Continuing with CDs?

i really don't get why people are dead-set against exploring other digital options that provide a better listening experience. why does science have to stop in 1985?

might as well ask why do people still believe in gravity or why the earth is flat, why stop indeed? why not post sales brochures as evidence of scientific progress?

re: the AES meta-analysis, what a shocker that a review would include results from improperly conducted studies, then discover there's a difference after all

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=112204.0

hey now that's just not playing fair. if you mean by "sales brochures" the stereophile review of the ch precision transport, i happened to grab it from the vendor site because they were proud of the review and posted it in full, and it is not available as free content on stereophile's site. but if you want to read it in stereophile you can go buy it off the newsstand. and yeah what a shocker that the aes, the largest professional organization of audio experts, would post an analysis and people would then snark about it on some internet forum?

by sales brochure i meant stereophile itself, not where the pdf was hosted

so SP is something to be trusted and HA is just "some internet forum", got it

xp It's not a scientific paper or peer-reviewed therefore sadly the scrutiny is mainly only found on internet forums.

i'd like to see archived usenet discussions on qsound.

i think that paper has been peer-reviewed. it appears in the journal itself (JAES Volume 64 Issue 6 pp. 364-379; June 2016). fully expecting a hydrogenaud link to someone who says peer reviewing doesn't mean anything anymore. there's no way out. i had not gleaned that you meant stereophile magazine itself is a sales brochure. the layers of snark run so deep here i'm out of my element. i'm gonna go back to the blue oyster cult thread where they like me.

hey tsf, no snark intended on my part. i'm just a wisearse that doesn't have anything of substance to add to this discussion. but i like reading it either way, so thanks for posting.

(also qsound marketing was funny.)

i really don't get why people are dead-set against exploring other digital options that provide a better listening experience. why does science have to stop in 1985?

― Thus Sang Freud, Saturday, February 12, 2022 9:45 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't have the faculties to parse the science, but I do sometimes think it's odd when people have such a resistance to the idea that music formats and playback technology can't improve over time just looking around at.... literally every other technology in the world

haha xp austin my comment was not directed at you and your comment was funny.

Isn't hearing, for most of us, getting worse the older we get?

Won't most of us, by the time we can afford better gear, be less able to appreciate whatever difference it makes?

some of this is cognitive, is the point i've been trying to convey. it's not just the sensor itself but what the brain makes of the info. if we were merely talking frequency response, then yeah as we get older our sensors degrade. but the point of hi-res audio is not to increase the frequency range. that's one thing that cds are good at. but they're not so good at timing. humans are very sensitive to timing, from prehistoric days. if hi-res audio can fix the timing issue, then digital audio becomes more transparent, and deep listening becomes that much easier, even if your hearing has degraded.

Isn't hearing, for most of us, getting worse the older we get?

WHAT??

ha.
thread delivers the oldest, but still brilliant, joke.
i have tried to keep up with the audiophile detour but the simple fact is : cds are great.
yeah, i know i downgrade the quality when i rip to 320 for my sonos archive (originally ripped at 256, redoing the collection killed the optical drive in my laptop, but was worth it), but, i have decided to be happy with the compromise and just kick back and enjoy having instant access to all of my collection.
of course, should my NAS drive die, then i have it backed up, but should the worst of the worst happen, then i still have the original cds (for 93.6% of the collection).
albeit scattered semi randomly all over the house/attic making it very hard to find a specific cd as and when the urge should kick in.

tsf could you please define what “timing” means and how CDs lack it?

This is kind of what Bob Stuart of Meridian has been claiming to "solve" with MQA - a sort of time-domain "deblurring", but without ever really being specific about how it's achieved or what "deblurring" really means or how one could possibly eliminate all the phase-shifts / timing issues that accumulate in a multitrack recording chain. The articles I've skimmed on this suggest that humans are sensitive to time-domain inaccuracies of the order of a few microseconds; but redbook digital has time-domain resolution in the order of picoseconds.

Audio tech has improved, and continues to improve, in all kinds of ways (I think £250 speakers / £40 earbuds these days are pretty amazing compared to what that bought you 30 years ago; power-efficient class D amps are way better than they were, etc), and even CD-level digital is better, as ADC/DACs have improved. But hi-res digital isn't adding much to this progress as far as I can tell.

