Null test 88.2/24 and 44.1/16

[crenca]

35 minutes ago, bachish said:

 

Yep, I do see your point and believe I see the concern of audiophiles.

 

I am sitting here thinking...I have a 20year old digital Spdif cable....I could stream from the digital outs of my Roland recorder (the field recorder I mentioned) to the Spdif inputs of my 20+ year old Marantz CD burner. I could then stream back to the Roland recorder via the same digital cable. In other words, I'd be streaming in real time with a low end cable. I could upload the double streamed version to the computer and null test it with the original. If it nulls, then it looks like the cable doesn't matter much. If it doesn't null, more tests would need to be done to isolate the problem (could be errors in writing to CDR by an older machine, for example).  

 

Just a thought. If it nulls, would that satisfy the concerned?

 

 

If only ??

 

The ways that  your original test, and your hypothetical above, is "moot" is as diverse as the number of audiophiles. You have seen two respected and respectable members of the community (I mean that - I don't disparage them personally and I value what I have learned from them) say explicitly why the math itself is moot, that there is an in between where there is a sound, etc. just on this very thread.  Others who have been conversant with you would reveal similar beliefs if pressed.  Like John Atkinson says, being an Audiophile is about "belief ", which is to say that it is more than a mere emphasis, or a state of understanding/knowledge about digital, circuits, or even a methodology about how to go about getting the best sound...

 

[bachish]

5 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

 

If only ??

 

The ways that  your original test, and your hypothetical above, is "moot" is as diverse as the number of audiophiles. You have seen two respected and respectable members of the community (I mean that - I don't disparage them personally and I value what I have learned from them) say explicitly why the math itself is moot, that there is an in between where there is a sound, etc. just on this very thread.  Others who have been conversant with you would reveal similar beliefs if pressed.  Like John Atkinson says, being an Audiophile is about "belief ", which is to say that it is more than a mere emphasis, or a state of understanding/knowledge about digital, circuits, or even a methodology about how to go about getting the best sound...

 

 

Ok, interesting...well, when I have the time, I may try that test anyway. If I do, I'll post the results (maybe Null test No. 2 haha). Now, if I could just get my hands on that software by pkane2001!!

 

BTW, if you haven't seen it, check out my last post on the previous page. As long as you use a respectable DAW, you can be assured of a good SRC today. It's a nice website.

[look&listen]

3 hours ago, PeterSt said:

Well, if it is allowed to be off-topic slightly again, this is exactly how the digital "response" of the analogue in there implies different sound in the far end. Only when this is analyzed from the analogue things of the matter (or the matter of things) we can explain how e.g. a protocol implies a distortion. Good example : 8KHz USB noise seen at the DAC output. The 8KHz is simply the 0.125ms interval of packet transmission.

Want to go further ? then we load the initially empty "data frames" with data, and the 8KHz goes up (rises for amplitude). How ? well, because the analogue part of the so-called digital stream has more "RMS value" because of the now more 1's (of say 1.2V) than with an empty stream (more close to everything 0V but with now and then protocol overhead of again 1.2V)

Thx for very good explanation (English!) of one example analogue complication of digital. 

Maybe should be (re)read by posters denying such explanations 

 

2 hours ago, PeterSt said:

Filters are math and not computers. But computers can make them by means of applying math.

Yes, never think computers are math over 60 years with them. Boolean good for describing machines & algorithms, but not speak to meaning of data processed, packaged & transferred.

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, bachish said:



This one is rather horrible. What the hell are they doing? Sure, that crap is pretty far down, but there's just no excuse for being that weird.

[bachish]

4 minutes ago, mansr said:

This one is rather horrible. What the hell are they doing? Sure, that crap is pretty far down, but there's just no excuse for being that weird.

 

Yeah, definitely not as up to snuff as the others. But then again, it's all extremely quiet.

 

Audacity, the free one, is much better - actually, amazingly good.

 

This is Audacity 2.0.3 (Best Quality). 

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, bachish said:

Yeah, definitely not as up to snuff as the others. But then again, it's all extremely quiet.

 

Audacity, the free one, is much better - actually, amazingly good.

Except for Sadie, they are all pretty good. Some show a little aliasing at the very top. This allows a wider transition band, which means less of the dreaded "ringing." Not that it really matters.

[bachish]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

Except for Sadie, they are all pretty good. Some show a little aliasing at the very top. This allows a wider transition band, which means less of the dreaded "ringing." Not that it really matters.

 

True, not really. And this is all much quieter than the combined internal noise generated from the recording equipment itself, especially the mics.

[Jud]

Yeah, been going to the Infinitewav site for years.   

 

There are some other SRCs that don't look great on some of the tests.  But what I like it for is to visualize  things like the relationships between steepness, phase, and ringing, for example.

[bibo01]

6 hours ago, PeterSt said:

8 hours ago, bibo01 said:

I can't replicate anything if you say nothing.

 

You mean you forgot ?

(hard to imagine)

I don't think so. But, if you don't give me something to explicitly measure/work, how can I justify your assertion?

