4 ms·

It's not only the difference (or none) between 16 or 24-bit, but it's mostly about the quality of the DAC that is being used - in this case a very high-end one.

• Shivetya 13y ago
  without the big name attached I doubt it would have had much traction. Its merely a very good marketing exercise. Snake oil for the 21st century. No better than all the joke techies used to make about HDMI cables. I always like Alan Parson's quote, audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment
  • ANTSANTS 13y ago
    A 24-bit sample depth is not completely useless and silly in the way that gold plated HDMI cables are. You can get a real improvement in dynamic range with 24-bit samples, allowing a song to have quiet parts and loud parts with no loss in quality in either, which is hard to do with 16-bit samples without losing quality for the quiet parts or using dynamic range compression and having everything sound roughly the same. Of course, few people actually want impressive shifts in volume in their music, because prog is dead and no one wants their headphones to suddenly blow their eardrums out. Gotta compress the shit out of that dubstep for the kiddies! Somewhat ironically, greater bit depth in audio makes a bigger difference for film than most music because of this.
• nollidge 13y ago
  And it's a bulky weird triangle shape, which to me is the stupidest part of the whole endeavor.
  • arrakeen 13y ago
    It's not portable in the sense of an iPod or an iPhone where you carry it around with you in your pocket. It's portable in the sense that you keep it on your desk at home, grab it and take it to work, then sit it down on your desk at work. The design is not for everyone, but I think when viewing it through this use case, it has a much more successful design than a flat form-factor like most portable music players
    • nollidge 13y ago
      (i realize this is two days old, but i just saw your reply) But... they could have just made it flat, and then it fits the use case you laid out AND the pocket one. Like, there is zero advantage to the bulky shape.
• calinet6 13y ago
  Another problem is that "hear the difference" is so often defined as "hear the difference between 30 second samples repeated a dozen times." The testing impacts our experience immensely. It isn't equivalent enough to real music, and the human auditory sensory perception and recall systems just aren't perfect enough to make accurate judgements in those test cases. When testing you end up looking for discrepancies you can identify with words and identifiable momentary observations, things like "I can definitely hear this passage the notes are more muddled together in the compressed file." But you miss so many things that show up as minor feelings of unidentifiable hunches. Of course, you could change the format of the test, but even still, "identifying" is not "listening." Things you can not identify, or talk about, or remember, or form sentences about, can still impact your musical experience. Our ears and brains are complex, and the range of input that is perceived subconsciously is astounding. We accept this for vision, for taste, for emotions, for memory, but for some reason not for audio. The simple feelings that you can't put your finger on can be important to the experience even if they can't be identified. But if you start to talk about "realism" and "emotion" and "feeling," you are immediately blacklisted by the empirical measurement mafia. There is so much truth to the fact that scientific measurements and empiricism are important in determining the decisions you make about your audio storage and listening. You shouldn't pay money for things you can prove won't make a difference, and there are so many things out there that fit that bill. But we shouldn't throw out entire possibilities of discussion just because they influence parts of our experience that are subconscious or unidentifiable in an A/B test. Again, I'm not saying we should disregard scientific evidence, just that listening tests set a limit that might not be accurate. We're finding only things that can be tested, and many parts of the audio experience don't fit the test. In this case, there are more bits down there, higher resolution at lower levels. It basically means you can turn up the amplification and receive more resolution regardless of amplified volume. But it also means you have more information, and that's worth something.
  • calinet6 13y ago
    Of course, shut down the infidel. Believers in the church of the empirical only here.