7 ms·

Hahaha. The title says it all. My dad was one of these who should've known better making a living at electronics. I recall an urban legend about an audio engin

Hahaha. The title says it all. My dad was one of these who should've known better making a living at electronics. I recall an urban legend about an audio engineer who added a "richness" control to a piece of studio equipment that did absolutely nothing but allowed some rich person to feel like they engineered an album. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon. If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. It's more likely a badly-chosen lossy compression codec (or it's parameters), a nonuniform DAC, or some other source of analog signal loss is causing loss of fidelity by the time it reaches ears. Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

smeyer 4y ago
>If you can't hear over 8 kHz Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.
- causality0 4y ago
  Is there anything pleasant to hear over 8khz?
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Yeah, a lot of the "details" are 8khz and up. A pure 15khz tone isn't fun to listen to (if you can hear that high) but if you cut off everything above 8khz (or 7khz, or etc) things will start to sound increasingly more muffled. Experiment in Audacity or such to see for yourself.
  - muffles 4y ago
    The harmonics of a guitar or piano can extend well beyond 8kHz, even though they contain lower frequency components that give them their characteristic sound. In fact, the higher harmonics can contribute to the richness and complexity of the overall sound, even if they're not heard as distinct pitches. Similar effect occurs with cymbals, the high-frequency shimmer of cymbals can extend well above 8kHz. Also violins can include overtones that extend beyond 8kHz and the sound of a trumpet can include overtones that extend up to 10kHz or higher.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    No one wants to listen to pure tones over 8kHz, but things like cymbal crashes would sound rather different if you cut off those higher frequencies. The primary frequencies are of course under that cut-off, but there's lots of other frequencies above it.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Yeah I think parent poster confused a detail or two. 20hz-20khz is the human range, more or less. For most adults it's more like 15khz. The 44.1khz sampling rate of CD audio was chosen because it can represent frequencies up to 22.05hz (44.1khz / 2) which safely covers the frequency range of human hearing with a bit of headroom for good measure.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    But surely at 22khz you can only oscillate between 2 values if sampling at 44khz, whereas 2khz gets 20 values in the same 180 degrees of the wave? So doesn’t this mean you lose fidelity at higher frequencies? Edit: thanks for all these great responses!
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      A CD is 16 bits, so you have 65536 possible values to oscillate between. If you mean "does a 44khz only output a square (or triangle) wave at 22kHz, the answer is "no." If you have two alternating values at 44kHz, the output will be a perfect (to the limits of noise &c.) sine wave, since the DAC is band limited. If this is still confusing to you, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I
    - tkuraku 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp... You can only capture all the information if you sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency of interest.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      A sine wave is a sine wave; it can't contain any "additional information" that would gain anything from getting encoded by more data points. If it would, it wouldn't be a sine wave anymore, and you could decompose it into its component of phase and amplitude shifted sine waves, which will occupy all kinds of places in the frequency domain, many of them higher than your initial 22 kHz. That's in fact what we mean when we say "a 22 kHz signal": An ensemble of all of these overlapping waves represented as a single signal. If you're sampling that with an ADC, you're not only sampling the the 22 kHz wave, but you're also sampling it – and that, but only that, can in fact be described with a single bit per ADC readout. Looking at it from an information theoretical point of view, the Kolgomorov complexity of "a sine wave of 22 kHz and amplitude x" is pretty minimal – just from that sentence, you can perfectly recreate that signal with no sampling whatsoever, and one ADC readout tells you its amplitude and phase. It can carry a bandwidth of 0 Hz.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Yep, but 8kHz is nearly twice the frequency of a piano’s high C (rightmost key). There are vocalists that can sing G10s (which is around 10k?) but they’re rare and not musically useful
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    It's not the base frequencies that matter, it's the harmonic sequence above the base note that makes for the difference between instruments. Play with it yourself - record various notes, on various instruments, do the FFT to break it into the frequency domain, and you'll see quite a few harmonics over the base note. Strip those out, and it sounds muddy. For those old enough, an analog phone line was typically limited to 300-3300Hz, give or take. It's more than enough to pass clearly understandable human voice, but neither it is the same as being next to someone. There are also a lot of the high frequencies present in the sort of transients that cymbals and snare drums and such put out - and I'll suggest that most audio compression algorithms mangle them quite badly until you get up into the lossless or "may as well have used lossless" bitrates.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    But that high C on a piano isn't a pure 4khz tone. There is a lot going on there above and below 4khz. You can prove this to yourself by looking at it in a frequency analyzer, or by simply listening to a pure 4khz tone and observing that it sounds a lot different than a piano. This is also why the same note played on different instruments sounds different. If you lop off everything above 8khz, things sound "muffled", like you've put a thin blanket over the speaker. No need to believe me, try it yourself in Audacity or any music playing app with EQ controls.