Let's not try to run in circles here. Be direct Peter, please. 

[mansr]

9 minutes ago, bibo01 said:

Let's not try to run in circles here. Be direct Peter, please. 

Good luck with that.

[STC]

6 hours ago, PeterSt said:

Good example : 8KHz USB noise seen at the DAC output. The 8KHz is simply the 0.125ms interval of packet transmission.

 

I have not read the entire thread and therefore this response is only in the context of what was referred in this post. If you are saying there is something by 125 microseconds delays than it is quite plausible for it to be audible depending on other factors. 

[esldude]

2 hours ago, bachish said:

 

Yeah, definitely not as up to snuff as the others. But then again, it's all extremely quiet.

 

Audacity, the free one, is much better - actually, amazingly good.

 

This is Audacity 2.0.3 (Best Quality). 

That one from Audacity uses Sox.  Prior to that I think they used Super Rabbit or whatever it was called.  Which wasn't too spiffy.  

[bachish]

2 hours ago, Jud said:

Yeah, been going to the Infinitewav site for years.   

 

There are some other SRCs that don't look great on some of the tests.  But what I like it for is to visualize  things like the relationships between steepness, phase, and ringing, for example.

 

Yes, cool website.  Some of the DAWs don't do well and, actually, I've tested one of them against the original and it didn't null. I could hear the whole tune faintly with the volume up all the way up. That is NCH MixPad, which in many other respects works pretty well. But for SRC, no, I wouldn't use that DAW. 

 

But the ones I listed are amoung the most common for studio work. 

 

 

[crenca]

55 minutes ago, bachish said:

 

Yes, cool website.  Some of the DAWs don't do well and, actually, I've tested one of them against the original and it didn't null. I could hear the whole tune faintly with the volume up all the way up. That is NCH MixPad, which in many other respects works pretty well. But for SRC, no, I wouldn't use that DAW. 

 

But the ones I listed are amoung the most common for studio work. 

 

 

 

In the pro audio world, is there a trade publication or organization that reviews and tests these applications - I mean, really test them for computational integrity and usefullness?  As a music lover/audio enthusiast I have occasionally found myself looking at pro audio websites/publications (can't even recall the names at present) and their speaker or headphone reviews, and they don't appear on average to be any more rigorous than most "audiophile" reviews.   This surprised me a bit to be honest.  Perhaps I have been looking at the wrong publications?

[bibo01]

10 hours ago, cookiemarenco said:

Thank you for prompting me to write an article on comparative listening tests.  I scribbled something out this morning for you to read.  It's an off the top of my head guide to how we do the tests.  I'm sure I've forgotten something.

 

Testing is not easy and requires a minimum of people to do a good test and half a day to setup properly.  We listen for differences in sample clips whether it's in the silence, wideness of space, movement of phase, fall off of dynamic response.  It's not easy, but we find we can teach people in a workshop (which we've done successfully at many audio shows).  Here's the article.

https://dsd-guide.com/how-do-comparative-listening-test

 

 

This has been an interesting thread.

 

Enjoy your music!

Cookie Marenco

Blue Coast Music

https://bluecoastmusic.com/

Thanks for your reply.

I would like to be hand accompanied in this "journey of discovery"... if you can.

Could you please pinpoint two or more examples of clips of different res or, better, flac and wav with phase shifts or piano notes not dying in the same way?

[bachish]

 

1 hour ago, crenca said:

 

In the pro audio world, is there a trade publication or organization that reviews and tests these applications - I mean, really test them for computational integrity and usefullness?  As a music lover/audio enthusiast I have occasionally found myself looking at pro audio websites/publications (can't even recall the names at present) and their speaker or headphone reviews, and they don't appear on average to be any more rigorous than most "audiophile" reviews.   This surprised me a bit to be honest.  Perhaps I have been looking at the wrong publications?

 

Sound on Sound does have more in depth reviews but not all reviews are equally so.  I sent you a PM.

[bachish]

21 minutes ago, bachish said:

 

 

Sound on Sound does have more in depth reviews but not all reviews are equally so.  I sent you a PM.

 

1 hour ago, crenca said:

 

In the pro audio world, is there a trade publication or organization that reviews and tests these applications - I mean, really test them for computational integrity and usefullness?  As a music lover/audio enthusiast I have occasionally found myself looking at pro audio websites/publications (can't even recall the names at present) and their speaker or headphone reviews, and they don't appear on average to be any more rigorous than most "audiophile" reviews.   This surprised me a bit to be honest.  Perhaps I have been looking at the wrong publications?

 

And I almost forgot about the Audio Engineering Society Journal. http://www.aes.org/audiosciences/

 

That is in the format of a typical, scholarly journal with all types of scientific tests and experiments.  To get it I imagine you have to become a member. I've thought about attending one of their conventions. 

 

But just looking through the papers in the latest journal, you realize how in depth and technical the field of recording engineering actually is.  There are definitely some really smart scientists and engineers out there.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, bachish said:

Sound on Sound does have more in depth reviews but not all reviews are equally so.  I sent you a PM.

