Enter this device: It appears to convert the low quality bitrate of Bluetooth up to 32bit.... so that makes it SOUND
better.... Hmmmmm ...
I'd love to know anyone's thoughts on the subject but in this Kickstarter unit i'm seeing an audio up-scaler that's not HiFi let alone being true HiRes even though they are using a device capable for the doing so... bottom line you can't replace actual lost bits (only approximate them).... SO WHY BOTHER IN THIS APPLICATION?
Enter this device: It appears to convert the low quality bitrate of Bluetooth up to 32bit.... so that makes it SOUND
better.... Hmmmmm ...
I'd love to know anyone's thoughts on the subject but in this Kickstarter unit i'm seeing an audio up-scaler that's not HiFi let alone being true HiRes even though they are using a device capable for the doing so... bottom line you can't replace actual lost bits (only approximate them).... SO WHY BOTHER IN THIS APPLICATION?
Bit rate and bit depth are two different things.
I'd recommend watching Monty Montgomery's excellent video on this to further understand how the two affect signals. In short, 44.1K 16 bit is an excellent choice, and there is nothing wrong with it.
For most generic pop type music i guess but along comes an audiophool who once handed me their Neil Young 'HiRes Pono' player that has a special comparison file set and i must say i actually noticed what i describe as an obvious clarity difference for the higher bit recording of the same song. Whether it actually mattered i guess not and i must agree the standard for music CD is good enough but there are those who seek perfection and will go for the 'extra bits' i guess...
Can you truly make 16bit audio sound better by upping it to 32bit and call it HiFi/HiQuality Audio?
Sorry. I am missing something here. This latest Kickstarter looks like a nifty wee cased thing to plug your headphones into but really?
that was...awesome
that gentleman is a really good educator
When you do the math, you will see that a dynamic range of 16 bits is the equivalent of 96.33dB. If you take the noise-floor of the Real World at around 20dB you will see that 96dB is quite more than enough to produce sounds over the complete range that our ears can handle. Unless you want to ruin your ears with head-banging heavy metal at 120dB, I'll leave you to decide that for yourself.
For that reason a lot of video editors use 4K.
A normal human being isn't able to see the difference either (with 1080p or 720p).
(same marketing BS)
For that reason a lot of video editors use 4K.
A normal human being isn't able to see the difference either (with 1080p or 720p).
(same marketing BS)
well, for watching TV perhaps
Gamers are using the extra real estate to achieve a wider FOV, I am already seeing attempts at 3 x 4K surround setups among the serious (and wealthy) hardware enthusiasts.
There will never be a limit to the gamer appetite for pixels, framerate, input lag or anti-aliasing.
Gamophiles
Can you truly make 16bit audio sound better by upping it to 32bit and call it HiFi/HiQuality Audio?Can you make the MonaLisa look better by putting it into a larger frame? No.
BTW, for small but close to eye applications, such as cellphones, maybe 2k and 4k don't make much a difference, and to some people, maybe 1080p and 2k don't make a difference, but 720p and 1080p are definitely different, very different.
* The human ear cannot tell the difference between sine, triangle and square waves at above a few kHz. So, this is actually quite acceptable. Believe it or not.
* The human ear cannot tell the difference between sine, triangle and square waves at above a few kHz. So, this is actually quite acceptable. Believe it or not.
Given that both triangle and square waveforms consist of the fundamental tone plus odd harmonics (in different ratios), the first overtone in both cases is three times the frequency of the fundamental tone. So it stands to reason that even a fundamental of 5 or 6 kHz puts the first overtone near or past (depending on age) the limit of hearing.
I have been recording audio professionally from several decades before the Digital Age. The goal while "tracking" (recording the original sounds) is to maintain the optimal SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) by keeping the average audio levels as high as possible without hitting the upper limit (clipping). Clipping back in the analog era was much "softer" and more forgiving/flexible compared to digital recording where when you hit 0dBFS (Full Scale) you are up against a HARD limit, beyond which there is nothing but severe distortion.
