A warning. There is a new web article going aroud that is a crock of schmidt.

[JohnBooty]

This article is crap.

Probably the worst thing about this article is that it (intentionally) conflates so many things about digital audio.

Among other things it bounces back and forth between discussions of so many types of "digital audio."

• Uncompressed CD-quality digital audio
• High-quality lossily compressed digital audio
• Low-quality lossily compressed digital audio, mangled by Bluetooth protocols, and further mangled and compressed by the DSP tricks that portable speakers use to eke out sound (Most audiophiles would probably agree that listening to music this way is pretty bad)

He seems to acknowledge that CD-quality audio is pretty good? But then rails about how other kinds are bad and sort of talks about them like they're the same thing? ::holds head, tries to make the pain go away::

Is there a sentence in that article which is true? It is almost completely bizzarro world applications of the ideas being knocked about. I don't know who the tech turncoat is, but I'm getting a strong impression from this article just not a positive impression. One of those Orwellian feelings that something named the fair observer is instead its very opposite.

I actually like the case he makes for the reasons why headphones aren't as subjectively exciting as speakers or a live performance.

The best way to locate sounds is to use the whole body — ears, skull, skin, even guts — since the entire body contains vibration sensors. The brain’s main job is making sense of vibrations throughout the body, eyeballs to toes to eardrums, all consistent, all at once. One single vibratory image unified from skin and ears.

Headphones and earbuds fracture that unified sensory experience. Normally, your skin still absorbs vibrations from the outside, consistent with what you see. But with headphones covering them, your ears process entirely different signals injected directly into the perceptual space inside the head. That new sound image bypasses skin and eyes, while still being superimposed in front of you in space, on top of real sound sources. That physical impossibility sounds interesting, but it is the deepest kind of hack a brain can suffer, short of drugs. Consuming separate, inconsistent sensory streams that create competing maps of space violates a brain’s design.

I agree with this. You can have a great time listening to headphones, obviously! But it's certainly true: you can't feel the music in your body like you can with a great two-channel speaker system. And if we extrapolate a bit farther, it's part of the reason why recorded sound can never quite replicate live sound: you're attempting to recreate one acoustic space inside another and it's never going to quite fool the brain. And there's also a discussion to be had about whether or not this even matters anyway for music created in a studio, since so much of it consists of synthetic aural concoctions that aren't even attempting to recreate a real acoustic space in the first place.

But what the HELL is this assertion doing in an article about digital sound?

This assertion about headphones vs. other sources is completely orthogonal to the discussion of whether we're talking about live audio sources, analog audio sources, or digital audio sources.

It's like this guy has major, crippling ADHD. He bounces around between so many different concepts.

He's like one of those people who can't even finish a sentence before he cuts himself off in the middle of a sentence and starts off on a new tangent. I am shocked he managed to obtain a degree, much less a doctorate, if the fractured and damaged train of thought exhibited in this article is any indication. He starts out by comparing A to B, and then A to C, and then D to Z, and goes back to A, and then compares C to M, and at the end he says... VOILA Q.E.D.!

 

[maxxevv]

It's like this guy has major, crippling ADHD. He bounces around between so many different concepts. He starts out by comparing A to B, and then A to C, and then D to Z, and goes back to A, and then compares C to M, and at the end he says... VOILA Q.E.D.!

He has a great example at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

When you can't convince them, confuse them.

 

[j_j]

It's like this guy has major, crippling ADHD. He bounces around between so many different concepts.

I don't think it's ADHD, I think it's a laundry list of what he wishes others to image are wrong with digital. As someone said before, the list of rhetorical fallacies is probably longer than the article. The "bouncing around" is just, in my view, intentional "guilt by association", coupled with a massive case of most every other rhetorical fallacy out there. He does repeatedly attempt the "guilt by association" move, as well as appeal to authority, straw man, flat-out wrong arguments about sampling, utterly ridiculous statements about the Channel Capacity theorem, misattribution of the sampling theorem (Shannon proved it, Nyquest made it as a conjecture, albeit a very educated one). In short, the mistakes show slant, ignorance of a subject he presents as an expert, and a willingness to pretend absolute expertise in a field he clearly does not understand. I suspect that he may also misunderstand how human perception works, but I'm tired of this codswallop, and I'm having dinner instead.

 

[JohnBooty]

He has a great example at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
When you can't convince them, confuse them.

You read my mind. I was totally thinking of you-know-who when I wrote this.

In a lot of venues I would have named that person without a second thought. But part of me cherishes audiophile-dom as my utterly frivolous (and completely enjoyable) haven from the real world.

 

[restorer-john]

Be careful how far you go.

I took your advice and took the minimalist approach.

After some exhaustive, sighted, biased, totally subjective, before and after comparisons, there is absolutely no doubt a pair of Quantum Absorbers placed close together, along with an Annular Ring give the best results. Of particular interest are the directional arrows which really guide the steam on its journey, a definite improvement across the board.

