Out of Pod Experience

Y'know, you have the same problem that younger filmmakers have now, that is resulting in almost every single blockbuster release this summer tanking horrifically at the boxoffice.

They can only understand the technical aspects of filmmaking, and know nothing of much less understand, The Language of Cinema.

Yes, but that's my point. In photography you can see the differences quite clearly, in music, nope.
It has everything to do with signal information, and acuity - when you're looking at a photograph your brain is processing the image based on longterm exposure to the medium; the same information. Your eye can also see more colours than any of the colour-spaces that can be described with common 8-bit images. You can literally perceive every pixel and the colour of it.

With (CD) audio your brain is *not* telling you it's perception of each frame of music. You hear a snare drum, you don't get 90,000 samples with a resolution of 8-bits per channel into your perception system, your brain has already made massive amounts of assumptions and discarded most sounds out of your perceptual space - this is how an MP3/AAC file can discard 80+% of the audio signal and you can't tell the difference - because the codec knows what you can't perceive and discards it.
This is a very good thing, because if your brain didn't lock onto certain audio signals and cues and push that to your perception, we'd not be able to do things like hold conversations in a noisy space, or pick your conversation out in a restaurant over the others.
With raw CD audio, it's more complex than that - the 44.1khz sample rate means it can represent, with no deviation from source, every frequency between 0 and 22,050hz - this is wider than the human hearing range and so we simply can't perceive the difference in-between that, and a source that also has things going on over 22khz.
Indeed, not only can people not double-blind 44.1khz/16bit CD from Vinyl or 24bit/48khz, but you can go quite far below 44.1 as a sampling frequency before people start being able to spot the difference. Useful if you want to apply quite heavy compression.

For any other purpose, a medium which is literally designed to be able to hold any frequency the human ear can hear is good enough

n.b. if you're over 30, good luck hearing much above 15-16k anyway.

What matters to which medium is better is whether or not you can perceive a difference between one medium and another. Which people can't.
The rest of it is just you convincing yourself the above isn't true in whatever way you can.

Do you want me to believe in fairies, instead? Yes, when discussing facts, facts tend to be pretty relevant. I am sorry this is inconvenient for your argument built on flowery thinking and invented nonsense.

You could have clicked on the link and seen it was independent. Or, you can use any search engine of your choice to determine the same information based on sources you find independent enough.
On searching, the only people I can find talking up a storm about how great 24bit audio is, are people who are writing about it on a page where it's sold.

Huh.

Weird.

You get the same thing with video equipment nowdays. I've heard lots of complaint from older folks that HD video looks "too real" to them. When you come to expect a certain amount of distortion, any improvement or degradation of signal seems "wrong".

Indeed I can hear degradation on the high and low end with any mp3 below 320 Kbps. That said with a good quality recording I can usually tell the difference between 320 and flac. These days with the prevalence of the loudness war and the general tendency towards crap quality recordings (don't get me started on the massive amount of autotuning) it's hard to tell the difference on some of the newer stuff.

I use flac exclusively for my digital copies because I actually run a good quality stereo setup on my computer. Xonar ST output to a vintage pioneer sx-1250 (in excellent condition with minimal reconditioning) which outputs to a pair of floor standing speakers and a class a/b fully regulated 600 watt rms subwoofer setup. I have a flat output from 20-25k hz with audible output from 5-30k hz (I use test tones and a db meter to confirm). If you're running a set of junk speakers or headphones you wouldn't notice the difference between mp3 and flac let alone vinal and digital..


I actually have that issue when watching HD tv on a top end tv setup. It just looks weird and way too detailed for my older brain to comprehend properly.

Fact is that the human ear picks up sounds through tiny hairs. There is only so much space inside an ear and each hair needs space to vibrate in order to pick up its frequency, which understandably limits the number of hairs one can have inside an ear. As a result of this scientific fact have the so called independent audio experts decided that each human ear has got exactly 576 tiny hairs and that these must grow in an harmonic pattern!

Now do take a look at people and their ears and their hairs and tell me that this is all right.

It is all right when one makes an assumption like this in order to reduce the size of audio data, but to use it to say that nobody could ever hear a difference between compressed audio and the original is just plain ignorant. It is like saying that all ears and all hair was the same, which is nonsense.

Unless you have followed scientific method in your experiments/testing you cannot say anything factually about this, sorry.

Eliminating all variables in recording and output, this audio expert in 1984 could not succeed in a double-blind study where the digital signal was produced at ~13 bits.

And here you come, claiming you can 'tell the difference' when today's digital conversion is done around 24 bits.

So I guess, in your double-blind test (an a-b-x switch where x is randomised between a and b at the start of each test) you carefully equalised each signal to the same frequency levels, using hi-fidelity equipment to test and play the signal. Then you ran series of objective trials, both with the signal, with no signal (listening for the noise), and eliminated any tendency to guess based on other variables such as the clicking of the a-b-x switch?

No?

Time for you to duck out gracefully then....you were wrong in 1984 and with today's advances in sound technology you're even more wrong today. Factually.

U drunk, bro

I just leave this here. An Audio Expert

The audio expert was interviewed for his definition of music, too.

You know, we've probably talked across one another. I'm claiming people can't tell the difference between Vinyl and a digital representation of the same recording, not that lossy compression is 100% transparent. My comments on lossy compression were to show that not only is CD more than sufficient for the task, but you can also compress THAT down by massive amounts and most self-proclaimed audiophiles can't tell whether it's source, or a version which discards 80% of the signal.
Some can, and if you use problem samples and train yourself to know what an artefact sounds like, you can do it pretty reliably. Until you get to 256 and above, where you need simulated samples and near-square waves to be able to do it.

Yeah, well I did already claim if you prefer vinyl for it's ... vinylness .. then you'll not be persuaded out of it. It's a different medium and that imbues certain elements of it. That said, if you digitise a vinyl record you can have the benefits of both - digital precision and no degradation, and you've recorded all the pops, burr and hiss to make the record "warm" or whatever.

No. Your internalised belief you are hearing something of higher quality is palpable.

One of my favourite audiophile experiments was from the late 90's. A researcher setup testing whether people could hear the difference between all the common culprits - vinyl and digital, $4000 per metre cable and coathangers, and so on. The results were a predictable "no" along with audiophile hoo-har about how asking them to hear the difference is unreasonable because ~reasons~ and whatever.
He did another experiment where he asked people to rate the quality of an audio setup after telling them the cost. The result was a fairly linear (and statistically significant) correlation.
Only, it was the same HiFi each time.

People pretty much hear what they're told they'll hear, whether they want to or not. There's people who will, having not understood how something like HDMI cables work, will write a few thousand words of reviews about which is better. Which has the "clearer blacks" the "warmer skin tones" and "cleaner transients" and so on.

Hint: it is literally impossible for there to be a difference.