    - titzer 4y ago
      Not only that, but stringed instruments have a lot of frequencies in the first millisecond, right at the attack, until the string settles into its harmonic oscillations. This is very noticeable on a spectrogram and gives each plucked/raked/bowed note its distinctive character.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  The common quoted range is something like 20hz to 20khz; most people aren't able to discern much beyond "sound is present" above 12khz to 16khz. There are however some folks who have much higher top ends, 24k to 32k and maybe more. hard to test. They hear bats talking. There's also things like hyperacusis which add an extra dimension of sensitivity to things others can dismiss completely like dynamic range and even phase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis
- wl 4y ago
  Yes, humans can detect sounds up to about 20 kHz when they're younger. That number goes down with age and noise exposure. But if you ever have taken a hearing test, you might notice they stop testing at 8 kHz. If you look at equal loudness curves, 8 kHz is around the point where sounds have to get much, much louder to be perceived as the same volume as sounds at lower frequencies. You can hear those higher frequencies in cymbals and a few other things in music if your hearing isn't thrashed, but in a practical sense, 8 kHz is the upper limit of useful human hearing.
Exmoor 4y ago
> I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. As a millennial, I'm always slightly amused (and maybe a little horrified) to see my peers spend endless time and more than a little money hunting down vinyl releases of the music of our generation. I also listen to a lot of music from earlier generations and have noted that older collectors were and are thrilled to see that music get well-transferred and mastered releases on a digitally perfect and durable medium and generally consider those to be the definitive release.
- primax 4y ago
  I'm quite fond of suggesting to them they just play a track of pops and hiss quietly over the digital recording to get the same effect.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  What if they're right? https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red - one fairly recent album I found in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions. There's also the benefit of vinyl in that a single sale will typically send quite a bit of money actually to the band - vs streaming sending fractions of a penny, if that, per play. One of the best ways to actually support a band you like is to buy the LP, even if you don't have a turntable.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    > in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions Perhaps the mastering engineer did that intentionally? Surely the vinyl dynamic range doesn't exceed 96db.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    As I said 58 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 > Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes. Demand better mixes, not vinyl.
JohnBooty 4y ago
Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon Yeah. I'm in the camp that understands it. Well, maybe I don't totally understand it, but I understand its implications and was certainly unable to differentiate between "high-res" audio and redbook audio even in pathological cases. For consumer use, anything over CD quality (44.1khz / 16bit) is a waste. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Or, for a simpler and more affordable option, just use balanced wiring. It is effectively interference proof. =) https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. There are some details, particularly percussion, that are just not well represented by lossy formats. It's like trying to represent sharp text at small point sizes with a JPEG. Don't get me wrong. High bitrate lossy codecs are almost always good enough for nearly everything. It's what I listen to most of the time. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Agree, although I actually don't see much of that -- people really perpetuating the myth that vinyl is technically superior to lossless digital -- these days. The one kink here is that sometimes vinyl releases are mastered better than their digital counterparts; many releases these days have that "brick wall" loudness wars mastering applied that smashes out all of the dynamic range. So sometimes there are vinyl releases that actually do sound better (though it has nothing to do with the format itself)
- smilekzs 4y ago
  FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.
Syonyk 4y ago
> Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days. I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality). wav: 434MB flac: 249MB mp3 (-V0): 80MB A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio. Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now... Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here. In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match. https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... > If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. > Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible. > Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
  > This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason. Why would they want that? It's possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal. The sampling theorem states that analog and digital audio are equivalent given a high enough sampling rate. > If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, then it can be completely determined from its ordinates at a sequence of points spaced less than 1/2B seconds apart. I don't see the point of analog signals anywhere in the pipeline other than in a DAC whose output drives the actual speakers.