 

Apologies for the OT: did you happen to see the interview with Giles Martin about the making of the remastered 50th anniversary Sgt. Pepper?  https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band

 

Fun quote:

 

"According to Okell, he and Martin began the remix process by listening to the 1967 mono and stereo mixes of each song, which would be at the top of each Pro Tools session. Okell would then recreate these as a starting point. 'There were no mix notes or anything like that, so it really was a question of listening carefully. We used Mark Lewisohn’s book [The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions] but he’s not an engineer and some details have been missed out, or are incorrect. Obviously, the content of each four-track tape was scribbled on the box, and they’d write ‘best’, and ‘4 to 4’ for a bounce, with the tape number it was bounced to, and the varispeed info, but that was it. And even these notes were sometimes incorrect, because things were changing all the time."

[Fokus]

9 hours ago, bachish said:

The filters used in the major professional DAWs are actually very good.

 

Today: yes.

 

In a not-so-distant past, however, the SRCs in top-dollar pro tools were less than stellar (which IMO was inexcusable, since at the top of the music production chain), and

in affordable/free DAWs often were sheer crap. There were exceptions, but the majority of tools was at least suspect.

 

IIRC this situation lasted up to 2007 or so, when iZotope and some of the public domain tools showed how to do things properly.

 

[Fokus]

16 hours ago, mansr said:

Nobody is talking about ADCs here. You made the assertion that the filters used by DAWs such as Pyramix when exporting to CD format are somehow "bad." Maybe they are, but the discussions you've referenced are about other topics and neither support nor refute this idea.

 

Not really. The assertion I made back then was that many production-chain software SRCs were half-band, and thus alias. Just like many ADC chips.

 

(The context in which I made that assertion was NOS DACs, whose proponents claim that these do not ring. I countered this by stating that for practical recordings, made with HB ADCs or SRCs, these DACs do exhibit ringing: the ADC/SRC's.)

 

 

 

[bachish]

8 hours ago, Fokus said:

 

Today: yes.

 

In a not-so-distant past, however, the SRCs in top-dollar pro tools were less than stellar (which IMO was inexcusable, since at the top of the music production chain), and

in affordable/free DAWs often were sheer crap. There were exceptions, but the majority of tools was at least suspect.

 

IIRC this situation lasted up to 2007 or so, when iZotope and some of the public domain tools showed how to do things properly.

 

 

There is truth to this. Many of the DAWs back in the 90s and probably into 2000s did have edgy sounding SRC.

 

But i disagree that the 'top of the music chain' had poor SRC. Back in the mid 90s I did my first serious recording project (choir CD). As was common, I recorded to DAT, which is 48Khz. I didnt do my own editing back then so when the final edited version came back it sounded a little edgy and not as smooth. The RE who did the edits said for a better SRC we'd have to take it to a mastering studio.

 

I took it to Sound Mirror, a mastering studio in Boston, and their SRC sounded gorgeous; smooth, silky, and extremely difficult to distinguish from the original, if at all.

 

So they did have good SRC at the top of the music chain before the early 2000s, it was just more expensive than today.

 

[Fokus]

9 minutes ago, bachish said:

So they did have good SRC at the top of the music chain before the early 2000s, it was just more expensive than today.

 

Those aware of the issue and prepared to pay did, yes. The others used whatever came with ProTools or SADiE or Pyramix.

 

 

[Jud]

10 hours ago, Fokus said:

 

IIRC this situation lasted up to 2007 or so, when iZotope and some of the public domain tools showed how to do things properly.

 

Would higher quality conversion then characterize recordings (if not all, then a substantial proportion) issued by major labels since that time?

 

(I am wanting to get a notion of the quality of the conversions that are done with most of the music I buy.)

[crenca]

57 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Would higher quality conversion then characterize recordings (if not all, then a substantial proportion) issued by major labels since that time?

 

(I am wanting to get a notion of the quality of the conversions that are done with most of the music I buy.)

 

Anecdotally, I want to say yes (which means I am probably wrong ?).  This just based on my personal experience with many Jazz artists I buy.  I have noticed a quality "demarcation" that I had been placing at about 2005 in my mind up until now.  Recordings before then have an "edgy" quality that those after don't (a general statement of course).  I had wondered the cause, and was wondering if it was something digital or something else.  I had also not made a distinction between the "major" labels in Jazz (e.g. Blue Note, Posi-Tone {are they "major"?} , etc.) but will have to go back and evaluate...

[bachish]

3 hours ago, Fokus said:

 

Those aware of the issue and prepared to pay did, yes. The others used whatever came with ProTools or SADiE or Pyramix.

 

 

 

Well, that's how technology (harware/software) works, I suppose. Costs come down with time.

 

If a RE didn't notice a problem where one existed such as poor SRC, or wasn't willing to pay the $200-$400, then it probably wasn't a widely distributed recording anyway.

 

Do you have any evidence that Pyramix had bad SRC prior to ca. 2007? I admit Im a bit skeptical. Pyramix is considered a high end DAW, and not cheap too.