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> You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in t

by apohn 4y ago

> You can tell by listening to the shimmer of a cymbal, or a plucked string fading to silence. I don't think this is true. A long time ago I was involved in the headphone audiophile community and people were always using the shimmer of a cymbal as how they could tell the difference between MP3s and Lossless, Analog vs Digital, CD vs SACD or whatever. Then they'd do a blind test using Foobar2000 and start saying the whole blind testing methodology is flawed because surely they can hear the difference under normal listening conditions with their $1000 headphone connected to their $3000 amp using their $2000 DAC. My favorite quote was from somebody who said "Nobody in this community cares about music. They only care about their equipment."

allears 4y ago
I'm a recording engineer, and I can tell you that there definitely is such a thing as high quality audio. Certainly there are people who believe in snake oil and like to parade their ignorance as though it were knowledge. But if you bother to study the science of audio, read trade magazines, or hang out with engineers and studio owners, you will find that just quoting frequency range or dynamic range, or even noise floor, is not enough to specify an excellent audio signal. And if you think CD audio is as good as it gets, and nobody can tell the difference between that and a studio master tape, for instance, you are dismissing the expertise of the people who have studied and worked to make the recordings you love.
- Kirby64 4y ago
  The reasons for higher quality audio (24/32-bit data, higher frequency, etc) have value in the mastering process. For recording, yes there is value in it. It gives you freedom to adjust your recording without running out of headroom. For listening, no. Find me a double-blind test where 16-bit 48 or 44.1 kHz audio compares poorly to 24-bit 192 kHz audio. You won't find it. You'll find PLENTY of people claiming they can tell a difference, but it's just unfounded claims.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I wonder if there's some real-world "resonance" we're ignoring. I could imagine an accurate statement like "the converted signal out of the DAC never diverges more than 0.005% from the original input", but could some aspects of that .005% produce some outsized weight when fed through a real audio system? I could imagine circuits that "rang" if given something that looks a little too square-wavey or hitting non-linear spots on the speaker's response curve differently. It would be interesting to do some sort of A/B/C/D testing-- analog and digital, on two different audio systems, for example, to see if some systems are more subject to that.
    - apohn 4y ago
      So don't take this personally, but comments like yours are one of the major reasons I refuse to participate in any audiophile communities. There's always a hypothetical edge case for some audiophiles to claim that what they hear is possible. And no matter how much blind testing, research, or engineering is done, this hypothetical edge case means that something has not been proven. It's both pointless and exhausting to discuss anything with these people because the end result is always that the possibility that an edge case exists means you can't claim something is BS. Imagine somebody claimed that people can fly by flapping their arms. You say this is nonsense, but they said you have to prove it. So you ask 10 people to try to fly by flapping their hands and they cannot. This is not enough proof for them. So now you ask 1000 people to try it. Then the person claims maybe people in your country cannot fly this way, but in other countries they might be able to. So you go to 10 countries and ask 1000 people to try. Now the claim is that you did not test enough people who went to the gym every day and you should have asked the strongest people to fly. When nobody from this group can fly, maybe you should test the lightest people with light bones. This keeps going forever because there is always yet another edge case. Welcome to Audiophilia.
  - Sporktacular 4y ago
    He's spot on. There are dozens of parameters that can describe audio quality. And his comment compared CD/44.1 kHz to master tape. He said nothing about hi-def.

by apohn 4y ago

allears 4y ago

I'm a recording engineer, and I can tell you that there definitely is such a thing as high quality audio. Certainly there are people who believe in snake oil and like to parade their ignorance as though it were knowledge. But if you bother to study the science of audio, read trade magazines, or hang out with engineers and studio owners, you will find that just quoting frequency range or dynamic range, or even noise floor, is not enough to specify an excellent audio signal. And if you think CD audio is as good as it gets, and nobody can tell the difference between that and a studio master tape, for instance, you are dismissing the expertise of the people who have studied and worked to make the recordings you love.

Kirby64 4y ago
The reasons for higher quality audio (24/32-bit data, higher frequency, etc) have value in the mastering process. For recording, yes there is value in it. It gives you freedom to adjust your recording without running out of headroom. For listening, no. Find me a double-blind test where 16-bit 48 or 44.1 kHz audio compares poorly to 24-bit 192 kHz audio. You won't find it. You'll find PLENTY of people claiming they can tell a difference, but it's just unfounded claims.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I wonder if there's some real-world "resonance" we're ignoring. I could imagine an accurate statement like "the converted signal out of the DAC never diverges more than 0.005% from the original input", but could some aspects of that .005% produce some outsized weight when fed through a real audio system? I could imagine circuits that "rang" if given something that looks a little too square-wavey or hitting non-linear spots on the speaker's response curve differently. It would be interesting to do some sort of A/B/C/D testing-- analog and digital, on two different audio systems, for example, to see if some systems are more subject to that.
  - apohn 4y ago
    So don't take this personally, but comments like yours are one of the major reasons I refuse to participate in any audiophile communities. There's always a hypothetical edge case for some audiophiles to claim that what they hear is possible. And no matter how much blind testing, research, or engineering is done, this hypothetical edge case means that something has not been proven. It's both pointless and exhausting to discuss anything with these people because the end result is always that the possibility that an edge case exists means you can't claim something is BS. Imagine somebody claimed that people can fly by flapping their arms. You say this is nonsense, but they said you have to prove it. So you ask 10 people to try to fly by flapping their hands and they cannot. This is not enough proof for them. So now you ask 1000 people to try it. Then the person claims maybe people in your country cannot fly this way, but in other countries they might be able to. So you go to 10 countries and ask 1000 people to try. Now the claim is that you did not test enough people who went to the gym every day and you should have asked the strongest people to fly. When nobody from this group can fly, maybe you should test the lightest people with light bones. This keeps going forever because there is always yet another edge case. Welcome to Audiophilia.
- Sporktacular 4y ago
  He's spot on. There are dozens of parameters that can describe audio quality. And his comment compared CD/44.1 kHz to master tape. He said nothing about hi-def.