At what point does audio snake oil become fraud? - Page 15

Amir, *codecs matter*.


No, Amir, I claim you are misinterpreting that graph. I even cited text from that same documentation to that effect. But hey, go on Hydrogenaudio and prove me wrong. You're claiming to know what the LAME testers believe, after all. If you're scared to do it, I'll be happy to repost your claims over there and get the feedback.



I said 100 people picked at random from the street ...that is not quite the same as 'no matter who I pick from the street'. You're not a scientist, are you?



Hilariously, *no one* in that test got a statistically significant score. (And it was itunes encoding presumably AAC, circa 2007, not LAME, and the lower VBR was 160, not 192). As you admit, it was all rather 'anecdotal'.

The rest of your blabbering frankly made my eyes glaze over.

You mean, the several times in this very thread where Amir asked me what advice I'd give to buyers, and whether they should worry about amp difference? Where I gave answers so concise and unambiguous and consistent (and predictable, to tell the truth, if you've been paying any attention at all) that even you, after downing a 40 oz or two, should have understood? That memo? I think you missed it the first few times.

I always have, and still do, given that answer to that question, as when you asked me a couple of times on this thread. Sometimes just 'no', sometimes with explanation, depending on the question and questioner. So why are you still bloviating on?



Not when you ask me point blank 'yes or no', as you have. But as you see, I am *HAPPY* to expand on that.


Prove the claim that it doesn't typically matter because it's not typically audible, if amps and DACs are compared fairly? *You* prove that the commonly measured differences would likely be audible under those conditions. Btw, ever read Tom Nousaine's blind amp comparison reports in Stereo Review?

I give the answer I gave ON THIS THREAD: buy what meets your power needs, and has the features ( room correction, multi-format connectivity etc) you're interested in, and meets your price point, and don't discount overall build quality/mfr rep. Factor in WAF too if that matters in your house.

This, in various permutations of its elements, is the same answer other 'objectivists' have given you when asked what the important buying criteria are. It's what I believe, and it's how I choose my AVRs. Why can't you accept it? Are you thick? Or is that you want to see that answer from me on other threads? If so, go search. You're good at that, right?


Seriously, how many times do you need to be told something? Sheesh.

Again, WTF?

I don't think they should worry about the 'sound' of DAC or amps. Said as much half a dozen times, it feels like.


...unless they plan to shop exclusively in the clowny end of high-end audio. There, they run a significant risk of encountering silliness like belt-driven CD players and tubed DACs. Does Madrona sell these, Amir?

Not in that discussion. Or apparently in this one: http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/...d.php?t=532408

Did you honestly not know that if you decompress an MP3 file you get back the original file size? Would have saved me a lot of typing had I seen this thread earlier .


How could anyone misunderstand this graph?




You did. And I answered that the text you quoted clearly indicated that people even in double blind test can tell the difference -- opposite of what you claim.


Seeing that AVS thread above, I am not sure you understand what they are saying or what I am saying. I mean if you don't understand the simplest concept of what happens when you decompress a file, what hope is there that you really know what is even being discussed?


But somehow, across multiple testers, you didn't get lucky with them not identifying any of their own tracks .


Well, that is a shame because if you follow what is being written, here and elsewhere there is an opportunity to learn things rather than saying things and when challenged, have to go and get other people to defend it.

Since you so much trust their site, here is the last test I found there comparing LAME MP3 to iTunes AAC:



The test year ironically was 2007 -- same time as maximum PC article. So it was quite representative of what the two could do then, despite what you are claiming. In that sense then, the magazine used a superior codec/encoder to LAME MP3 and yet people still identified their own track *and* in the right order (i.e. 160 kbps vs 320kbps) in blind testing.

Honestly Krab. Is there a topic that you would not claim to know the full answer even beyond practicing engineers in that field? If your claim is to know more than me about perceptual codecs, with no schooling or work experience, surely there is no limit to what you know. Correct?

