Hi-Res - Does it matter? Blind Test by Mark Waldrep

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Interesting. 
 

When I talked to Archimago at Axpona he mentioned the possibility that people with certain types of hearing damage may be prone to hearing high resolution files. This was only based on his very very very limited sample, but it’s kind of interesting. 

 

I've met several people at T.H.E. Show with hearing damage that exhibit the same phenomenon. 

 

I'm enjoying this thread but wake me up when an actual market exists for high resolution audio files or streaming.  

[Rt66indierock]

2 hours ago, Rexp said:

It's a bit like wine, if you enjoy plonk, good for you, its much cheaper than a good Bordeaux, but please know you are not a connoisseur and are missing out big time and you're not qualified to advise others. 

Or as I would say if you can’t tell me why  the former lead singer of the band Tool and Highway 47 are important in the wine world you are Just a wine snob. And unqualified.

[Rt66indierock]

6 hours ago, Rexp said:

A connoisseur is an expert in matters of taste, and a wine snob presumably buys wine on the basis of the label or cost, not sure your point? 

I questioned your expertise.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Just use so high sampling rate and bit depth that you have the analog noise floor dominating everywhere and that all harmonics captured by the microphones have long disappeared into the noise floor. And you are safe. And absolutely no reason not to do so.

 

Or use DSD and you don't need any brickwalls anywhere...

 

 

We've had high resolution for a couple of decades and nobody cares at the consumer level. And if you take out Japan does anyone care about DSD? 

 

The whole reason for Mark's test is he really believed high resolution sounded better. Then he met me. 

[Rt66indierock]

25 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 Do you bother to look at other areas of this forum ? 

There are numerous USA and elsewhere members that love their DSD.

 

They don't add up to anything but a rounding error in the market.

[Rt66indierock]

5 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, quite a lot of people care about hires (PCM and DSD). All the time new material coming, to nativedsd.com, highresaudio.com and even HDtracks. Nowadays more are more at DSD256 rates. 

 

I have two DSD256 capable AD/DA converters (RME ADI-2 Pro) and my own recording software. But of course many of the recordings are made using Merging, TASCAM, Korg or Mytek hardware and edited in Pyramix or Sonoma. Now Merging has three DSD256 capable recording devices (Horus, Hapi and Anubis). All those can do also playback, in addition to their NADAC.

 

 

NativeDSD, Highresaudio and HDTracks are three of the 10 sites I looked at to make the case nobody cares.

 

In my case I use DSD as a sound effect on a few harmonicas and some older resonator guitars. I like to fiddle with things, some say too much.

[Rt66indierock]

33 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

I only care that music important for me is available in hires. That ranges from Daft Punk to David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler, and to classical music and blues/jazz. I'm not even rounding error as customer for a record company, so I care as much about their market as they care about me.

 

 

The exact thought process that stunted adoption of SACD.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

 

If no one cares then why bother posting here. This site is less than a rounding error for the market!

 

If no one cares then just listen to MP3 or AAC or Spotify and be done with it.

 

If no one cares then just open your mouth and swallow MQA.

 

Nice try, but I seem to get my points across here. I do listen to Mp3 over on  over web radio stations. Good music is good music. And I listen to AAC every morning on my morning walk/run on my iPod Shuffle. 

 

The goal is get as good as possible sound recorded then distribute it to consumers as CD quality.  Not nearly as easy to do as you would think. I think focusing on improving CD quality is the way to improve recording quality overall. The math of high resolution is troubling especially if you take out crash cymbals. 

 

As for MQA I'm not interested in a new format that doesn't sound better to anyone but the audio press. 

[Rt66indierock]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

 

I think that has much more to do with technical annoyances. It is still alive and kicking. But DSD only took off properly after it appeared in computer audio and downloads. DVD-Audio based on LPCM and Meridian's proprietary compression (from the same guys that brought you MQA) died really quick. Although that compression is still in a way alive on Bluray.

 

Physical media, be it RedBook, SACD or Bluray is pretty much dead.

 

 

Go back a little over 15 years ago for SACD. If you think DSD took off please explain it looks like a dead format to me. When I wrote MQA is Vaporware many in the DSD world asked if I felt DSD was vaporware? I told them the only thing preventing from being vaporware is that it is in DAC chips but chip manufactures never could give a good reason why they included DSD.

[Rt66indierock]

1 minute ago, kumakuma said:

 

SACD is dying as a delivery format for DSD just as CDs are dying as a delivery format for PCM. Doesn't mean that DSD is dead though.

The number of DSD titles is not an indication of a healthy format.

[Rt66indierock]

1 minute ago, kumakuma said:

 

What is?

Think more than half a million albums. 

[Rt66indierock]

20 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

Seems like a pretty arbitrary number. How did you come up with it?

10% of available tracks on Spotify.

