On 18 July 2007 at 16:31, "Stuart Allie" <Stuart.Allie@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That would have been soooooooo much more useful if you had done your > listening as a double-blind test. I still have the DVD-A. > That is, if you had listened to the > tracks in a random order and then compared your listening experience to > the track formats after the fact. I suppose we could bring in another party and do just what you say. > As it is, you could have experienced > a major case of "confirmation bias". You were expecting the tracks to > sound better, and that's exactly what you heard. It's hard for me as the subject to say for sure, but I don't think I had much bias. I had a lot of curiosity, not ever hearing the higher resolutions before. > I don't doubt that > there *was* an audible difference between, say, the mp3 and the 16/44.1 > track, but by not doing a double blind test, your results really aren't > useful. Shame about that. In my message I gave the qualitative statements. There were some objective measures as well. For instance, coming back from 24/192 land into MP3 land, the piano had a distinctive sound of a flanger on it, and I'd presume it's artifacts from compressing to MP3. Between 16/44.1 and 24/96 details like the rustle of the drummers brushes on the snare became apparent, as did the sounds of customers eating at tables. Going from 24/96 to 24/192 the spacial perception improved, but the timbre of the instruments didn't change much, if at all. At 24/192 more details of customer movements, things like putting on a coat, became more identifiable. For the string quartet, bow noises showed up at 24/96, and traffic outside showed up at 24/something. When we discovered things like this, we went back down the quality chain to see where the line of demarcation was between being able to hear a feature or not being able to hear it. That's still not what you were after, but it's a bit more objective than my earlier writing. > I'd love to get hold of that disc and have > the equipment to listen to it properly. I got mine for free from Minnetonka. You might write for one; that's what I did. > From my reading over the last couple of years what I've learned is that > the evidence says that: > - 24 bit sounds better than 16 bit at the same sampling frequency > because of increased dynamic range I've read the same, and it's easy to see why. Especially if music is going to be compressed to 16-bit CDs, then starting with greater than 16 bits seems like a must, or that 16-bit CD will be more like 12-bit sound (with the number of effective bits being strongly influenced by the amount & type of compression). > - 96kHz sounds better than 48/44.1kHZ only when the processing of the > digital data has introduced aliasing and other artefacts related to the > sampling frequency. So 96kHz tracks often *can* sound better than > 48kHz, but only because of poor processing somewhere along the way. Don't forget that the whole signal path up to the A/D converter needs to be clean (free from noise & distortion as much as possible) or whatever "dirt" that exists in the potential bandwidth added by the sample rate will be captured, whereas less would be captured at 44.1kHz. > - 192kHz is totally unnecessary. I don't know enough to comment on that. > Hope that helps somewhat. Check out Bob Katz's web site and book > "Mastering Audio" for more that you could ever possibly want to know > about this stuff :) I'll add it to my list. Thanks.... -- Kevin _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
