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24/352.8 vs. 16/44.1 - an attempt at a comparison


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I’m not really sure how much utility this thread is likely to have, but there are some things I’d like to pass by people. So here goes…

 

I’m going to use the following nomenclature to try to keep things clear:

file = original source material

downloaded directly from 2L site

- not manipulated in any way, shape or form before replay

- very little music content above 10kHz

- one file is the original 24/352.8

- the other file is a 16/44.1, derived by 2L through decimation of the original 24/352.8

capture = digital file created by me, by capturing the analogue output of my DAC with an ADC

- ADC set to 16/44.1

- I used a Prism AD124 ADC, which was considered excellent in its day, but is perhaps not SOTA today

- the digital output from the Prism was fed via spdif to a Tascam DA-3000, which was used purely as a digital interface to a memory card

- one capture is the original 24/352.8 file being played back totally natively (i.e. no upsampling, filtering or SDM) in the software player

- the other capture is the 16/44.1 file being played back with 8x upsampling in the software player

 

In the “Some commonsense” thread, I posted a couple of 16/44.1 captures. Listening to the two original files directly, there was an obvious difference in sound, with the 24/352.8 being vastly superior to the upsampled 16/44.1. However, the two 16/44.1 captures sounded far more similar – though they still sounded audibly different to my ears.

 

@mansr, @pkane2001 and @Arpiben analysed the two captures, and pointed out that the difference in sound might be down to the particular upsampling filter I used when replaying the 16/44.1 file. (I really like the way this filter sounds, but it doesn’t measure very well in the frequency domain. Some would refer to it as a ‘leaky filter’.) So I decided to redo the captures, using a filter with better frequency-domain performance (the ‘poly-sinc' filter in HQPlayer, with TPDF dither). Here are the new captures:

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1u0CErRn-2XJQCnNZLdr7WILjgx4xJ2w1

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d7C1LL_IuMdUyE5LP_3GjV9nl-U4W_NI

 

I think these captures sound very subtly different from each other (though I'm not sure I'd be confident doing a blind ABX). In any event, I’d like to understand a few things:

 

Could there be anything in the original 24/352.8 file that is lost during decimation down to 16/44.1?

If so, what could have been lost, considering there’s virtually no music signal above 10kHz anyhow?

Is all this hires malarkey really much ado about nothing?

 

I'm not sure if these two captures are going to be useful in helping to answer these questions, but feel free to take a listen, and/or perform any analysis.

 

Is it possible to identify which is the capture of the 24/352.8, and which is the capture of the upsampled 16/44.1?

 

Mani.

Main: SOtM sMS-200 -> Okto dac8PRO -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Tune Audio Anima horns + 2x Rotel RB-1590 amps -> 4 subs

Home Office: SOtM sMS-200 -> MOTU UltraLite-mk5 -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Impulse H2 speakers

Vinyl: Technics SP10 / London (Decca) Reference -> Trafomatic Luna -> RME ADI-2 Pro

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2 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

They sound the same to me.

 

 Were you using a DAC that is able to play 24/352.8 DIRECTLY without Downsampling ?

 The majority of affordable DACs don't do more than 24/192 directly.

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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Just downloaded these two 16/44.1 files and even using DeltaWave's inbuilt playing facilities, on the laptop speakers, it is clear how the difference in the treble spectrum between the two affects the subjective quality - will have a closer look to see if anything else is there ...

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29 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Just downloaded these two 16/44.1 files and even using DeltaWave's inbuilt playing facilities, on the laptop speakers, it is clear how the difference in the treble spectrum between the two affects the subjective quality - will have a closer look to see if anything else is there ...

 

Even the sceptics should be able to hear very clear differences between these 2 16/44.1 files.

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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8 hours ago, manisandher said:

I think these captures sound very subtly different from each other (though I'm not sure I'd be confident doing a blind ABX).

 

Using Audacity at 192000Hz sampling rate and sound card at 192kHz, T005 sounds having a little bit more bite probably the hirez file. Changing the sound to 24/44.1 - no diff. Changing the Audacity project rate to 44.1 and sc at 192 also no diff. Guess playback method can make a difference too. In any case, no one making a guess?

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28 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Where these differences originate is then the question ...