When you do the math, you will see that a dynamic range of 16 bits is the equivalent of 96.33dB. If you take the noise-floor of the Real World at around 20dB you will see that 96dB is quite more than enough to produce sounds over the complete range that our ears can handle. Unless you want to ruin your ears with head-banging heavy metal at 120dB, I'll leave you to decide that for yourself.
The overwhelming majority of music consumed these days is typically both dynamic range compressed (see the "Loudness Wars") as well as data-compressed (i.e. MP3) and it is rare to find people listening to music that even amounts to 14-15 bits of dynamic range.
OTOH, when I am recording live performances (especially of amateur musicians) I prefer to use 24 bit recording sample depth. Not because it offers any significant improvement of SNR, but because it offers a significant increase in headroom so that I can record at a comfortable level while maintaining a substantial safety margin to handle unexpected amplitude excursions. Of course, it is also true that the electronics (mostly the microphone preamp) has nowhere near the 144dB of dynamic range implied by a 24-bit sample depth.
32 bits of sample depth implies 196dB of dynamic range which isn't even possible to achieve under normal atmospheric pressure on our planet. Not to mention that you would need cryogenically-cooled electronics to even get half that dynamic range. But 32-bit (or even floating-point) arithmetic is commonly used for intermediate calculations in most modern audio software to handle mixing and other effects without worrying about arithmetic overflow ("clipping"). Of course the final result is truncated back down to 16 bit for consumption in the Real World.
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
It's interesting how the "Sine" looks when zoomed in:
Square (also 10000 Hz)
It would be even more interesting to compare it with what comes out of the headphones, but that's not easy.
It's interesting how the "Sine" looks when zoomed in:
Watch the video by the xiph.org guy. Playing 'connect the dots' as audacity does it is the wrong way of rendering sampled signals. The correct way is to use sinx/x interpolation since this is what you'll get after putting the signal through a brick-wall filter that cuts off at nyquist frequency. Audacity can do this for you using Tracks->Resample and choosing a high sample rate.
When generating a 10kHz square wave, select "Square, no alias" and you'll get something that doesn't look like a square but is the correct band-limited approximation of a band-limited 10kHz square.
I followed a bit of the excitement for a while over high bitrate compressed audio files (.flac etc) thing. We mere individuals can now supposedly access what is as close if not a direct copy of the original studio mix by the recording artist. Some are released with the assurance you hear what the original mix which will always sound better being the studio recording, not some now-considered degraded version 16bit 44.1k music CD sold by the music industry that they adopted when vinyl records and cassette tapes went away...
I followed a bit of the excitement for a while over high bitrate compressed audio files (.flac etc) thing. We mere individuals can now supposedly access what is as close if not a direct copy of the original studio mix by the recording artist. Some are released with the assurance you hear what the original mix which will always sound better being the studio recording, not some now-considered degraded version 16bit 44.1k music CD sold by the music industry that they adopted when vinyl records and cassette tapes went away...
And a good lot of studio recording a mixed with Yamaha NS10 studio monitor speakers which are actually not all that great (some say terrible), they are just "the standard". So unless you listen on the same speakers, you aren't getting the same mix anyway regardless of how perfect your file format is.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
I followed a bit of the excitement for a while over high bitrate compressed audio files (.flac etc) thing. We mere individuals can now supposedly access what is as close if not a direct copy of the original studio mix by the recording artist. Some are released with the assurance you hear what the original mix which will always sound better being the studio recording, not some now-considered degraded version 16bit 44.1k music CD sold by the music industry that they adopted when vinyl records and cassette tapes went away...
