6 ms·

What Does A Song That Costs $5 Sound Like?

26 points by joe_bleau 13y ago

Buge 13y ago
Are people even able to audibly tell a difference? Like in an ABX test?
brianpgordon 13y ago
The very fact that 5.6MHz sampling rates are even a thing intended for human listening makes me doubt this lady's sanity.
- glassx 13y ago
  It is intended for encoding, not for hearing. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-density_modulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-density_modulation
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  You're ignoring that the encoding is only a single bit deep. Compared to a CD, it's only four times the bitrate. It just happens to be drastically reformatted.
coin 13y ago
Audiophile (the unhealthy obsession with audio) has made it on NPR
busterarm 13y ago
Whether DSD is even good or not is still something hotly debated. It's not at all suitable for editing. I'm really scratching my head why NPR reported a story that is so one-sided. The fact-checking here is poor. They're presenting it as DSD vs MP3 when really it's DSD vs PCM.
dietrichepp 13y ago
It would be nice if someone could demonstrate that DSD sounds better than PCM in a double-blind experiment. Just as a sanity check, you could record the PCM from the DSD output to discover whether PCM is perceptually transparent. Advocates of DSD are often skeptical of double-blind experiments, which itself is a red flag.
- busterarm 13y ago
  > Advocates of DSD are often skeptical of double-blind experiments, which itself is a red flag. Exactly. There's a lot of wackos out there in the music biz though. People have religious beliefs about certain products/technologies/sounds without any solid reasoning behind it.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Whats wrong with that? We don't question tastes in art, why audio? I don't need logic or research or the agreement of others, I just know what sounds right to me, and that is perfectly solidly reasonable. Ears are as weird and personal as eyes, as is our interpretation. You wont necessarily hear what I hear. On top of that, over time they change. No need for words like wacko and religious. Unless of course you doing mind if I fire back with a few judgmental words of my own?
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      I think you have a different sort of 'taste' in mind than busterarm does. It is a very reasonable thing to prefer record over CD. They have different sounds, people have different likes, easy, done. But if someone tells you they prefer the look of HDMI when you use gold-plated wires, they're clearly deceiving themselves, because as a digital signal there is no difference whatsoever. So the important question to ask is whether people can hear the difference. I will accept that some people have better/different ears from others, but the best way to demonstrate that ability is a double-blind test. Your standard is what 'sounds right'. Well, if you can reliably tell me that X technology sounds better than Y technology, without labels on the two sets of headphones in front of you, then great, that's all I wanted. I don't need any kind of research showing that a format is objectively 'better'. I just want someone to show that it's objectively different to human ears. If someone says they have a preference, but doesn't actually prefer either one in a blinded test, then the labels 'wacko' and 'religious' fit.
      - busterarm 13y ago
        Right. I'm trying to refer to the self-deception that people have when it comes to audio gear. A really common example is how many musicians and audiophiles end up buying power filters and claim they make the sound better. Often these people don't need the power filters and you can prove with documentation and test equipment that they a) don't need them and b) aren't doing anything to the sound. Are you playing out live in random clubs? Sure get a power filter (but that's not as important as a surge protector). Are you playing at home with modern wiring and not overloading your circuit? Don't waste your fucking money. So many musicians end up developing biases about what certain equipment is supposed to sound like. There are a few videos floating around comparing guitar amp/cab modeling gear to the real thing. A lot friends of mine have trouble picking them apart or getting them right in a blind listening test. Frequently the model has some tweaks that make it sound better... or a better description would be to say that it sounds more like what the musician expects that gear to sound like. Some amp X was used on such and such album and has Y sound and the model sounds like that amp does on the album. I'm frequently right in these blind tests and I end up telling people is that it's because I don't care about the gear and don't have any preconceived notions about what it should sound like. I just listen to the timbre and make my best guess.
__david__ 13y ago
So DSD is just storing [the equivalent of] the digital pulse part of a class-D amplifier? That seems completely pointless... My feeling is there's a one to one transform between the 1 bit world and the multi-bit world, which means that they're mathematically the same and any perceived differences are merely the result of poor A/B testing.
- busterarm 13y ago
  Pretty much spot on here.
voltagex_ 13y ago
But no one's talking about FLAC/DSD for archiving and MP3 for casual listening... which should be the point. The history of music (even if you don't like today's pop) should not be stored in 320 kilobit/s CBR.
qdog 13y ago
It sounds a lot like someone making money. You play these over your $150,000 speakers with $10,000 speaker wire and you can pretty much hear the money hitting the table. I heard this story on my way to work this morning and was just shaking my head. There are probably going to be a lot of people wanting to try out this newfangled $50 album, though.
r0h1n 13y ago
Here is a link to what must apparently be the new range of Sony hi-fi equipment the article talks about (but doesn't link to) in the first paragraph: http://www.whathifi.com/news/sony-launches-high-resolution-audio-product-range-and-hi-res-downloads-site http://www.whathifi.com/news/sony-launches-high-resolution-a...
deleted 13y ago
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26 points by joe_bleau 13y ago

Buge 13y ago

Are people even able to audibly tell a difference? Like in an ABX test?

