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

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5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Agreed. I once had a B&O (Bang & Olufsen) stereo ribbon mike. Two figure-of-eight mike units were stacked, one atop the other and the top one could turn, right to left with regard to the bottom one. The mike was gorgeous satin chrome and it came in a beautiful, padded rosewood case with gold lettering. Aside from the fact that at the time, I couldn’t find a mike preamp that was quiet enough to give a decent S/N, and that the top end only went to about 13,500 Hz, recordings made with it sounded marvelous in spite of the noise! I finally sold it due to my inability to find a suitable mike amp (one of life’s little regrets). The mike was designed to be used with a B&O stereo tape deck which contained a pair of proprietary transformers to boost the minuscule ribbon output to a level where it could be electronically amplified without the amp needing 70 to 80 dB of gain! The transformers were not available separately! Today, of course, there are cheap op amps that could do the job easily (Like the TI LME47910, for instance with it’s 2 nV/root-Hertz of self noise). But in the 1980s when I owned the B&O stereo mike, a transformer was de riguer.

Ever think that maybe ribbons with a slower transient response are providing a beneficial limiting upon the rate of change in a digitally sampled system?

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2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

With the lightness of the ribbon, I would say that its transient response would be faster than say, a condenser mike. Especially older ones with etched metal diaphragms. I’m sure that the limited high-frequency response of most ribbons  have some affect on transient response, but low inertia due to low mass, would allow it to start and stop very quickly.

No the condenser will have the better transient response.  Ribbons while light have to move more.

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So how can ribbons have better transient response if they are so truncated in frequency response?

 

OTOH, not all are. Like this Samar MF65 ribbon.

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3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Up to about 10 KHz this mike does very well (obviously omni or figure-of-eight. No cardioid could ever do a flat bass response like that). Even that slight peak at 10 KHz is insignificant, but that -10dB negative peak at around 16 KHz is difficult to account for as is the rising response above that. At US$2000 each, this Chech-built beauty certainly ain’t chicken feed!

It is only a -5 db dip there.  So not great, but plenty of mikes do worse. 

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4 hours ago, Miska said:

There are pdp-11 systems running RSX still operational today, doing critical tasks. Very few other systems have stood time as well as those ones...

 

Anybody still remembers RL02 disks? Probably one of the very first HDD's with swappable disks.

 

Gotta also love pdp-11's printer terminal...

 

Yeah I worked with those up until the late 1990s. My employer then sold them for $3000 each for some gas company using them for billing.  They had the printer terminal which used reams of paper. They had the add on Quantuum drives.

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4 minutes ago, NoisyNarrowBandDevice said:

The last machine I saw running FORTRAN was the HLRE-3 Mistral supercomputer at the German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg. Almost all climate modelling is partially or fully FORTRAN and these codebases have been maintained and expanded over many generations and architectures of compute.

 

Now back to topic

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268870715_Climate_Models_Challenges_for_Fortran_Development_Tools

 

A quick look at this paper.  I didn't even know assigned GoTo was now obsolescent in Fortran.  Nor that Do Loops have changed.  So even my Fortran knowledge is out of date.  Well there are worse things. 

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1 minute ago, Sloop John B said:

I’m quite amazed that Mark has only received 122 submissions. 

 

Here is is a chance for us to contribute to the understanding of music reproduction and so few are bothered to take the test. 

 

It would appear reading between the lines that most of us cannot blindly tell a 24/96 track from a 16/44 one. This is not the result that an owner of a high res label would wish for so makes it all the more interesting. 

 

Mark particularly would like some under 40 ears to take the test. 

 

I would  urge as many here as possible to take the challenge and add to our knowledge of audio reproduction. 

 

Sign up here

 

.sjb

 

Audiophiles don't like trusting just their ears.  Happens over and over and over again. 

 

Heck so poor is participation in these kinds of listening tests, I'm impressed he has 122 submissions. 

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16 hours ago, semente said:

 

I can't think of anything more tedious than comparing files of different resolution, except perhaps comparing the effects of cables...

 

I've done that once with PlayClassics' files, and that's it for me.

I doubt that any of these recordings is as good/fit-for-purpose anyway...

I'm not speaking of you in particular here.  We have regular reports to pick on example of the obvious difference footers for your speaker cable make.  Apparently it engages the interest of some audiophiles who claim a significantly different sound.  Yet record both conditions and let people pick what is different and it becomes tedious.  That tells you something.