smeyer 4y ago

>If you can't hear over 8 kHz Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.

causality0 4y ago
Is there anything pleasant to hear over 8khz?
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Yeah, a lot of the "details" are 8khz and up. A pure 15khz tone isn't fun to listen to (if you can hear that high) but if you cut off everything above 8khz (or 7khz, or etc) things will start to sound increasingly more muffled. Experiment in Audacity or such to see for yourself.
- muffles 4y ago
  The harmonics of a guitar or piano can extend well beyond 8kHz, even though they contain lower frequency components that give them their characteristic sound. In fact, the higher harmonics can contribute to the richness and complexity of the overall sound, even if they're not heard as distinct pitches. Similar effect occurs with cymbals, the high-frequency shimmer of cymbals can extend well above 8kHz. Also violins can include overtones that extend beyond 8kHz and the sound of a trumpet can include overtones that extend up to 10kHz or higher.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  No one wants to listen to pure tones over 8kHz, but things like cymbal crashes would sound rather different if you cut off those higher frequencies. The primary frequencies are of course under that cut-off, but there's lots of other frequencies above it.
JohnBooty 4y ago
Yeah I think parent poster confused a detail or two. 20hz-20khz is the human range, more or less. For most adults it's more like 15khz. The 44.1khz sampling rate of CD audio was chosen because it can represent frequencies up to 22.05hz (44.1khz / 2) which safely covers the frequency range of human hearing with a bit of headroom for good measure.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  But surely at 22khz you can only oscillate between 2 values if sampling at 44khz, whereas 2khz gets 20 values in the same 180 degrees of the wave? So doesn’t this mean you lose fidelity at higher frequencies? Edit: thanks for all these great responses!
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    A CD is 16 bits, so you have 65536 possible values to oscillate between. If you mean "does a 44khz only output a square (or triangle) wave at 22kHz, the answer is "no." If you have two alternating values at 44kHz, the output will be a perfect (to the limits of noise &c.) sine wave, since the DAC is band limited. If this is still confusing to you, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I
  - tkuraku 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp... You can only capture all the information if you sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency of interest.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    A sine wave is a sine wave; it can't contain any "additional information" that would gain anything from getting encoded by more data points. If it would, it wouldn't be a sine wave anymore, and you could decompose it into its component of phase and amplitude shifted sine waves, which will occupy all kinds of places in the frequency domain, many of them higher than your initial 22 kHz. That's in fact what we mean when we say "a 22 kHz signal": An ensemble of all of these overlapping waves represented as a single signal. If you're sampling that with an ADC, you're not only sampling the the 22 kHz wave, but you're also sampling it – and that, but only that, can in fact be described with a single bit per ADC readout. Looking at it from an information theoretical point of view, the Kolgomorov complexity of "a sine wave of 22 kHz and amplitude x" is pretty minimal – just from that sentence, you can perfectly recreate that signal with no sampling whatsoever, and one ADC readout tells you its amplitude and phase. It can carry a bandwidth of 0 Hz.
spamizbad 4y ago
Yep, but 8kHz is nearly twice the frequency of a piano’s high C (rightmost key). There are vocalists that can sing G10s (which is around 10k?) but they’re rare and not musically useful
- Syonyk 4y ago
  It's not the base frequencies that matter, it's the harmonic sequence above the base note that makes for the difference between instruments. Play with it yourself - record various notes, on various instruments, do the FFT to break it into the frequency domain, and you'll see quite a few harmonics over the base note. Strip those out, and it sounds muddy. For those old enough, an analog phone line was typically limited to 300-3300Hz, give or take. It's more than enough to pass clearly understandable human voice, but neither it is the same as being next to someone. There are also a lot of the high frequencies present in the sort of transients that cymbals and snare drums and such put out - and I'll suggest that most audio compression algorithms mangle them quite badly until you get up into the lossless or "may as well have used lossless" bitrates.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  But that high C on a piano isn't a pure 4khz tone. There is a lot going on there above and below 4khz. You can prove this to yourself by looking at it in a frequency analyzer, or by simply listening to a pure 4khz tone and observing that it sounds a lot different than a piano. This is also why the same note played on different instruments sounds different. If you lop off everything above 8khz, things sound "muffled", like you've put a thin blanket over the speaker. No need to believe me, try it yourself in Audacity or any music playing app with EQ controls.
  - titzer 4y ago
    Not only that, but stringed instruments have a lot of frequencies in the first millisecond, right at the attack, until the string settles into its harmonic oscillations. This is very noticeable on a spectrogram and gives each plucked/raked/bowed note its distinctive character.
h2odragon 4y ago
The common quoted range is something like 20hz to 20khz; most people aren't able to discern much beyond "sound is present" above 12khz to 16khz. There are however some folks who have much higher top ends, 24k to 32k and maybe more. hard to test. They hear bats talking. There's also things like hyperacusis which add an extra dimension of sensitivity to things others can dismiss completely like dynamic range and even phase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis
wl 4y ago
Yes, humans can detect sounds up to about 20 kHz when they're younger. That number goes down with age and noise exposure. But if you ever have taken a hearing test, you might notice they stop testing at 8 kHz. If you look at equal loudness curves, 8 kHz is around the point where sounds have to get much, much louder to be perceived as the same volume as sounds at lower frequencies. You can hear those higher frequencies in cymbals and a few other things in music if your hearing isn't thrashed, but in a practical sense, 8 kHz is the upper limit of useful human hearing.