Isn't hearing, for most of us, getting worse the older we get?

How can I miss hearing quality? It's so obvious but it completely passed me by.

How many of you regularly go to concerts and wear ear protection every single time? I'm guessing not many, or if you do only sporadically, because I rarely see anyone else wearing ear plugs or ear monitors for protection, and that will take a toll on hearing.

I have really excellent hearing that's held up over the years, and I have to thank a classmate who sadly was going deaf in one ear. I remember because the first time I ever saw ear plugs was when I walked into our very first school band concert and noticed a small pile of ear plugs in cardboard packets sitting on the percussion table. A classmate also in that section told us he brought them for us, explaining he already had bad hearing loss and that we needed to be careful. We got along very well and I had no reason to doubt him, so I took a pack and wore them for the show. Eventually I got a jar of them at a drugstore and made a habit of wearing them. I was especially conscious of doing so because it's hard not to notice that practicing drums gets really loud. Many years later, not long before I moved to NY, I was with a friend who was fiddling with a device that played 20k tones. It was sort of a hearing test in a way because he heard nothing and neither could an acquaintance of ours who went to concerts basically every week with no hearing protection. In fact, the same guy had trouble hearing lower frequencies (I remember it being 16k but I'm reluctant to go with that because that's pretty bad hearing loss). On the other hand, myself and a friend's younger sister who was there could hear the 20k tone perfectly. (Supposedly women and obviously younger people typically display better hearing at higher frequencies, which is why I bring up her gender and age.) I have no doubt that wearing protection has made an enormous difference. Also it's already been widely reported that doctors are finding younger and younger people with the type of hearing loss they expect from the elderly, and it was often chalked up to portable devices being played way too loudly. I don't doubt this either - it's a big reason why I got ear monitors that sealed out outside noise. (I don't have to crank up the volume to hear a bass line over the rumble of the subway.)

So with all that in mind, if you're already at that point where the upper frequencies of your hearing has dulled, the advantages of high fidelity have already been greatly diminished. You even see this in bad mastering - it's a joke among some mastering engineers that when they need the approval of an older listener (say someone in the band), it's inevitable they'll have to boost the upper frequencies because that spot in their hearing has inevitably been decimated from decades of performing without any hearing protection. There are countless remasters out there that have a shrill, piercing EQ curve, and it wouldn't surprise me if that was the usual reason for it.

OK could you define what “time-domain” is, and perhaps as a bonus consider how time-related phenomena in the microsecond range would compare to head position and movement? Sound travels 0.3mm in a microsecond. To be sensitive to “errors” (compared to what?) on that scale you’d need headphones screwed directly to the skull, otherwise breathing, head position, etc. would absolutely swamp any “time-domain” “smearing” effects.
Sorry, just extremely weary of marketing hype disguised as pseudoscience.

sorry that was a reply to the previous

Michael Jones - see also the Gas thread for "old techno guy can't hear the audio errors in his music" roffles

wait sorry that was to bird

Yeah, I couldn't believe that Gas album! One occasion when streaming beats physical media, I suppose; it was fixed and replaced on all the platforms, but the folks who pre-ordered the CD weren't so lucky.

usually frequency domain is the concept people have trouble with. time domain is straightforward. you know that effect they put on robert plant's voice in the spacy middle part of "whole lotta love," where you sort of hear him said "way down inside" off in the background *before* he actually says it? that's a macro version of what's happening at a microscopic level when you have ringing in the signal. the notes aren't happening precisely when they're supposed to. there are little artifacts preceding (and also coming after) the sound.

Not sure that's really the big deal it's been made out to be. With DSP, recording plug-ins, or with psychoacoustic lossy codecs, certainly it's a real problem - but with properly bandwidth-limited 16/44.1 digital playback, it just isn't there. Becomes more of an issue with heavily compressed / clipping modern pop, where "illegal" waveforms are being fed through the reconstruction filter.

Good article here:
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2018/01/audiophile-myth-260-detestable-digital.html

Oh I do understand the concepts of time-domain and frequency-domain when it comes to spectral analysis etc. I’m more interested in the misuse of the word as a “woo” term in describing inaudible artefacts. Pre-echo is caused by tape print-through or a deliberate effect. A reproduction medium which caused that would be so grossly inaccurate that it would show easily measured defects, in much the way that CDs don’t.

