Audio Blind Testing

[sandyk]

I am ashamed to admit that Australian Professor Ian Plimer is one of many that insist that Global Warming is a cyclic event and man has had no real part in it.

Also :   http://www.independent.org/store/book.asp?id=42&s=ga&gclid=CjwKCAiAy4bTBRAvEiwAFtatHEb9eX0J2mUZ8jOf3i6PwwDd5lVDoi7jnUy0mx6O9-Hqw3fw-9XynRoC-l8QAvD_BwE

[sandyk]

9 minutes ago, STC said:

Currently, there are 2992 members in Phasure Forum. Are you telling me all of them took part in experiment?

 

 Of course they didn't all report back, but if the bulk of members who tried the update reported  positively, then you will find that many who didn't participate will then update, just as many C.A. members do when there are quite a few favourable reports about a product. However. my experiences with Peter, formed from quite a few uploads that I have sent him, is that he is usually correct if he believes that something is an improvement. Like myself, Peter hears a little differently with each ear, which highlights some phase anomalies etc.

I never cease to be amazed that some people can actually prefer MegaPoop3 !

To me, it sounds dull and lifeless, as any further reduction in HF response, due to my age and Industrial related hearing damage is very obvious. The same applies with .aac 187kiobits which is the maximum used by VEVO and YouTube.

I used to save quite a few .mpeg2 music videos before the change to .aac audio, as they used 16/48 .

I stopped using my very good PLL Pioneer FM Stereo tuner shortly after several stations started to use automated .mp3 carts.

.

[sandyk]

13 minutes ago, esldude said:

Throw in a well recorded but unfamiliar track and all the distinguishing ability of the audiophile disappears

 

 Not necessarily. It depends entirely on how much better one component is than another.

At a listening session a while back, they played an unfamiliar  recording with a female singer which had a very wide stereo image and good depth. However, when played using the laptop instead, there was a lot of "grit" accompanying  the wide image, despite her voice being central in the image. It was using sub-optimal USB Audio. 

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

HF content can be preserved to the level necessary for audible insignificance.

 

 That's not what was found in  a thread here sometime back where they showed the Spectrum BEFORE and AFTER .mp3.

I am surprised that with your highly revealing system that you are also unable to hear the difference between .flac decoded "on the fly", and the original .wav file, let alone a .wav file converted to .flac and back again to .wav , as Cookie Marenco mentions in my signature.

Dale ,who hangs out mainly in the Headphone area of the forum also thought the same about .mp3 until I demonstrated to him in another forum that it did dumb down some material. IIRC, the material used was "Yello-Bostich (Reflected)"

.mp3 didn't do wonders for the thunder at the end of the track either!

 

Cookie has even commented about hearing the SQ differences between  different .flac compression settings.

 If it is so damn good, why did they much later on bother providing an uncompressed version  of .flac ?

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

My most telling experiment was a live AC/DC track, at a low resolution MP3 rate; played direct, the drums sounded terrible! Converted that audio sample to WAV, and upsampled to hi res standards - remarkable improvement in the clarity of those drums!

 Frank

 You can't recover the data that .mp3 discards, especially the HF area which has a large part to play in how a drum sounds, at least SOME drums as in the attached. Note the VERY fast rise times of the envelope.

I tried similar quite a while back and it still sounded like crappy .mp3.

 

Alex

[sandyk]

19 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

I suspect we could find some music where few could tell mp3 from Redbook, or other

 

Interesting thought re age - certainly possible - would make a nice gerontology grant appl. to NIH...

 Not everybody who has damaged hearing is ancient !

 I expect that due to teenagers wandering around listening to loud music much of the time with earphones, that we are going to see far more middle aged people with greatly degraded hearing in the not too distant future, just as we are going to see many more people needing eyesight correction , perhaps with Laser surgery, from squinting at tiny little screens, especially when they are moving around.

How many people these days bother to observe Occupational Health and Safety Standards about the amount of time they spend in front of a monitor without taking a regular break ?

Telstra had strict O.H &S standards in that area, as well as with heavy lifting etc..

[sandyk]

10 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Just on YouTube, it is possible to download versions of the clip's audio where there's a clean spectrum all the way to 20kHz - the content may not be a perfect match to the original, but it's still there ...

 

 An .mp3 file may be able to do that too, if you drop the player down the lift well of a skyscraper, due to Doppler effect !

[sandyk]

35 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

MP3 can go as high as you want, to 20kHz, if the right encoder is used, and appropriate settings; the YT stuff using opus at 160k gives the full spectrum.

 

Given that most .mp3 users originally tried to cram as many songs as possible on a small amount of storage space, you are highly unlikely to find many (if any) remaining .mp3 songs using those settings.

 You must come from the same school that has dumbed down DAB Broadcasting by using such ridiculously low bitrates, so that most people don't even know what DAB is ?

DAB is highly unlikely to replace FM Stereo in Au. any time soon  for that reason.

 

Quote

1. The abstract, accessible at http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=16969:-

AES E-LIBRARY

Perceived Audio Quality of Realistic FM and DAB+ Radio Broadcasting Systems

The perceived audio quality of a digital broadcasting system (such as DAB+) is dependent on the type of coding and bit rates selected. Because of bandwidth constraints, the required number of channels, and conflicting auxiliary services, audio quality is sometimes degraded. In designing a broadcast system, it is necessary to have well-defined criteria for minimally acceptable quality. Two studies explored quality criteria and how quality degrades for various bit rates. For DAB+ the subchannel rate should not be less than the currently available maximum of 192 kbits/s for a stereo signal, which would be comparable to the quality of a modern FM system. Rates below 160 kbit/s can significantly degrade certain types of program material. To be truly perceptually transparent, bits rates of close to 300 kbits/s may be needed when using the current generation of coders.

