Digital Music Files: 16/44.1, 24/88, 24/96, 24/192 - Page 8

Well, except that one of the things you should have picked up from this thread is how easily your ears can mislead you!

On that, I think we totally agree. I would hope that this issue is not decided based on hype or numbers or theories, but is decided by actual sound quality as perceived by unbiased listeners.

Yes, brain can cheat you.
Today, I was working with my computer and wanted to listen a RayWilliamJohnson Youtube video, so when I pushed play button started to listen a wisper at a very low volume for a second, then I realised that the PC speakers where OFF, so this wispering was only in my head

Brain is very tricky, sometimes you listen more detail and some times you just can´t listen that detail, WE ARE A BUCH OF WACKOS!!!!

As near as I can tell M&M is the best that has been published to date.
No doubt it could have been done better, and no doubt better could be done
today (or back then) - if somebody was willing to fund the study, or, do it themselves.
It would take considerable work/money/time. As near as I can tell
nobody has felt it worth the effort - or if they have, they decided
to keep the results to themselves. I might be wrong, but I think
M&M were just interested amateurs. They put in a lot of time and effort into
their study, and likely more time and effort in getting it published.
Yes it was flawed by not testing the samples they used for frequencies
that could not be resolved by 44.1 sampling rate. Too bad the reviewers
did not catch this at the time. I thought I had the study on my computer,
but can not find it, if memory serves one of the authors learned to
tell the difference between raw and resampled signals by listening for noise at
very high gain/volume.

I think a little history might be in order. I'm not a historian,
and I was not involved in any way with the music industry (except as a consumer).
Also my memory is not perfect - apparently memory fades with age just like
hearing does. Basically I have no facts to back up what I'm about to say,
and likely am wrong. With those disclaimers in place here is what I remember.

The 16/44.1 standard we call "redbook" was developed in the late 70's.
It was the best that could be done at the time (the digital processing
was pushing the limits of what was practical, and it was theoretically
good enough). It took a few years to go from developing the standard
to make product available - some time in the early 80's I think. Unfortunately
back then they were still just learning - some content was not well
made - and most players were not very good. It took them a good ten
years or so to really start realizing the potential of 16/44.1.
Many people still remember those bad old days, and that memory is stuck in their heads.
Of course people were clamoring for more - they wanted digital, but
they wanted better digital. It is about that time that SACD and DVD-A
came about. Of course companies wanted to get their new product to market
asap. At the same time people were learning how to really use the
capabilities of 16/44.1. It seems many (most) people are now happy
enough with 16/44.1 for play back of well mastered material. In fact it turns
out your can further compress the signal and not tell the difference
(but that is a different conversation)

I encourage you to play with this. Try it for your self.
Can you tell the difference between 24/192 and 16/44.1?
How about the difference between "lossless" and 320 mp3?

I should probably not hit submit - since no doubt there are huge holes
in this, but I will, since it took time to type. don't take it personally if I do not reply to your reply

Speaking of history, there's a good deal of revisionism going on in this debate. The crucial "issue" now is the question of whether the disks M&M used were true hi-res recordings—i.e., that they contained content that was beyond the capability of CD (which would have to be either dynamic range above 93 dB or FR above 22 kHz).

But the claims for hi-res at the time did not focus on this (and for good reason, if you think about it). Much attention was paid to the idea that the higher resolution could more accurately recreate the analog sound wave—any analog sound wave, not just ultra-high-frequency stuff. It was a seemingly sophisticated version of the smoothing-out-the-staircase canard. The bible of such pro-SACD bullsh!t was Robert Stuart's JAES piece from 2004, which M&M take direct aim at.

The whole complaint about true hi-res recordings was after-the-fact theory-saving. M&M demolished Stuart, so the SACD partisans had to find another nail to hang their hat on. Bizarrely, or perhaps predictably, they chose to focus on the lack of ultrasonic content—a theory that, for all intents and purposes, comes to us pre-debunked. And they still don't have any data supporting the audible benefits of hi-res.

I worked with true 16 bit, 200 KHz sampling rate digital in 1971-2, but the ADC plus a number of DACs cost about a quarter of a million dollars and was a very solid, heavy deep 7 RU cabinet, if memory serves.


For a price.


Good enough was thought to be 14/44 (still true!), but the extra 2 bits were added because it was what the computer people needed, and they drove the market enough so that audio could ride their coat tails.


In fall 1982 CD product was dribbling out and by spring it was readily available in most large cities - say Detroit. I bought my CDP 101 at the Sony store on 8 mile Road for $932 including tax. The best record stores in town had about a dozen titles. I traveled a lot on business in 1983-94 and found lodes of dozens of titles in places I expected - Chicago and Manhattan, and places I didn't - Bismark ND - the rich farmer's market.


There was probably a higher percentage of well-made CDs that sounded great in 1983 then there is today! Yes there were a few faux paux, but it was not nearly as bad as the golden ears starting making it out to be in the late 1980s.


Absolutely not! The first 12 CDs that came out totally blew away the analog recordings that were available to consumers. The first 2 players were orders of magnitude better than the best analog players, tape or LP.

I base this on retro-testing, both on the bench and proper listening tests.

I still have working a CDP 101 (one of the 2 first players on the market) and know of another. If I demoed them, and CDs from the first 12 ever to make the stores, in a blind test, you would not be able to distinguish them from the best equipment and media of today, other than perhaps the style of the music would be dated.


What really happened is that CDs sounded different than LPs. They were typically brighter and if you had the woofers to do it right, they were far clearer on the bottom end.

Those of us who had been listening to high speed 2 track masters in studios, and live music over headphones immediately recognized what we heard from CDs - music liberated from the obvious audible discrepancies of consumer analog.

What really happened is that many people were psychologically programmed to enjoy LPs and some of them aren't bothered by the obvious audible deficiencies to this day! The brain science to understand this came to light in the past decade or so.


Their error was that they believed those who were still hanging onto their pre-programming for tolerating LPs. There is nothing significantly better sounding than a CD and can never be such a thing as long as the existing bottlenecks to recording and listening (which are not the electronics or media) are still in play.


In 1983 we may or may not have known enough about the limitations of hearing and recording and playback to understand why the CD was an overkill medium. By Y2K many of us did, and the key to that was understanding what the perceptual coder developers were getting away with throwing away.

Many insiders knew very well why SACD and DVD-A were solutions looking for a problem and I clearly, forthrightly and publicly predicted their failure in the mainstream. I was not alone, except maybe in terms of doing so very clearly in public.


No and no as long as I restrict myself to almost all commercial recordings listening normally. If I cherry pick and fabricate media and/or do tests that are asymmetrical with normal listening, maybe.


I know what happened - I was there and lived it on the inside and on the edge.

I don't know if it is revisionism or simply recognizing that things move on.


If the question is about the technical need for the so-called hi rez playback technology, and that is how it has been stated, then yes.


Depends on how much you were distracted by the golden ear hype of the day.


Yes, there were a lot of misapprehensions. Stairsteps, empty spaces between voltage levels, and all sorts of trash that played to naive intuition.


Exactly.



That, and the Fielder paper from more than 10 years before that.


Exactly. There are some strange things going on it Montreal and other places, but so far the resurrection of SACD and DVD-A has not gotten any serious market share.

DVD-A is sort of buried in the the latest flavors of Dolby for Blu Ray, and I guess there is some talk of resurrecting DSD on Blu Ray.

Is anybody going to do any mass re-releases of CD music-only recordings this way? I doubt it. The economy is tough and the people in the music business who are still employed want to stay that way! Heads rolled after DVD-A and SACD tanked.