3 ms·

I think the conclusion ("there was no evidence that 24-bit audio could be appreciably differentiated from the same music dithered down to 16-bits") is not corre

by kmike84 12y ago

I think the conclusion ("there was no evidence that 24-bit audio could be appreciably differentiated from the same music dithered down to 16-bits") is not correct. EDIT: I'm not sure if the conclusion is correct or not, but the logic that lead to the conclusion has flaws. 50%/50% accuracy means a random guess - people can't distinguish 24-bit from 16-bit. But if accuracy is less than 50% for a large enough sample it means the difference between 24-bit and 16-bit is heard. Article said: "As a subgroup (total of 31 respondents), the self identified respondents with a "good amount" of musical background did not do well. In fact, this group of respondents consistently scored worse than the combined result." People with persumably better ears ("musicians" and "hardware reviewers") were less accurate than regular people, especially on Vivaldi. I think this means they did well. This means they heard the difference - it is not possible to be significantly less accurate than 50% without hearing a difference. They failed on deciding which one is "better", but they were able to differentiate 16-bit music from 24-bit.

svantana 12y ago
But the article itself states that this difference was not statistically significant, and should therefore be attributed to randomness?
- kmike84 12y ago
  The article does state that the difference is statistically significant: "Curiously, the musician group seemed to select the 16-bit dithered Vivaldi as the "better" sounding version (p-value 0.047)."
  - ZoFreX 12y ago
    I'm not convinced it is, though. If you take a sample of 140 people and divide it into a dozen different cohorts, it's pretty likely that one of those groups will show a difference that would be statistically significant if observed across the whole sample.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    How many individual comparisons were made throughout the article? A dozen? Two? You'd expect a p-value less than 0.05 by chance about one time in 20, and indeed this p-value is just marginally below that threshold. I wouldn't view this one result as particularly significant in that context.
Joeboy 12y ago
> People with persumably better ears ("musicians"... I's expect musicians to generally have worse hearing than similarly-aged non-musicians, especially in the non-young demographic. Although it's a moot point as it looks like the results were driven by chance rather than hearing ability.
- huuu 12y ago
  There is a difference between how much you can hear and how much you can distinguish in what you can hear. The first decreases when you age (or when you are exposed to loud sounds). The last can be trained. So I agree that it's likely that musicians have worse hearing (playing in a orchestra can/will give you ear damage) but they are trained to distinguish sounds.
danbruc 12y ago
This means they heard the difference - it is not possible to be significantly less accurate than 50% without hearing a difference. For small sample sizes being far of is quite likely, for example the chances for getting at most 1/3 of 31 (11 or less) 50/50 guesses right is 1 in 14.
- kmike84 12y ago
  I agree that sample sizes are small, and there is no proper analysis done - the difference can be only from a chance. But the article states the difference is statistically significant and then draws a wrong conclusion from it (not accurate => can't differentiate).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by kmike84 12y ago

svantana 12y ago

But the article itself states that this difference was not statistically significant, and should therefore be attributed to randomness?

kmike84 12y ago
The article does state that the difference is statistically significant: "Curiously, the musician group seemed to select the 16-bit dithered Vivaldi as the "better" sounding version (p-value 0.047)."
- ZoFreX 12y ago
  I'm not convinced it is, though. If you take a sample of 140 people and divide it into a dozen different cohorts, it's pretty likely that one of those groups will show a difference that would be statistically significant if observed across the whole sample.
- Steuard 12y ago
  How many individual comparisons were made throughout the article? A dozen? Two? You'd expect a p-value less than 0.05 by chance about one time in 20, and indeed this p-value is just marginally below that threshold. I wouldn't view this one result as particularly significant in that context.

Joeboy 12y ago

> People with persumably better ears ("musicians"... I's expect musicians to generally have worse hearing than similarly-aged non-musicians, especially in the non-young demographic. Although it's a moot point as it looks like the results were driven by chance rather than hearing ability.

huuu 12y ago
There is a difference between how much you can hear and how much you can distinguish in what you can hear. The first decreases when you age (or when you are exposed to loud sounds). The last can be trained. So I agree that it's likely that musicians have worse hearing (playing in a orchestra can/will give you ear damage) but they are trained to distinguish sounds.

danbruc 12y ago

This means they heard the difference - it is not possible to be significantly less accurate than 50% without hearing a difference. For small sample sizes being far of is quite likely, for example the chances for getting at most 1/3 of 31 (11 or less) 50/50 guesses right is 1 in 14.

kmike84 12y ago
I agree that sample sizes are small, and there is no proper analysis done - the difference can be only from a chance. But the article states the difference is statistically significant and then draws a wrong conclusion from it (not accurate => can't differentiate).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]