and past values of the signal; but digital signal processing can delay the signal a little bit and look at a "box" around the current value. I think that is key to preserving phase relationships.
NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
The highest-of-high end analog tape with Dolby SR and the works is still objectively inferior to vanilla 44.1 kHz / 16 bit PCM.

kstrauser 4y ago

That whole line of thinking just blows me away. It's possible to accurately sample and reproduce any vinyl recording in the digital realm. It's absolutely not possible to accurately record every digital recording onto vinyl. For instance, it's not hard at all to make bass so loud that it causes the needle to leap out of the track, or treble so high that the needle can't accurately track the high frequency vibrations. In fact, part of the record player spec is the "RIAA equalization"[0] that attempts to account for the fact that vinyl isn't good at recording a wide range of frequencies well. On recording, you cut the bass and jack up the treble. On playback, you boost the bass and reduce the treble. Without that, vinyl would be even worse than it is today. It's absolutely, 100% fine for someone to say that they subjectively prefer the sound quality of a record player to a CD. I don't, but that's fine: it's purely a preference thing. But to claim that vinyl is objectively better in some way is just ludicrous. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

jrajav 4y ago
Most of the time people will argue that vinyl has "warmth" and this makes it subjectively better. This is true, but it's actually because of the pleasing distortion record players add to the music. Being distortion, even if it improves your listening experience (and this depends on genre, though it generally does), it is certainly objectively worse in terms of accurate reproduction.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  Exactly. If you like that warmth, awesome. There's not a thing wrong with that. It's when people confuse "warm" for "better" that the problems start.
- mod 4y ago
  Can't the warmth just be reproduced in a digital player anyway?
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    Yup. Boost the mids on your EQ and you're halfway there.

nerfbatplz 4y ago

Not only can you not tell the difference between analogue and digital, you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3. Most audiophile mania is poorly informed at best and astrology at worst. http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

MivLives 4y ago
Badly transcoded mp3s are the worst. For most artists I couldn't tell the difference between a v2 and a flac. There were a few who you could but they're mostly not what people are listening to (intentionally very noisy artists). Realistically if I just heard them blind I don't think I would have cared.
Maursault 4y ago
> you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3 I'm not sure what you mean by "properly transcoded," as though there's a scourge of bad encoders out there and everyone has nutty encoding practices, but I really, really bet you can. Listen to an mp3 of a rock/pop track. Try to focus on the cymbals. See if you can isolate them aurally from the rest of the music. Can you hear how mp3 encoding completely munges high frequencies to sound like digital glass breaking? Then you shall finally understand why mp3 encoding has always sucked, and Napster really, really should have won.
- Nav_Panel 4y ago
  ^ yeah exactly. Also, you really do need a pretty good sound system to hear it. I was with the poster above you for a long time, but then I did blind A/B testing on my buddy's $10k monitors, and the difference was clear. I wouldn't call it "night and day", but I had no trouble distinguishing even 320 MP3 from FLAC on his system by focusing on the very high frequencies (3/3, small N I know I know, but I felt like I could've gone on indefinitely). The MP3s lost some clarity in the highs which led to less dimensionality/sense of space ("soundstage"), because our spatial hearing is very attuned to minute transient differences in high frequencies in particular. But you need to be listening on a system that is adequately equipped to reproduce very high frequency transients accurately, which most people don't have access to.

apohn 4y ago

>The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. Don't worry, the crisis will not last long. Audiophiles will find a way to get over it and buy some better cables that would have revealed they were using a Digital source all along.

user_7832 4y ago
> Don't worry, the crisis will not last long. Audiophiles will find a way to get over it and buy some better cables that would have revealed they were using a Digital source all along. You don’t need to attack any person or community - especially given that rich people buying expensive stuff is hardly hurting others directly. Please make good faith arguments.
- bambax 4y ago
  > especially given that rich people buying expensive stuff is hardly hurting others directly Superstition is always bad.
  - user_7832 4y ago
    If superstition is always bad, I take it you're also annoyed/angry at Wayne Gretzky or Serena Williams? Or any athlete engaging in superstition? (https://thevarsity.ca/2022/03/20/athletes-superstition/ https://thevarsity.ca/2022/03/20/athletes-superstition/)
    - bambax 4y ago
      I have never heard of Wayne Gretzky; Google tells me he's a hockey player. I don't think I have ever seen a match of hockey in my entire life. I'm not annoyed by what I don't know. But the "superstitions" that the linked article mentions, are rituals, lucky charms. They're much less dangerous than going around pretending that something exists, that provably isn't there. Audiophiles are moon-landing deniers. Some might think it's funny or harmless. I think it's terrifying.

throwawaycities 4y ago

> Hard to imagine a better A/A-test. In part it goes to prove Mark Twain’s quote that it’s easier to fool people that to convince them they have been fooled. So many people build their identity around being something like an audiophile and something like this demonstrates the are mostly frauds…not all of it is a bad-faith fraud either which makes it so much more difficult for those people who believed they had a genuine passion and talent to accept. On the other hand there are people who really don’t give a shit and just shill themselves in a given industry to make money as self-proclaimed experts. It’s part of a sickness social media pushes on people where they think they are brands…as opposed to actual humans. These people have no allegiance and will readily move on the the next money making opportunity so long as they can…probably high priced wines.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]