Digital Music Files: 16/44.1, 24/88, 24/96, 24/192 - Page 5

You'd think it was obvious, given that dynamic range compression is due to the aptly named "loudness wars".

I'm not on either side of this debate, I'm just pointing our dissenting opinions and disagreements with the sited reference. I have a smattering of sacds, mostly RCA living stereo SACD reissues that I remember my parents having as LPs. at 8 bucks a piece, I was fine with that. I avoid rock generally in sacd or any hi-rez format. What's the point of 9 in Nails in hi-rez?? I have some jazz (Dianna Krall) and others as well as classical on sacd or flac downloads. I have hundreds of cds. The hi rez stuff is more of an experiment since I got my Oppo-bdp-95. I can see one side where in acoustics (string and wind) the harmonics (overtones if you will or the mathematical term fundemental frequencies like the solution to the problem of a vibrating string) could have an effect on tonal qualities in sound, but I can also understand that it may be one thing in a classical live performance in a concert hall and questionable if its dectable in a recording of varying bit depth and sample rate.

As far as why why didn't reviewers call out these releases when issued. Well many do. Many discs have been exposed as upsampled content in various reviews. Norah Jones for example was called out. Others in the sited study are as well. From SACD.net:

The Meyer / Moran paper proceeds by theoretically starting with:

(a) a high-rez SACD, and then

(b) downsamples that to CD quality,

and then plays both (a) and (b) to audiences.



The difference between (a) and (b) should be:

(i) the loss of high frequency information above 20kHz (CD only supports up to 20kHz, whereas SACD theoretically supports uo to 100kHz and practically 50kHz after filtering). Even though the human ear does not hear above 20 kHz, the interplay of harmonics etc can effect frequencies which we do hear.

(ii) increased quantisation, loss of information etc from downsampling from hi-rez DSD resolution (say effectively 20 bit 192kHz) to CD quality resolution (16 bit 44.1 kHz).


The first indication of a problem with the Meyer / Moran paper is that it is fundamentally inconsistent with the earlier results of

T. Oohashi, E. Nishina, M. Honda, Y. Yonekura, Y. Fuwamoto, N. Kawai, T. Maekawa, S. Nakamura, H. Fukuyama, and H. Shibasaki. Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: Hypersonic effect. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83(6):3548–3558, 2000.

http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/83/6/3548


which finds that, for subjects in double-blind tests:
*** EEG monitoring of their brain activity showed statistically significant enhancement in alpha-wave activity in their brains when the high-frequency sounds were included,

*** The subjects in the study found the sound containing the high-frequency components to be more pleasant than the same sound lacking the high-frequencies.
.

Thus, item (i) alone ... the high-frequency spectrum in SACDs (and other hi-rez recordings) ... should give rise to a statistically significant difference in the Meyer and Moran paper too. This is before any effect from the quantisation downsampling is added in. And yet, Meyer / Moran fail to reference this paper, and fail to explain or account why they cannot reproduce the earlier results.


Resolving Meyer / Moran
____________________

So why do Meyer and Moran fail to reproduce earlier double-blind tests? And fail to find any differences? It turns out that many of the recordings that Meyer and Moran selected to play their testers were NOT hi-rez to start with. This provides the ridiculous situation that they start with CD quality recording, albeit sold on an SACD disc, and then 'convert/downsample' it back to CD. It almost beggars belief. A listing of recordings used by the authors is provided here:

http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm

For example, the Perahia Mozart SACD -- there is no hi-rez Mozart concerti recording by Perahia. There is one old analogue recording converted to DSD, and an early digital recording in the 80s that is basically CD quality to start with. Neither are appropriate to use in the test. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is also analogue, and would not contain high frequency sounds. Nor is it acoustic. Same goes for Alan Parsons project. The BSO, Saint-Saens, Organ Symphony SACD (RCA 82876-61387-2 RE1) is a 1959 recording.
Steely Dan, Gaucho is NOT Hi-rez: it is originally a 1980 LP /1984 RBCD release.
The Carlos Heredia, Gypsy Flamenco is not hi-rez either: it is a mid-1990s recording that pre-dates the entire SACD format.


Under the circumstances, it is difficult to find anything of interest or thought-provoking about the Meyer / Moran paper ... The only real quandary is perhaps how this ever got published? The whole thing is frankly somewhat professionally embarrassing for all concerned.

The first indication of a problem with your argument is that it relies on an age-old paper that's already been thoroughly debunked. Search on Oohashi over at HydrogenAudio for details.

And by the way, Oohashi et al reported that people could NOT distinguish between music with and without hi-res content in listening tests. So how are M&M contradicting them at all?


And what about the majority of M&M's test disks, which you did not list here? You're doing a lot of cherrypicking here.