The very fact that 5.6MHz sampling rates are even a thing intended for human listening makes me doubt this lady's sanity.

glassx 13y ago
It is intended for encoding, not for hearing. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-density_modulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-density_modulation
Dylan16807 13y ago
You're ignoring that the encoding is only a single bit deep. Compared to a CD, it's only four times the bitrate. It just happens to be drastically reformatted.

coin 13y ago

Audiophile (the unhealthy obsession with audio) has made it on NPR

busterarm 13y ago

Whether DSD is even good or not is still something hotly debated. It's not at all suitable for editing. I'm really scratching my head why NPR reported a story that is so one-sided. The fact-checking here is poor. They're presenting it as DSD vs MP3 when really it's DSD vs PCM.

dietrichepp 13y ago

It would be nice if someone could demonstrate that DSD sounds better than PCM in a double-blind experiment. Just as a sanity check, you could record the PCM from the DSD output to discover whether PCM is perceptually transparent. Advocates of DSD are often skeptical of double-blind experiments, which itself is a red flag.

busterarm 13y ago
> Advocates of DSD are often skeptical of double-blind experiments, which itself is a red flag. Exactly. There's a lot of wackos out there in the music biz though. People have religious beliefs about certain products/technologies/sounds without any solid reasoning behind it.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Whats wrong with that? We don't question tastes in art, why audio? I don't need logic or research or the agreement of others, I just know what sounds right to me, and that is perfectly solidly reasonable. Ears are as weird and personal as eyes, as is our interpretation. You wont necessarily hear what I hear. On top of that, over time they change. No need for words like wacko and religious. Unless of course you doing mind if I fire back with a few judgmental words of my own?
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    I think you have a different sort of 'taste' in mind than busterarm does. It is a very reasonable thing to prefer record over CD. They have different sounds, people have different likes, easy, done. But if someone tells you they prefer the look of HDMI when you use gold-plated wires, they're clearly deceiving themselves, because as a digital signal there is no difference whatsoever. So the important question to ask is whether people can hear the difference. I will accept that some people have better/different ears from others, but the best way to demonstrate that ability is a double-blind test. Your standard is what 'sounds right'. Well, if you can reliably tell me that X technology sounds better than Y technology, without labels on the two sets of headphones in front of you, then great, that's all I wanted. I don't need any kind of research showing that a format is objectively 'better'. I just want someone to show that it's objectively different to human ears. If someone says they have a preference, but doesn't actually prefer either one in a blinded test, then the labels 'wacko' and 'religious' fit.
    - busterarm 13y ago
      Right. I'm trying to refer to the self-deception that people have when it comes to audio gear. A really common example is how many musicians and audiophiles end up buying power filters and claim they make the sound better. Often these people don't need the power filters and you can prove with documentation and test equipment that they a) don't need them and b) aren't doing anything to the sound. Are you playing out live in random clubs? Sure get a power filter (but that's not as important as a surge protector). Are you playing at home with modern wiring and not overloading your circuit? Don't waste your fucking money. So many musicians end up developing biases about what certain equipment is supposed to sound like. There are a few videos floating around comparing guitar amp/cab modeling gear to the real thing. A lot friends of mine have trouble picking them apart or getting them right in a blind listening test. Frequently the model has some tweaks that make it sound better... or a better description would be to say that it sounds more like what the musician expects that gear to sound like. Some amp X was used on such and such album and has Y sound and the model sounds like that amp does on the album. I'm frequently right in these blind tests and I end up telling people is that it's because I don't care about the gear and don't have any preconceived notions about what it should sound like. I just listen to the timbre and make my best guess.

__david__ 13y ago

So DSD is just storing [the equivalent of] the digital pulse part of a class-D amplifier? That seems completely pointless... My feeling is there's a one to one transform between the 1 bit world and the multi-bit world, which means that they're mathematically the same and any perceived differences are merely the result of poor A/B testing.

busterarm 13y ago
Pretty much spot on here.

voltagex_ 13y ago

But no one's talking about FLAC/DSD for archiving and MP3 for casual listening... which should be the point. The history of music (even if you don't like today's pop) should not be stored in 320 kilobit/s CBR.

qdog 13y ago

It sounds a lot like someone making money. You play these over your $150,000 speakers with $10,000 speaker wire and you can pretty much hear the money hitting the table. I heard this story on my way to work this morning and was just shaking my head. There are probably going to be a lot of people wanting to try out this newfangled $50 album, though.

r0h1n 13y ago

Here is a link to what must apparently be the new range of Sony hi-fi equipment the article talks about (but doesn't link to) in the first paragraph: http://www.whathifi.com/news/sony-launches-high-resolution-audio-product-range-and-hi-res-downloads-site http://www.whathifi.com/news/sony-launches-high-resolution-a...

deleted 13y ago

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