Authors:

Berg, Jan; Bustad, Christofer; Jonsson, Lars; Mossberg, Lars; Nyberg, Dan

 

Affiliations:

Luleå University of Technology, Piteå, Sweden; Swedish Radio, Stockholm, Sweden; Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science - SKL, Linköping, Sweden

(See document for exact affiliation information.)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_in_Australia

 

What a farce !

[sandyk]

19 minutes ago, Sonicularity said:

Bob Stuart even found that mp3 is preferred over HiRes when he submitted his meta-analysis marketing paper.  With training even...training on something.

 

You are so out of touch with the general membership it's laughable !

 Many members even preferring to upsample LPCM to DSD.

I suggest that you have a good look  at other areas of the forum before insisting that the bulk of membership is wasting their time with anything better than .mp3 !

[sandyk]

2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

ummm, we'll leave NBN out of this!

 

 Why ? I am connected via WiFi and I regularly achieve speeds up to 2.82M/BS

We are on a medium speed plan too.

"Bugger the consumer ? "

 Yeah, they got carried away initially up here with Win HD ( 10 Network) where they reduced the bitrate too much, so that even decent SD on other channels looked better. Perhaps they got more than a handful of complaints too, as it is now approaching what .mpeg2 HD was capable of. (still not there though, as quite a bit of downloaded U.S.A. HD 1080 TV still looks way better.)

[sandyk]

24 minutes ago, fas42 said:

The big joke is that NZ went full fibre, and now are miles better off than we will ever be with this shemozzle - it will take decades, probably, to sort it all ...

 

 The not so funny joke here, is that NBN problems can be laid directly at the Commonwealth Government's interference .

At my last Team Briefing with Telstra before I took a redundancy package, we were told about the imminent introduction of FTTN.

 It was common knowledge in Telstra that much of the old copper network was well past it's use-by date , yet the current Prime Minister ( Communications Minister back then) insisted on using FTTN instead of FTTP to save money.

 Incidentally, that last team briefing was when I was age 58. I am now 78 !

Shortly after the team briefing, the government of the day decided to milk Telstra for dividends, and they were no longer able to fund the roll out of FTTN.

 Is it any wonder with incompetence like that, that we also have major Electricity network problems nationwide ?

 

[sandyk]

6 hours ago, davide256 said:

There are "Borg among us" who think art is only numbers.

 

 LOL !

[sandyk]

3 hours ago, marce said:

DBT is another tool available to us, to help determine sound differences without the bias of sight, that's all...

 

 What point is there for DBT with Audio when MANY (most ?)  refuse to accept the results because they don't go the way they expected them to ? 

You are also one of those people .

[sandyk]

49 minutes ago, marce said:

No I am not.

 

  In which case you must believe that the series of 6 separate (by date) DBTs that I refer to, were either not correctly performed, or that around 8 repeats per session , all with positive results is inadequate ?

 What are the odds against results such as those being false results or not meaning anything ?

[sandyk]

2 minutes ago, STC said:

 

Sandyk, I am unable to find the relevant post. The hificritic link returns page not found error. Could you please provide the link? Thanx.

 Unless you are a HFC Forum member you won't be able to access the pages. Also, just like C.A. due to Forum upgrades, many older links no longer work.

 I will PM you copies of some of the HFC tests.

[sandyk]

14 minutes ago, marce said:

We have an agreement from years ago that we will not discuss this subject

Marc

 All of our discussions in DIY Audio years ago were before Martin became involved., so no DBTs back then.

You may remember though that I did send Netlist (Hugo) a comparison CD though, and that I did have some support from Erin in Melbourne.

 

Alex

[sandyk]

8 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Ummm, my copy is worn out, just about - I 'pinched' the earlier edition from the library, because I couldn't bear not having access to it ... .

 

I presume that mansr and yourself also have copies of Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook  - Douglas Self, such as the 5th edition ? 

[sandyk]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

The audiophile equivalent prefers looking at stained glass windows over viewing the scene on the other side.

 

 Nasty. Go wash your mouth out with Lysol !

Somehow I suspect that Audio has far more veils than the 7 that Salome wore !

I.M.E. , you can remove one veil and hear an improvement, but you never seem  to end up hearing a further small improvement after implementing further technical improvements, and I am talking about recognised technically based improvements such as further reducing PSU noise down past even several uV, and further isolating the PSU areas for Digital and Analogue areas.

All of which are measurable improvements in their self, and undoubtedly measurable at the eventual signal presented to the speakers as well.

Incidentally, a couple of days ago I found a double A.C. socket half way up the wall behind my PC which was previously obscured by a cutain on a window with no fly screens that never got opened.
Transferring my Class A H.A. and X-DAC V3 to these sockets, instead of having to share a heavily filtered power board with the P.C. resulted in  another of those pesky veils being lifted.

P.S.

That love him, or hate him, character Amir gets around doesn't he ?

 

 

[sandyk]

9 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

I have very little inclination to fool around with magic new ideas, unless they appear to be a good shortcut to getting consistent results.

Any amplifier design that is 30 years or more old, is capable of marked improvement using new techniques and improved semiconductors.

Unless yours uses Mosfets in the Output stage, it is likely to be using old , low gain and poor Ft, output devices too, and rely on quite a bit of NFB to try and improve it's performance.

 

The various Distortion mechanisms discussed by Douglas Self are NOT magical new ideas, they are fairly recent technically based findings and methods for improvements that are readily measurable with the right equipment, and result in an amplifier being closer to the proverbial "bit of wire" connection.