What is your regular profession if I may ask?

Don't worry krab (I CAN call you krab can't I?) I know The Stance (tm). No the memo has to reach the nether regions, you know, like I said, dipsyminion et al.


Oh, got it. Yeah, that is a good way to test the codecs.

BTW, WHY do we bother about compression?? I mean apart from a tool to bludgeon audiophiles with? How much does storage cost nowadays. Would have thought back in the day when we had to save space by not having the full date in the computer (remember the millenium bug!) compression made sense, but why nowadays??

Anyways, back to missing what was written, remember this??


Oh, looks like this is not the first time he has said it. Been drinking Krab?

Anyway, back to your challenge/brill idea. Yeah, let's 'prove' that lame compression is suitable. Remember all, we HAVE to take 100 people picked at random from the street. THAT will show that the very small percentage of the population who 'care' about sound also cannot hear the codec.

You're not a scientist are you. Heck, maybe you are, but still quite happy to cook the books to get the result you want eh?



Talking about not reading (or comprehending)

You had trouble following that? Amazing. This is what you complain about me saying:

"Well, once upon a time there was a forum where a couple of people were taking a beating to every audiophile there, claiming a $200 AVR was just as good as any other product and that a $1 DAC in a receiver performed the same as a dedicated DAC."

He is saying the second part is absolutely cool with him. You can't follow the argument that you started yourself?


Unbelievable. What a waste of time. How on earth is that different than what I said you claim above? If people don't have to worry about the sound of amps and DACs, then what I said above is the same thing. The flip flopping is just incredible. At least I can bookmark this post to avoid yet another round of it in the future of "who says we say that."


We sell no CD players of any type or tubed DACs (we left the tube off in that Nova loaner DAC -- it sounds awful with it on). We use PC music servers using asynchronous connection to DACs. Here is the one feeding the Paradigm speakers:



And the Mark Levinson/Revel side:



Hopefully that is enough proof so that you don't mimic diomaniac anymore .

BTW, our music is ripped into WMA Lossless which you no doubt think is overkill. So you may not want to come by, lest you be insulted by too much quality .

If we have a group of people, pluck one person from that group, then pluck one test from that one person where they got 3 for 3 correct, what statistical inference can be gleaned?

This is something I do not understand either. A couple of years back on Hydrogen Audio, I was being criticized by Krabapple and others on my recommendation to Stereophile's readers that they rip using a lossless codec rather than a lossy one. My reasoning was that even if a large percentage of someone's music collection would be transparently encoded using, say, AAC at 320kbps, there would still be many recordings that would not be. So for just those, you would still need to use a lossless codec.

As you don't know in advance which those recordings are, and to do multiple rips with different codecs and bitrates and compare would be extremely time-consuming, why not use lossless for everything? Given the low cost of data storage, the incremental cost would be negligible and you would _know_ that your rips would be 100% transparently encoded.

This common-sense approach (at least in my view) was apparently equivalent to blasphemy on HA. :-)

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Oh cool, Terry and Amir say all AVR amp/dacs sound the same.
With the weasel caveat: To the "general public".

Beware of Levinson products (amirm sell them by the way).
http://www.stereophile.com/content/daniel-hertz-m1

To be fair, the ML brand like amir...excuse me...his associates sell, is under the Harman umbrella. It retains only the namebrand for recognition.
Levinson (the guy/high end huckster) is not associated with those.

cheers,

AJ

In his own way, his continued ventures tend to damage whatever rep the ML name might have with Harman.

Precisely! But I'd like to see some graphs to back up your claims.