Sorry, that was a bit of a strawman misinterpretation on my part. Presses my buttons.

very jealous of birdistheword's ears - mine are more like michael jones', probably similar levels of loss down to the low 10,000s, too many basement punk shows as a teenager

there seem to be people who do consistently well on the mp3 vs. wav tests online, enough to make me think they're not all taking the piss. i like to believe there are humans out there with super-good hearing, just like there are people out there with better than 20/20 vision. wouldn't it be nice!

Two different arguments here though - lossy compression is audible, no argument there. Superspectral audio perceivably better than redbook CD sampling, I have a problem with.
By the way the paper cited above is what’s called a meta-analysis, in which the findings of other studies are combined in a common statistical framework to draw inferences. So - no new data, and quality entirely depends on the quality of the studies chosen for the analysis. Several of the papers it draws on are familiar, discredited and commercially motivated “findings” which in many instances were not peer reviewed. Garbage in, garbage out.

i went to the gas thread and heard the offending beeps, so i'm feeling a little relieved! seems my hearing is good to at least 10khz

one of my fears is that one day i'll be watching a hollywood blockbuster and there'll be a big explosion and afterwards there will be that high pitched ringing to indicate the main character's got hearing loss - except i won't be able to hear the ringing because my own hearing loss has progressed too far

all this is discussed in the AES paper i linked to earlier. people of course are free to dismiss it as total bs, but i like to think of it as a new area of scientific pursuit that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet.

Temporal fine structure [73] plays an important role in a variety of auditory processes, and temporal resolution studies have suggested that listeners can discriminate monaural timing differences as low as 5 microseconds [31–33]. Such fine temporal resolution also indicates that low pass or antialias filtering may cause significant and perceived degradation of audio when digitized or downsampled [54], often referred to as time smearing [74]. This time smear, which occurs because of convolution of the data with the filter impulse response, has been described variously in terms of the total length of the filter’s impulse response including pre-ring and post-ring, comparative percentage of energy in the sidelobes relative to the main lobe, the degree of pre-ring only, and the sharpness of the main lobe. [41, 42] both claim that human perception can outperform the uncertainty relation for time and frequency resolution. This was disputed in [75], which showed that the conclusions drawn from the experiments were far too strong.

I feel like all of that has been debunked already by the extremely knowledgeable posters itt, e.g.:

"The articles I've skimmed on this suggest that humans are sensitive to time-domain inaccuracies of the order of a few microseconds; but redbook digital has time-domain resolution in the order of picoseconds."

enough people don't love cd sound, though, that the determination of why they don't like it -- and it could be a combination of reasons -- almost becomes secondary. as we migrate to streaming services, and it's just as easy to click on the hi-res file as the normal resolution file, the rationale that people are falling for marketing gimmickry becomes less persuasive.

you can't really debunk what people hear, or tell them they're not hearing it.

lol sure you can!

you seem to be confusing "subjective" and "objective" a lot here

ok true, but what is the point?

but to your specific point, time-domain resolution can be as precise as can be, but if there's pre-ringing then you're still going to perceive the sound before it happens.

granted this is a microscopic effect that might alter or flatten the "soundstage" or the illusion of three-dimensionality in music. which is yet another thing that some people say doesn't exist.

"The articles I've skimmed on this suggest that humans are sensitive to time-domain inaccuracies of the order of a few microseconds; but redbook digital has time-domain resolution in the order of picoseconds."

Wait, how does 44.1kHz become trillionths of a second?

Anyway the issue is in encoding and reconstruction, not resolution of the format.

Wait, how does 44.1kHz become trillionths of a second?

Here you go:
https://troll-audio.com/articles/time-resolution-of-digital-audio/

(Sorry for all the random links - it's been 30+ years since I studied this stuff, have to Google the formulae these days :) )

there is no such thing as "cd sound", redbook audio is transparent. if the cd sounds bad it's because someone pressed a bad sounding master onto it

matttkkkk, in this thread there's a download link for multiple audio clips with jitter, so you can hear what it sounds like. it's the same phenomenon as wow and flutter in vinyl playback
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=107423.msg879764#msg879764

needless to say, nothing to worry about with good equipment and a quality recording (if there's jitter in the master tapes of course it'll also be there on the CD, that's what transparency gets you). and by good equipment i don't mean "you can't buy it for less than $100", i mean "not defective due to poor engineering"

It's marvellous how this thread has gone - rather recently in fact - from "do you buy CDs?", "do you like buying cheap CDs in charity shops?", "do you think it's worth keeping some CDs as well as streaming?" - to ... levels of mathematical discussion about the nature of sound, recording, playback and the human ear that not only beyond most people's comprehension but even beyond the range of most people's sensory capacities.