And a good lot of studio recording a mixed with Yamaha NS10 studio monitor speakers which are actually not all that great (some say terrible), they are just "the standard". So unless you listen on the same speakers, you aren't getting the same mix anyway regardless of how perfect your file format is.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
And a good lot of studio recording a mixed with Yamaha NS10 studio monitor speakers which are actually not all that great (some say terrible), they are just "the standard". So unless you listen on the same speakers, you aren't getting the same mix anyway regardless of how perfect your file format is.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
In essence, a 16-bit 44.1kHz recording (even uncompressed) is quite dead as far as the sound quality is concerned. All kinds of voodoo around it it is just painting of that dead body with various colours so it somewhat better resembles a living thing. Guys just did design another way to sell that postmortem colouring, good luck to them!
In essence, a 16-bit 44.1kHz recording (even uncompressed) is quite dead as far as the sound quality is concerned. All kinds of voodoo around it it is just painting of that dead body with various colours so it somewhat better resembles a living thing. Guys just did design another way to sell that postmortem colouring, good luck to them!
I respectfully disagree. 44.1 kHz 16 bit audio can sound fantastic.
I followed a bit of the excitement for a while over high bitrate compressed audio files (.flac etc) thing. We mere individuals can now supposedly access what is as close if not a direct copy of the original studio mix by the recording artist. Some are released with the assurance you hear what the original mix which will always sound better being the studio recording, not some now-considered degraded version 16bit 44.1k music CD sold by the music industry that they adopted when vinyl records and cassette tapes went away...
And a good lot of studio recording a mixed with Yamaha NS10 studio monitor speakers which are actually not all that great (some say terrible), they are just "the standard". So unless you listen on the same speakers, you aren't getting the same mix anyway regardless of how perfect your file format is.
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story
In essence, a 16-bit 44.1kHz recording (even uncompressed) is quite dead as far as the sound quality is concerned. All kinds of voodoo around it it is just painting of that dead body with various colours so it somewhat better resembles a living thing. Guys just did design another way to sell that postmortem colouring, good luck to them!
I respectfully disagree. 44.1 kHz 16 bit audio can sound fantastic.
If it does for you, good! Doesn't for me though, even at its best (and I've designed some very decent CD-players and DACs).
Cheers
Alex
Unless you think science is an hoax.
Unless you think science is an hoax.
The science of human sound perception is to a large degree a hoax, as there are no reliable and correct tools and methods exist (and please don't start on DBT and ABX etc - these a flawed on so many points) . We are measuring what we can measure and not what we need to measure in the sound quality area, and we can not quantify the actual result of our listening to music - which is emotional and mostly subconscious. The majority of audio measurements is a little bit like checking the book contents change by it's weight change. We can detect a missing page but not a change in the text (at least if the amount of ink used stays the same).
Cheers
Alex
Unless you think science is an hoax.
The science of human sound perception is to a large degree a hoax, as there are no reliable and correct tools and methods exist (and please don't start on DBT and ABX etc - these a flawed on so many points) . We are measuring what we can measure and not what we need to measure in the sound quality area, and we can not quantify the actual result of our listening to music - which is emotional and mostly subconscious. The majority of audio measurements is a little bit like checking the book contents change by it's weight change. We can detect a missing page but not a change in the text (at least if the amount of ink used stays the same).
Cheers
AlexI would suggest doing further reading, especially if you think everything can just (simply) be measured (with some tools).
Science is very clear about perception. That whole field is called psycho-acoustics.
Their are billions of papers and books written about the fact that our perception is heavily biased by what we think, see or smell.
It's already well known for many many years that what people claim to hear isn't in line at all with what they should hear.
The only gap we are talking about, is that most people don't want to admit it.
(which is a perfect oppertunity for market to keep using these fairy tale claims)
Personally I don't understand why people get so worked up about it? For some people it's almost like a religion. There is a lot of (angry) emotion involved.
Everybody makes decisions which are only based on subjective feelings, what's wrong with that??
As a scientist or researcher it should be a challenge to disprove or prove things instead?
If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
It was inevitable that this thread would devolve into mysticism.