 

Not aligned sampling during the recording, or something like that.

 

It is now the second time that you show something like this (I forgot what the other was about, but 3-4 days back) but I see the same thing happening. Think like this for understanding:

 

You have two playbacks of the very same. You record it via a microphone in e.g. 16/44.1. After this you try to align this, but you can't. This is because of the infinite resolution which exists in analogue regarding the time you start capturing and how the ADC coincidentally "samples". Mind you, this ADC is just running loose in both cases. It can't go otherwise.

Now not only the sampling starts a a different moment in time (related to the playback), thus a small shift (compare with your plots for the idea of it) but also the samples fall at different moment of the peaks (etc.) in the playback. See at the very beginning of the plots, but also at just before 24.7497 and especially just before 24.7503; with this latter you can see two samples falling in the blue, while one sample just in between those falls in the orange. The peak (dip) will extend as far in the playbacks with the both, but in the blue the sample didn't fall at the (sort of exact) peak. Thus looks very different, but will be the same.

 

That was the example to make it clear.

 

Without microphone the same will happen. Remember, with two takes of the very same file. The ADC is still running loose against the two playbacks. They will always start at a slightly different point in time and the same thing happens.

To prove this, Mani should (if he feels like it) try to take these two takes of exactly the same. It could happen that, now knowing this, he is able to make the "sensitivity" of the start of the recording such that there's hardly a time difference and that this will result in only a couple of difference like the two plots show, throughout, but I suppose that the difference in noise (which is random) at some degree of sensitivity (of recording start) will mangle with this.

 

Point is of course, that the differences you see here by now are really in the recordings, thus they may be audible just the same. Obviously there will be numerous "observations" that this can't be audible because of the so slight differences (in dB) but for a start the both *are* not the same ...

 

Watch out please: I am not saying or suggesting that this explains the differences mansr pointed out. Actually I'd better "claim" that this is unrelated for sure. What I do say - and this is not the first time - is that trying to make two recordings comparable for this means (looking at the wave forms in detail like you did, Frank) is not legal.

 

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8 hours ago, manisandher said:

I’m not really sure how much utility this thread is likely to have, but there are some things I’d like to pass by people. So here goes…

 

I’m going to use the following nomenclature to try to keep things clear:

file = original source material

downloaded directly from 2L site

- not manipulated in any way, shape or form before replay

- very little music content above 10kHz

- one file is the original 24/352.8

- the other file is a 16/44.1, derived by 2L through decimation of the original 24/352.8

capture = digital file created by me, by capturing the analogue output of my DAC with an ADC

- ADC set to 16/44.1

- I used a Prism AD124 ADC, which was considered excellent in its day, but is perhaps not SOTA today

- the digital output from the Prism was fed via spdif to a Tascam DA-3000, which was used purely as a digital interface to a memory card

- one capture is the original 24/352.8 file being played back totally natively (i.e. no upsampling, filtering or SDM) in the software player

- the other capture is the 16/44.1 file being played back with 8x upsampling in the software player

 

In the “Some commonsense” thread, I posted a couple of 16/44.1 captures. Listening to the two original files directly, there was an obvious difference in sound, with the 24/352.8 being vastly superior to the upsampled 16/44.1. However, the two 16/44.1 captures sounded far more similar – though they still sounded audibly different to my ears.

 

@mansr, @pkane2001 and @Arpiben analysed the two captures, and pointed out that the difference in sound might be down to the particular upsampling filter I used when replaying the 16/44.1 file. (I really like the way this filter sounds, but it doesn’t measure very well in the frequency domain. Some would refer to it as a ‘leaky filter’.) So I decided to redo the captures, using a filter with better frequency-domain performance (the ‘poly-sinc' filter in HQPlayer, with TPDF dither). Here are the new captures:

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1u0CErRn-2XJQCnNZLdr7WILjgx4xJ2w1

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1d7C1LL_IuMdUyE5LP_3GjV9nl-U4W_NI

 

I think these captures sound very subtly different from each other (though I'm not sure I'd be confident doing a blind ABX). In any event, I’d like to understand a few things:

 

Could there be anything in the original 24/352.8 file that is lost during decimation down to 16/44.1?