I don't understand most of it, but I like it.

xpost to birdistheword, and somehow merging this thread with the blue oyster cult one, i saw boc in a long island club -- probably the last time i saw them with allen lanier in the band -- and happened to be standing next to eric bloom's audiologist. i think we bonded when we noticed each other putting in our earplugs. his were much fancier than mine though.

Just to throw in a neuroscience factoid: we are indeed sensitive to microsecond differences between ears, and it is in fact highly related to head position - we experience it as the azimuth of the perceived source (i.e. delay one ear's audio by a few microseconds and it's perceived as spatially shifted away from the delayed side). This tells us a lot about the unbelievably precise structure of the superior olive nucleus in the brainstem, which is extremely sensitive to these time differences and uses them to spatially "tag" an audio source, and absolutely nothing about the perception of "sound" which happens in an entirely different system, let alone the experience of "music" or "timbre" or whatever.
Here's a source for anyone interested: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12708617/

also xxxp I do understand jitter, my arguments apply to systems functioning as designed, I don't disagree that errors are audible!

Also, just to say, I wouldn't want anyone to feel defensive about their format preferences - it's fine that all of this stuff is out there, multi-channel PCM Blu-ray, SACD, boutique labels doing straight-to-"tape" 32/352k, vinyl with a download code, cassette, whatever (I'm even seeing refurb eight-track pop up in my Instagram). There may be some tiny benefit to high-res playback, and 24/96k FLAC is lower bandwidth than streaming HD video, so why not.

I'm a bit dubious when "improvements" are couched in terms of "fixing problems" with CD audio that are not inherently part of the format. The biggest problem with CD, from the industry's PoV, is that it has no copy protection, and most efforts to give us something "better" have been driven by trying to fix that.

MQA seems egregiously bad in this regard; I haven't investigated Tidal, but once an album appears in MQA format, do you have a choice to stream anything else? If not, and you don't have the right hardware, you're getting 13-14 bit resolution and a shedload of ultrasonic imaging (which might sound fine!). That seems objectively bad to me. Practically everything made in the last 10-15 years can play FLAC/WAV/AIFF/MP3/OGG/AAC/ALAC, but you have to get something *else* to unfold MQA to "full" quality. Dodgy.

I've happily bought into many audiophile myths in the past, which is maybe why I'm a bit touchy about this stuff now! External valve stage to "sweeten" (aka distort and roll off) my "bright" and "fatiguing" CD player? Take my money. Carbon fibre cables? HDCD? If that little LED comes on, it must be good.

the "fixing problems" remark came not from me but from jim austin, editor of stereophile, probably the largest circulation hi-fi magazine in the world. he's a physicist and formerly an editor at 'science' magazine. this of course does not mean he is right, but his statement is backed up by AES research. his past statements on MQA have been extremely measured, almost to a fault, taking special care to present the negative commentary along with the positive. (the 'positive' being that most people who have actually heard it think it sounds terrific.) he is not crazy, and per my limited reading of his work, not persuaded by snake oil. but...i hear you. people have every right to be suspicious of proprietary formats.

if you read his review of that component i linked to (which accepts MQA but doesn't do the special-sauce decoding), he had a more favorable opinion of its SACD output than its MQA output of the same track.

in my own experience, extended cd listening sessions can leave me with an aftertaste -- not quite a ringing in my ears but a sensation akin to it -- that i do not at all experience with vinyl. normal caveats apply. this could totally be an effect brought about by my particular playback systems. or it could all be in my head. nonetheless.

I generally only listen to vinyl by monitoring through my audio interface at 24/44.1 and it sounds nice the way vinyl does. I can even appreciate an AAA cut that way. So... some large part of what makes vinyl nice has nothing to do with it not being digtial ;-)