Well, it's true that storage costs are cheap enough these days. But it isn't just a matter of cost. The whole reason I ripped my entire collection in the first place was to have all of it portable. I used a 4GB iPod a few years ago and now I just take my huge clunky iPhone with me when I'm running outside, or working out in the gym, or on a plane, or in the car, or mowing the lawn. Even at 32GB, my iPhone has limited space that is shared with a bunch of other stuff which is far more mission critical than my music. When I ripped all my CD's, I used iTunes AAC at 192KHz. That's plenty good enough for the uses I listed above. I can't use canal phones running or in a car for safety reasons and the annoying footfall thumps. And even on a plane with canal phones, the background noise is high enough to override any concerns I have about the source material. And I really don't want to go through ripping my entire collection to a different format, painful time sucker. For any application with moderate background noise and/or moderate quality headphones, compression artifacts are not audible to me so, I'm happy. At home, I just use the archaic disc spinner thingy to que up a dozen tracks at a time.

Sure, but does that mean you also listen to those lossy files in your home system? Or do you still listen to the original CDs?


The context for my posting was listening in ideal circumstances, not while jogging. I don't think anyone would argue that AAC at 192kbps is audibly transparent with all music to all all listeners under all circumstances, which is what I feel the goal of high fidelity should be.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Speaking of Storage, I just received 2 3TB drives. Which are replace 6 1TB drivers. I have reached 3TBs of movies and music now but its nice to have them on one drive (for portability, I travel a lot and its nice to have 600 movies )


3TB for $100 is SICK!!! Im hoping Iphone5 has 64Gig space or larger so I can add more music to mine.

Precisely. Should have been obvious that this was the reason for why "lossy", smaller file sizes cannot yet be rendered obsolete.

Until we have multi-hundred GB storage sized portable music players, there will be a need for smaller file sizes. I tried putting a bunch of flac files on my 8GB Sansa mp3 player and boy did that thing ever fill up quickly! Deleted them all off the Sansa player and converted my flac files to something smaller.

Many people like to have a large library of music to choose from, immediately available. Some even prefer to have their entire music library at the fingertips. They don't want to have to do a lot of library fiddling, constantly removing some songs/albums from their portable players to make room for other, new music.

Of course, I still have my lossless flac files on my home computer and available for home stereo system playback. As do many.

So true.......

I have 150Gig but I seldom get to hear most of the songs because my hobbies/life choices do not have me sitting the same room too much.

Big deal. I picked up a few new 2TB drives about 4 months ago for $60 each, so call me when 3TB drops to $90 to finally draw even.

Truth be told, it was a price mistake, so I lucked out.

There are a number of solutions to that. In my case I rip in WMA Lossless and my sync app to my music player on the fly converts them to WMA VBR (or other format/rate of my choosing).

Another solution is to keep a shadow copy permanently in MP3/AAC or whatever.

The most time consuming part of your music server is ripping the CDs. You don't want to do that twice. Rip into lossless and then there are many options to get portable versions.

BTW, when I am on the road, I don't take all of my music. I assign ratings to them and only take my favorite tracks. That shrinks the amount of music you need to put on your portable device by a larger percentage.

Nice Score

All these debates about audibility and such but one thing is for sure, the technolgical advances in my lifetime are amazing. My brother died about 20 years ago and he would be amazed at the changes if he had lived. He always hated having to store records and even CD's and the amount of information that can be stored on small devices now would boggle his mind.

I don't know that Terry would add that caveat. I let him speak to that.

For me, yes, I screen people based on hearing ability when talking about what is or is not "audible." You know, we are talking about "sound waves." And your ear is involved in hearing said "sound waves" to use your favorite language.

I post the results of the MP3/AAC test earlier. You see those vertical bars? They show variations in scoring between people. So there is great proof point (there and in every test like it) that hearing ability varies. So considering that factor in making a determination is logical and required based on real test of "sound waves" and humans.

The militant objectivist on the other hand seems to think everyone has the identical hearing ability so the qualification must be a whether the situation is "typical," the music "random," the equipment "not broken," the amplifier "not clipping," the CD player using "not using belts," the DAC not using "tubes," the listener "not trained," and the sun not coming out of west .