Given that you appear to have only a glancing familiarity with this literature, I'm not sure you're a reliable judge of what might be professionally embarrassing in this field.

I can say the same thing with your cited reference. You really think it received the appropriate peer reviews in that journal???
Or, it just confirms your beliefs?

As I tried to indicate, I'm fairly much a noob here and have no passionate opinion on either side of the argument. I'm just pointing out differences of opinion do exist.

On thing, is my wife is s psychologist. So tonight we are going to have a discussion about the merits of blind or double blind tests. (And she says I'm not interested in her work )

Agreed, that was not my interpretation, just part of the sa-cd.net quote.

One follow up question though. Given I never really took a side, am admittedly a noob in the field, and amjust pointing things out and reading the thread more of an education why did you find it necessary to levy a personnal attack against me? I could of thought of many more appropriate responses.

sadly, this little secret appears lost on the person who is going on and on about "loss of dynamics"...

keep on educatin' arny...

Differences of opinion exist about the age of the universe, too. That doesn't mean that a new article saying it's 14 billion years old has a problem because it's inconsistent with an older article saying it's 6,000 years old.

It is an established fact that humans (a few teenage girls excepted) cannot hear above 20 kHz. Repeated experiments over the course of decades have shown that imposing a brickwall low-pass filter at 20 kHz (or even lower!) generally has no audible consequences. The articles that have a problem are not the ones whose findings conform to this long-established science. The ones that have a problem are the few that contradict it. They're the ones that have some 'splaining to do, Lucy. There's an old saying in science: When you get an unexpected result, it probably means you screwed up the experiment.


Two requests:

1. When you quote, indicate clearly that it's a quote.

2. Don't quote twaddle.

I kept asking myself "what the hell do EEGs have to do with the conscious activity of listening to music?"

I was originally scheduled to participate in that test, but the electrodes kept shorting out on my beanie.

so you just happened to cite at random an argument that's anything but dispassionate?

Quote about the study you cited:


Being essentially a paid advertisement sounds like the typical practice in High End publications.

Your two substantive posts made no mention of your self-described noob status. And you failed to indicate that almost the entirety of those posts was material you lifted from somewhere else.

As for not taking a side, come on, grow up. There's a debate going on here. You posted very clearly on one side of that debate. You didn't even indicate clearly that you were quoting someone else the whole time. Under the circumstances, I'm having trouble feeling sorry for you.

Aside from my not putting quotations where I should (sorry about that) I don't think I've indicated I'm an expert or that I'm adamant in any belief that hi-rez audio is the next greatest format.

But do not fret, as an open and honest discussion without personal insults seems impossible (my psychologist wife has an opinion on that too I can't put down!), I'll bow out of this thread.

But we want to know what your wife has to say about double blind testing and will you accept her answer?

Really? I think you may then be presenting an image that you don't want because using the OOhashi tests as the gold standard by all others must be judged is what high rez advocates do. Those tests are wildly asymetrical with regular music listening and are completely discredited in most objective learned circles.


No, you're advocating diagreement with factual results.


So, you've got a vested interest - a $$kilobuck$$ investment in a wildly overpriced optical disc player that appears to full of essentially useless features from the scientific viewpoint.


Besides ignoring the strongest influences that lead to an absence of ultrasonic overtones in live performances which are acoustic, you're also implicitly advocating the idea that amounts of ultrasonics that are detectable with test equipment are always subjectively important.



Really? I properly cited a source that was publicizing this problem in 2003. Where are your cites and do any of them predate that publication at an highly inflential international audio conference? If they are derivatives, then they may be just copycats with a subjective twist.


Exposure is only a halfways measure. How many of the exposures gave a credible account of the actual sonic problem that related to the lack of ultrasonic content?




I disagree with the above terminology. Its grotesquely flawed in ways that should get a high school student in trouble with his physics project. The above is not a theoretical approach. A theoretical approach would probably start out with the fact that human ears lack the basic sensory means for detecting ultrasonic content. What is described aboev is an experimental design, which is a very practical thing. So much for the expertise on this advocacy group devoted to a dead format - SACD.


A little discrepancy here - the actual extent of the CD format is 22 KHz, not 20 KHz. A CD can properly and accurately reproduce 22.00 KHz signals with full fidelity of both amplitude, freqeuncy, phase, and dynamic range.


Another little discrepancy - the SACD format suffers from a massive reduction in dynamic range above about 20 KHz. In comparison DVD-A with 176 Khz sampling may stop responding at a few KHz lower frequency, but it does not necessarily degrade dynamic range above 20 KHz.


That might be a candy coating of the real problem. The real problem has been around the high fidelity art since no later than the 1950s. The basic concept is that "The wider you open the windows, the more trash flies in". Most of the strong signals that one sees > 20 KHz in real world recordings are irrelevant to the music. They are things like the harmonics of LCD display power supplies and switchmode power supplies for audio gear and other electronic equipment which are endemic these days.