But I guess it actually started there, didn't it?
If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.No analysis of perception is perfect, but double blind trials are certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
[...]
So no mysticism required (or even allowed) for me personally when I design electronics for sound. You learn to trust your ears and you learn how to hear problems in the sound. It is almost an unpleasant skill as it spoils the music and denies you the pleasure if the sound quality is flawed in certain respects which you can recognise . And you learn where to look, what to change and how to make a design which will sound consistently good in production, without hiring virgins and producing equipment only on completely moonless nights .
Well, I think it is very understandable for people to be uncomfortable with the idea that they are living in a simulation.
The fact that we don't have the hard science behind all of audio doesn't mean those things don't exist.
Actually, the fact is, that there is enough hard and good science about it.
But for some reason people don't want to dive into it.
Almost like they refuse to face the truth.
One of the reasons why it's complicated is because there is a lot of psychology involved. A type of science which is not always being considered as real science by engineers and tech scientists.
Actually, the fact is, that there is enough hard and good science about it.
Actually, the fact is, there is not much "hard and good" science about it. What pretend to be a "science" is not based on measurements and numbers, and what in that area of knowledge is pretend to be based on measurements and numbers, is not a science but mostly a con art.
But for some reason people don't want to dive into it.
Almost like they refuse to face the truth.
One of the reasons why it's complicated is because there is a lot of psychology involved. A type of science which is not always being considered as real science by engineers and tech scientists.
Psychology is not a science, it is a lot of crap mostly made up on a spot. You can not measure something if your tools are not suitable for that measurement, plain and simple. You can not measure 10mV DC voltage with a needle meter for 1kV full scale, and that is what most of this "science" about human audio perception tries to do. No real positive data except on the level "OK, there is a sound and now there isn't" . And without a positive baseline established all the negative data ("this difference is impossible to hear according to our very scientific experiments") worth nothing.
Than you have A LOT of reading to do, good luck!
I should start with an AES membership first.
That's the most simplistic definition of 'science' I have ever seen.
Psychology is based on possibilities, very much like physics is.
Nothing more than describing certain behaviors. You don't necessarily need any measuring tools for that even.
Countless examples in physics that work exactly the same way.
ALL physics are based on statistics.
Most obvious are quantum physics, but even the famous F=m*a is based on statistics.
In other words, there is a possibility that something will 'fall up' instead of down for example.
The change is only so extremely small that it's extremely unlikely you will see it.
While much audiophoolery is hogwash, the example I provided earlier is a case where I can't explain an audio result based on the best tools I have from science - as an electrical engineer with advanced degrees and years of experience using and applying frequency response, power, dV/dt and other elements which supposedly explain it all. I am not saying that a fully integrated theory of audio won't combine those elements, merely that I haven't seen it developed yet.
There was a time when FFTs first became available, when speaker manufacturers were using such tools to design speakers with near-flat frequency responses, something which had previously been near-impossible. Only thing was, they sounded truly dreadful.
Which, I think underlines the folly of chasing a specification parameter which has little bearing on actual results. In practice, audio gear need not have an absolutely flat response in order to sound good, and our ears actually adjust to the tonal balance of the sound anyway. A speaker which booms on bass or puts sibilance on vocals is never going to sound good though, and avoiding such artifacts is more important than a flat response.
I'd also like to point out that even though psychoacoustics sounds like a pseudo science it really is not. It's a field which explains our perception of sound. Knowing the fact that we are more sensitive to baby screams than we are to rocks falling can be important to know. Much like the fact that we use echo and phase to locate and determine our surroundings. Then there is intermodulation and various noise shapes. What good is it that the RTA shows a flat line if you feel your ears bleed because of the 2-3k.
Tells what is important in a high quality sound system: a optimized phase response and a frequency response that is free of resonant spikes (no you can't properly correct that with eq).
On topic: IMHO over-sampling is over-rated.