[Rt66indierock]

48 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

I put my home music collection on the Web and can run it through my iPhone on several-mile desert walks at full resolution for all Redbook, for most 24/44.1, and for some 24/88.2 and 24/96. (Edit: It comes to the iPhone in full res, but if I use the iPhone's Lightning-to-miniplug adapter it's of course downconverted.) It sounds really nice. For trips I can run it through a CCK with a battery supply attached and into a portable DAC. Nice. I mostly use Subsonic, but jRiver with JRemote offers similar capability.

 

And if I want to hear something else in at least CD res, there's the Qobuz app on the phone.

 

So no particular reason to have to settle for AAC or mp3 except for web radio (though there may well be exceptions there that I haven't explored).

I prefer to run with the shuffle and not my iPhone. 

[Rt66indierock]

45 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

My definition of a "live" format is a little different:

 

"Is there still music being released in this format that I want to buy?"

 

The answer, for me at least, is "yes".

Healthy would be a lot more.

[Rt66indierock]

44 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

How many and which of Spotify's genres make up less than 10% of their available tracks? (I'm not saying this makes all hi res or CD-and-above streaming more than a nice lagniappe for the music industry, just wondering which genres we might think of as "healthy" that wouldn't meet your criterion.)

Formats not genres. A format needs to have music for me, Kal, Andy Q and you. How many formats cover us?

[Rt66indierock]

14 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

Would you care to share what evidence you have to support your contention that "chip manufacturers never could give a good reason why they included DSD"? I strongly suspect that you are presenting your opinion as fact.

 

Allan I asked about DSD when I was researching MQA. I have regular contact with people in the top ten semiconductor companies in the United States. And less regular contact with others. My mentor (and client) worked for two of them. ESS was very helpful about MQA and other formats.

[Rt66indierock]

12 hours ago, Jud said:

 

I know that's what you were talking about. But I asked a different question. How many of Spotify's genres (and which) would be unhealthy and failing by your definition?

 

Going back to my original vaporware post you would have to say jazz, classical reggae, new age, world and children's aren't doing too well. If you aren't up there with stage and screen at just under 3% of the US Market in 2018 can you say things are OK?

[Rt66indierock]

3 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

Are you seriously asking us to believe that you asked chip manufacturers whey they included DSD and they couldn't give you a reason? And if you insist that was the case, then surely you spoke to the wrong people at those companies.

 

I don't consider it is a check the box feature to be reason. But this happens a lot look the stickers on a receiver.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

I really don’t understand your use of the term “vaporware”. In the computer world, vaporware is a product that developers/manufacturers keep promising to bring to market, but never do. If I’m not wrong, you are using the term to mean a product that doesn’t perform to it’s makers’ promises. Is that right?

 

I'm using it in its original use in software. The reference is to Xenix. This was discussed in the Vaporware thread.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

Until Tidal started streaming MQA, vapourware was an appropriate term. A handful of demo tracks does not a product make.

 

Nor does a few thousand tracks make a product.

[Rt66indierock]

15 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

No, but it’s not like it DOESN’T Exist, though. I have Tidal, and I look for the “M” after new titles when they are released every Thursday. What bothers me about MQA, is that while Tidal’s software tells you that you are playing an MQA title, what I don’t see any indication of what is the actual bit depth and sampling rate of the selection to which you are listening. Same is true with the AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt the dragonfly logo glows purple when a MQA file is encountered, but again, is it 16 or 24 bit? 48 KHz? 88.2 KHz,? 96 KHz? There is nothing to tell you to what you are actually listening!

 

When Xenix was declared vaporware its market share actually went up a little. So it existed but was like selling smoke.

 

Part of the beauty of MQA is amount of 16/44.1 files processed.

[Rt66indierock]

10 hours ago, PeterSt said:

 

What do you mean by this ??

A lot of the music I listen too never was anything but CD quality, 2L’s Norwegian stuff as well. Mans has talked about this as well.

[Rt66indierock]

On 11/23/2019 at 9:37 PM, PeterSt said:

 

If you count out the last (Boris Blank) example, than personally I never found that proven, and I look a lot at this fake stuff. For example: 95% of HD-Tracks Hires would be faked from Redbook (don't pin me down on the 95%) and 0% of the MQA is faked, as long as it is shown as 88.2 or more (but mind my 192 remark in my previous post, which most certainly is not true by any means).

 

Of course, with the example like The Beatles, there may not be more than 12 bits because of noise. But this is all so often the case. But I can try it:

 

OK, you got me. Must be taken from some multi channel (48KHz)  version.

This is Come Together on the Abbey Road one.

 

So now I found it proven. Haha. But it is the first. Also I took this one deliberately because it looked suspicious to me in the first place, when I found this yesterday. And it is not signed of by the artists (smart move 🤐).

Tracks from The White Album show the same. The both CD Sets are the only Beatles in MQA I could find.

 

Sorry, I had a list of MQA tracks to review from the now gone Onkyo Music. Of the six at least two were 16/44.1 MQA according to them. And enough Universal stuff burned up in 2008 that there may not anything but 16/44.1 in many cases.

[Rt66indierock]

People, I've had to change an article because of the responses here about computers.