(ii) increased quantisation, loss of information etc from downsampling from hi-rez DSD resolution (say effectively 20 bit 192kHz) to CD quality resolution (16 bit 44.1 kHz).


And that is the exact point where you make this fundamentally flawed paper that has failed to survive a hailstorm of academic and technical criticism for the past dozen or more years, into your gold standard.


Ignoring the fact that this paper is grievously flawed and widely disregarded by well-known academic and day-to-day engineers because of the many asymmetries between the test conditions and actual listening to so-called hi rez recordings by music lovers.


Not true. Meyer and Moran did their listening tests using the kinds of audio gear that audiophiles use, the kind of people that audiophiles are, the actual recordings that audiophiles listen to, and based their results on the conscious perceptions of audiophiles. Oohashi et al missed out on every point.


I guess that if you want to make your gold standard for subjective tests out of a 12 year old study that is widely, effectively and thoroughly discredited by experienced academics and practitioners from with impeccable credentials from around the world due to its obvious asymmetries with real world listening, you can. ;-)

The Meyer and Moran paper was an attempt to correct the obvious flaws of the Oohashi paper. It suffered from the widespread apparent fraud related to the careless vetting of material sold as high resolution recordings by the music industry that was known since 2003 as I have previously documented here.


The fact that Meyer and Moran didn't reference the Oohashi paper, and yet was accepted by the AES review board for publication was exactly due to the low esteem in which the Oohashi et al paper is held. I'm surprised that you apparently know nothing about this.


They got bushwhacked by what is apparently fraud in the music industry. Low rez recordings were sold as high rez recordings. They sold gold plated base metal as if it were 24 kt gold.


By taking the music industry at its word, they ended up including a lot of dross as if it were gold.


Agreed.


What beggars belief is the fact that the music industry continued this apparent fraud for the better part of a decade after being exposed in 2003. They were supported by audio's high end industry.


What's interesting that nobody from the music industry wrote a letter to the JAES admitting that the Meyer Moran paper was flawed by the fact that it took the music industry's claims and product labeling at face value.



The only people who need to be embarrassed is the music industry segment that executed this apparent fraud, and the high end reviewers who failed to blow the whistle on it for the past 8 or more years. I give the AES kudos for blowing the whistle in a way that protected them from litigation while exposing the effects of the fraud.

I can save people from searching because I wrote this up clearly for my book:

^^^^^Thanks, Ethan.

Very good question indeed and answers are nonexistent.

But, it is enough to satisfy the true believer as it keeps the belief alive and afloat.

Of course, they are indicative of activity in the brain. Many seem to listen without consciousness.

The idea of evaluating sound quality without consciously listening to it is absurd, and flatly contradicted by the florid verbosity used to describe it--"deeper, wider soundstage, more focused midrange",etc.

robert, my man...

in the immortal words of todd rundgren...we gotta get you a woman

Been there, done that...more times than you have any idea. Have anything of substance to contribute to the topic?

Bushwhacked indeed. It limits the conclusions that can be made concerning their work, and indicates that it is highly unlikely that any music recorded with standard recording techniques produces a audible difference based on format alone.
What it fails to determine is if specialized recording techniques designed to exploit the hi rez formats played back in a specialized listening environment produces an audible difference.
At this point in time, we don't need a study that looks at multiple 'audiophile' recordings, but rather one piece of work that exploits the capabilities of hi rez, recorded in a state of the art studio (ie not live), and played back in a pristine environment to a large sample of people, A/B against the exact same recording in redbook format.

Although, this un-level playing field might seem biased against CD if hi-rez can't win in that situation it would be proven that it is utterly unnecessary.
Frankly, for the vast majority of listeners even the theoretical advantage of hi rez is useless.

1. These hi-rez audio (stereo or 5.1) quickly become surreal. The science people (most but not all) are relentless and almost nothing new gets said.

2. You have to do it, in order to get some sense of it's value for you. At least that's what I plan on slowly doing.

3. Check the longer AVS thread that I ref'd earlier: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...9&postcount=15

Objectivists have to be "relentless" (as you put it), due to the enormous ability of human beings to abandon reason in making decisions.

I don't believe I used the word "Objectivists"

With regard to your above "abandon reason in making decisions" my observation is that everyone does it, including "science" people.

Yes, it was my term. What's your point?


It's true that "science" people are capable of making errors and engaging in wishful thinking (although the degree to which they do this is miniscule compared to what subjectivists and other mystics do). That's why EVERY scientific study MUST lay out its methodology so that it can be subject to critical peer review. But this hardly constitutes a criticism of science; rather, it's a strength.

I guess my implied smiley was too subtle.

damn the weaknesses of text

+1; Exactly