If so, what could have been lost, considering there’s virtually no music signal above 10kHz anyhow?

Is all this hires malarkey really much ado about nothing?

 

I'm not sure if these two captures are going to be useful in helping to answer these questions, but feel free to take a listen, and/or perform any analysis.

 

Is it possible to identify which is the capture of the 24/352.8, and which is the capture of the upsampled 16/44.1?

 

Mani.

T004 is the upsampled version? 

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There's a peculiar glitch in the recording chain, which also occurred in the first two samples manisandher put up, in the other thread,

 

2LPiano03.thumb.PNG.d9ee7da09abfbd7fd0d5317793b72a76.PNG

 

That vertical transient just prior to time 0.046secs after the start occurs just once in the waveform, and has nothing to do with a piano - OTOH, is it perhaps a glitch in the original 2L recording?

 

Note as the title says, these are the file waveforms, unprocessed by DeltaWave.

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14 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Here's another interesting grab of the two waveforms, zoomed out on the time scale, with filtering to show only the bandwidth 8k to 16k,



Quote

(looking at the wave forms in detail like you did, Frank) is not legal.

I agree with Peter.

 

 You should be able to hear clear differences between both versions, not just hazard a guess based on looking at  waveforms to make up your mind first. :P

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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They are quite distinct when listening to them, but guessing which is which is quite pointless, really - because it will depend upon how the particular circuitry used reacts, behaves when processing the files ... I certainly have a preference, though, :).

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14 minutes ago, fas42 said:

They are quite distinct when listening to them, but guessing which is which is quite pointless, really - because it will depend upon how the particular circuitry used reacts, behaves when processing the files ... I certainly have a preference, though, :).

 

That's a pathetic excuse for not having gear (or hearing abilities ?) good enough to easily hear which file was the up-converted 16/44.1 version.

You appear to come from the 16/44.1 camp that insists that high res is a waste of time as only younger dogs, bats etc. can hear the differences.

Neither is it helpful to post screen shots like yours to help people decide BEFORE listening, which version is which.

 The members who haven't listened to them already deserve to listen to them for themselves without any kind of EXPECTATION Bias !!!

 

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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9 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

That's a pathetic excuse for not having gear (or hearing abilities ?) good enough to easily hear which file was the up-converted 16/44.1 version.

You appear to come from the 16/44.1 camp that insists that high res is a waste of time as only younger dogs, bats etc. can hear the differences.

Neither is it helpful to post screen shots like yours to help people decide BEFORE listening, which version is which.

 The members who haven't listened to them already deserve to listen to them for themselves without any kind of EXPECTATION Bias !!!

 

Don't worry most sensible members have Frank on Ignore. 

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6 minutes ago, Rexp said:

Don't worry most sensible members have Frank on Ignore. 

 

Perhaps I need to do the same ? ¬¬

 Like so many other members he will also keep ignoring the results of the research that Mani is doing in this area too, just like the usual suspects refusing to accept the clear indication from the Blind tests he performed with Mansr, which deserved to be followed up in greater depth.

 

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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30 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Neither is it helpful to post screen shots like yours to help people decide BEFORE listening, which version is which.

 The members who haven't listened to them already deserve to listen to them for themselves without any kind of EXPECTATION Bias !!!

 

 

Remenber that mani stated, " I'm not sure if these two captures are going to be useful in helping to answer these questions, but feel free to take a listen, and/or perform any analysis."

 

I note that "expectation bias" solves all problems in the audiophile world, irrespective of which side of the fence you're on :P - some of the most daft renditions I have ever heard of recordings I know well have been on fancy rigs, which wildly 'distort' the content to suit "expectations" of what something "should sound like".

 

If people can't judge whether they like something when just using their ears, ignoring other factors, then why do they bother doing this audiophile game, ^_^?

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14 minutes ago, fas42 said:

I know well have been on fancy rigs, which wildly 'distort' the content to suit "expectations" of what something "should sound like".

 

 Please don't go there again Frank. Most members clearly do not agree with your statements in this area.¬¬

 

 Your last sentence says it all. Music is meant to be listened to, not dragging out the test equipment at every opportunity , often before listening to them in many cases.