Your weasel words are just that. Vague, cover your behind, including cases that no one cares about (broken equipment, really?), situations where differences are accepted and not debated (tube sound), etc. That is why the adjective fits. That, and the fact that you claim to have simple rules for what matters in audio and what doesn't. But when in presence of someone would could challenge you, you get unsure and throw these words around just in case.

For those of us who acknowledge the complexity of audio and human hearing system, having qualifications would actually be fine, putting aside this upside down case that we are discussing now.

+1

I have 2 Iphones, 2 Itouch and 3 AVRs now in my house with Airplay. Not only that but the single best addition for me (having two young kids) is netflix online in every room......no more scratched DVDs or CDs in my world!!!!

oh, Of course I purchased $$$ of Apple and Netflix stocks last year

Indeed. Did you know that when DVD was being designed it almost had no copy protection because no one thought you could ever store it anywhere or ever have bandwidth to transmit it? Even on AVS just four or five years ago, people would fight the concept of anyone affording the space to store their movies at all. Yet you can buy a $100 drive that can store ~100 of your blu ray movies.

There is a great line I read in a research study long time ago that had to do with whether people would ever store their music on a portable device: "people overestimate the nature of change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term!" So to be fair, we are often guilty of getting ahead of ourselves based on what the technology can do for us .

The first part of that axiom btw is the core thesis of an article I just wrote for Widescreen Review magazine, talking about future of video distribution to the home.

My Apple iPod Classic has 160GB, my iPad 64GB. I use playlists for syncing so I don't see why I need use lossy formats at all.

On the subject of data storage pricing, I bought my first "large" hard drive in 1993 to use for my music mastering. It was a 2GB drive which costs $2000, ie, $1000/GB! I saw in Best Buy this week a 2GB drive for $99, ie, less than 5 cents/GB! To continue to argue that using lossless files represents any kind of storage problem seems pointless

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Thanks. I look forward to reading the article.

Typical subjectivist red herring. No one disputes this (except the strawmen created by your little minds). On the same token, self delusional ability varies too right? Or will you claim it does not?
Nor does any of this have jack shyte to do with DACs and amps in AVR's....unless amir has that data too? Does amir have the same data set for amps? For DACs? HDM...ooops.
Continuously hiding behind "data"...of utter irrelevance.


More fabrications from the weak little mind of the "more objectivist than all here combined".


Blah, blah, blah.
Amir:
1) Where is your certification for your claimed (self assessed) "expert listener" status. Show it.
2) What $600-$700 AVR for best "critical/expert listener" amp/dac "performance"?? (your repeated no answer provided the answer ).


Yes, the human hearing system is complex enough to hear ghosts and DAC "performance". No denying that misdirection.
But what we focus on is your claims about amp/dac "performance" (never mind your outright fabrications about blind HDMI tests which you have all but admitted were typical subjectivist delusional casual listening at home).
Specific question (again) amir: How would Earl improve his "performance" by using one of your...um, associates, $500 DACs, instead of the "$200 (pioneer) AVR's '$1' internal DAC"??
Again, no answer provides an answer.

cheers,

AJ

oh, btw, do you consider your former employee JJ to be an "objectivist"?
More/less so than you?

For your needs and setup, no, you don't. But you are not everyone.



I just did a couple posts ago.

Many people have a smaller sized iPod or mp3 player or smartphone which they use to do much of their music listening (not to mention in some cases, podcasts & video taking up additional storage space). And they might have very large collections which will not fit on 64GB or 160GB sized storage. Or they simply prefer the comfort and convenience of knowing a large portion or even their entire library is always available to them. And they can still generate playlists on the go from within this library, not having to be at home in order to do so.

In other words, bordering on the repetitive here, not everyone is you.

Being a magazine editor, I would have thought that you would have been practiced at thinking in terms of a market to whom you must serve. Finger on the pulse of the music listening public and all that. Albeit, many of these folks aren't the kind found subscribing or reading Stereophile. But some of them are, in fact.