Exmoor 4y ago

> I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. As a millennial, I'm always slightly amused (and maybe a little horrified) to see my peers spend endless time and more than a little money hunting down vinyl releases of the music of our generation. I also listen to a lot of music from earlier generations and have noted that older collectors were and are thrilled to see that music get well-transferred and mastered releases on a digitally perfect and durable medium and generally consider those to be the definitive release.

primax 4y ago
I'm quite fond of suggesting to them they just play a track of pops and hiss quietly over the digital recording to get the same effect.
Syonyk 4y ago
What if they're right? https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red - one fairly recent album I found in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions. There's also the benefit of vinyl in that a single sale will typically send quite a bit of money actually to the band - vs streaming sending fractions of a penny, if that, per play. One of the best ways to actually support a band you like is to buy the LP, even if you don't have a turntable.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  > in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions Perhaps the mastering engineer did that intentionally? Surely the vinyl dynamic range doesn't exceed 96db.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  As I said 58 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 > Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes. Demand better mixes, not vinyl.

JohnBooty 4y ago

Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon Yeah. I'm in the camp that understands it. Well, maybe I don't totally understand it, but I understand its implications and was certainly unable to differentiate between "high-res" audio and redbook audio even in pathological cases. For consumer use, anything over CD quality (44.1khz / 16bit) is a waste. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Or, for a simpler and more affordable option, just use balanced wiring. It is effectively interference proof. =) https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. There are some details, particularly percussion, that are just not well represented by lossy formats. It's like trying to represent sharp text at small point sizes with a JPEG. Don't get me wrong. High bitrate lossy codecs are almost always good enough for nearly everything. It's what I listen to most of the time. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Agree, although I actually don't see much of that -- people really perpetuating the myth that vinyl is technically superior to lossless digital -- these days. The one kink here is that sometimes vinyl releases are mastered better than their digital counterparts; many releases these days have that "brick wall" loudness wars mastering applied that smashes out all of the dynamic range. So sometimes there are vinyl releases that actually do sound better (though it has nothing to do with the format itself)

smilekzs 4y ago
FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.

Syonyk 4y ago

> Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days. I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality). wav: 434MB flac: 249MB mp3 (-V0): 80MB A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio. Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now... Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here. In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match. https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... > If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. > Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible. > Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.

bobleeswagger 4y ago
> This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason. Why would they want that? It's possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal. The sampling theorem states that analog and digital audio are equivalent given a high enough sampling rate. > If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, then it can be completely determined from its ordinates at a sequence of points spaced less than 1/2B seconds apart. I don't see the point of analog signals anywhere in the pipeline other than in a DAC whose output drives the actual speakers.