As far as Expectation Bias goes, if another people say the same thing, others are more likely to jump to the same conclusion, sometimes incorrectly.

 

In this case you could have sent Mani your findings, then posted them after more members had a chance to actually listen to them.

 

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

PROFILE UPDATED 13-11-2020

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13 hours ago, mansr said:

Here's a quick analysis.

 

Thanks Mans - that's excellent.

 

13 hours ago, mansr said:

The only anomalous thing here is the discrepancy between the DXD original and the 16/44.1 version. A plain downsample shouldn't differ that much. I wonder if perhaps they intentionally boosted the highs by a few dB for some reason.

 

How strange. Why on earth would they do this deliberately? I'm tempted to do my own decimation from 24/352.8 to 16/44.1 to see if I could do a more accurate job.

 

13 hours ago, mansr said:

As for the captures, the ADC has possibly been a limiting factor here. I would have used a 24-bit ADC at a higher sample rate to make certain nothing was missed.

 

I did think about this. I could have used the Tascam as the ADC, as opposed to simply using is as a digital interface. However, I really don't like the way it sounds, at any resolution - it measures well, but sounds cr*p. (Anyone who thinks most modern ADCs are essentially perfect obviously don't listen to them.) I do have another decent ADC here that is 24/192-capable. Will give it a go sometime.

 

Mani.

Main: SOtM sMS-200 -> Okto dac8PRO -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Tune Audio Anima horns + 2x Rotel RB-1590 amps -> 4 subs

Home Office: SOtM sMS-200 -> MOTU UltraLite-mk5 -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Impulse H2 speakers

Vinyl: Technics SP10 / London (Decca) Reference -> Trafomatic Luna -> RME ADI-2 Pro

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5 hours ago, fas42 said:

There's a peculiar glitch in the recording chain, which also occurred in the first two samples manisandher put up, in the other thread,

 

That's no doubt down to the Tascam's auto-start function - it seems to get itself into a bit of a muddle. But this only lasts for a very short period of time, after which it sorts itself out. I'd discard the first second or so of all the captures, to be on the safe side.

 

Mani.

Main: SOtM sMS-200 -> Okto dac8PRO -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Tune Audio Anima horns + 2x Rotel RB-1590 amps -> 4 subs

Home Office: SOtM sMS-200 -> MOTU UltraLite-mk5 -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Impulse H2 speakers

Vinyl: Technics SP10 / London (Decca) Reference -> Trafomatic Luna -> RME ADI-2 Pro

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7 hours ago, PeterSt said:

[impossibility of sample alignment]

 

Watch out please: I am not saying or suggesting that this explains the differences mansr pointed out.

The graphs I posted were based on the average power spectrum and thus don't rely on sample alignment.

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33 minutes ago, manisandher said:
13 hours ago, mansr said:

he only anomalous thing here is the discrepancy between the DXD original and the 16/44.1 version. A plain downsample shouldn't differ that much. I wonder if perhaps they intentionally boosted the highs by a few dB for some reason.

How strange. Why on earth would they do this deliberately? I'm tempted to do my own decimation from 24/352.8 to 16/44.1 to see if I could do a more accurate job.

Never mind. It's the 16-bit dither that causes the discrepancy. At the high frequencies, the signal is so low in level that the dither becomes significant in comparison.

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11 hours ago, fas42 said:

Here's another interesting grab of the two waveforms, zoomed out on the time scale, with filtering to show only the bandwidth 8k to 16k,

 

2LPiano02.thumb.PNG.b22e67336c3bcf2085ca72ed57e57755.PNG

 

T004 is blue, T005 is pink - does this make it easier to guess? :)

 

So what do these suggest Frank? That T004 is of higher resolution than T005? That T004 is more noisy than T005? Or perhaps that dithering is having an affect on the replay of the 16/44.1 file?

 

Mani.

Main: SOtM sMS-200 -> Okto dac8PRO -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Tune Audio Anima horns + 2x Rotel RB-1590 amps -> 4 subs

Home Office: SOtM sMS-200 -> MOTU UltraLite-mk5 -> 6x Neurochrome 286 mono amps -> Impulse H2 speakers

Vinyl: Technics SP10 / London (Decca) Reference -> Trafomatic Luna -> RME ADI-2 Pro

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