The Annular Ring placement is not ideal, and experimentation is needed for the best overall position. Worth it for players looking to extract that elusive last piece of the puzzle. Recommended.

Not forgetting the vital power lead, I employed a simple but effective, Event Horizon Minimizer and was rewarded with immediate gains.

 

[Blake Klondike]

I can't help but think about how many of the world's problems would be solved if everyone were comfortable admitting that they didn't know enough about a topic to express an opinion. there is a field of scientific study that objectively addresses all this stuff, and many of the members of this site possess that training. the first-principles at work in ASR analysis are so valuable-- why people can't see that will always be a mystery to me.

 

[Wombat]

I can't help but think about how many of the world's problems would be solved if everyone were comfortable admitting that they didn't know enough about a topic to express an opinion. there is a field of scientific study that objectively addresses all this stuff, and many of the members of this site possess that training. the first-principles at work in ASR analysis are so valuable-- why people can't see that will always be a mystery to me.

You wish to kill off all of the loose and windy banter, and thus the fun?

 

[Victoria]

Then there is the bit about many people creating music think digital screws it up. Very scientific that is considering that 99.99% of music in the world is created using digital technology.

Ah yes the good old "digital screws it up."

And that's exactly why all of our computers, mobile phones, and et cetera -- which we trust our lives upon on a daily basis -- are still analog based.

Oh wait...

 

[JJB70]

I may be the odd one out here but I see nothing inherently bad about lossy digital formats. I may have dud hearing but I find it extremely difficult to discern audible differences between 320k (and 256k) MP3 and RBCD quality 44.1/16. In many cases I can't. And if you need to subject the brain to some sort of stress test to discern such differences then it indicates that they are irrelevant to the enjoyment of music. And I see no point going beyond RBCD for playback formats in two channel. Articles like the one linked are just click bait to feed audiophile voodoo.

 

[solderdude]

restorer-john it looks like your pictures have not been optimized. You could ask Maty how to do this.
It could also be that your printer did not have the correct USB cable or it did not have an annular ring or other optimizations.
Hoping your shirts are as smooth as silk now. After all the trouble you went to it must be so.
On the other hand it could also be that I need to optimize my monitor or my eyes using real glass optics instead of cheap plastic optics.

More on topic... I wanted to read what was posted but after the first few posts decided to just post some ... well... what the author of the article seems to have done.

 

[Mtbf]

I took your advice and took the minimalist approach.

Patent pending?

 

[JohnBooty]

I may be the odd one out here but I see nothing inherently bad about lossy digital formats. I may have dud hearing but I find it extremely difficult to discern audible differences between 320k (and 256k) MP3 and RBCD quality 44.1/16. In many cases I can't. And if you need to subject the brain to some sort of stress test to discern such differences then it indicates that they are irrelevant to the enjoyment of music. And I see no point going beyond RBCD for playback formats in two channel. Articles like the one linked are just click bait to feed audiophile voodoo.

You're not the odd one out re: lossy. Every double-blind study ever done agrees with your experiences.

I think there is a case to be made that uncompressed redbook audio is perhaps very very very slightly more enjoyable than high-quality lossy audio, even if we're not consciously aware of the differences. There are a lot of small details that get smudged and fudged with lossy audio. They are there if you know what to listen for. Do these add up and make a difference even if you're not aware of them? I think probably so, but I also think the difference is very tiny.

I listen to lossy music literally all day long, so that tells you how much I (don't) find the difference terribly significant.

 

[carlosmante]

I took your advice and took the minimalist approach.

After some exhaustive, sighted, biased, totally subjective, before and after comparisons, there is absolutely no doubt a pair of Quantum Absorbers placed close together, along with an Annular Ring give the best results. Of particular interest are the directional arrows which really guide the steam on its journey, a definite improvement across the board.

View attachment 36800

The Annular Ring placement is not ideal, and experimentation is needed for the best overall position. Worth it for players looking to extract that elusive last piece of the puzzle. Recommended.
View attachment 36801

Not forgetting the vital power lead, I employed a simple but effective, Event Horizon Minimizer and was rewarded with immediate gains.

View attachment 36802

Now that Iron is able to produce Deuterium enriched steam, Audiophile grade of course.

 

[GrimSurfer]

Now that Iron is able to produce Deuterium enriched steam, Audiophile grade of course.

Kim Jong Un wants to buy your iron, @restorer-john.

 

[Soniclife]

I can't help but think about how many of the world's problems would be solved if everyone were comfortable admitting that they didn't know enough about a topic to express an opinion.

Very true. It seems knowing that you don't know something is no longer a legal thought.

 

[yikky900]

I may be the odd one out here but I see nothing inherently bad about lossy digital formats. I may have dud hearing but I find it extremely difficult to discern audible differences between 320k (and 256k) MP3 and RBCD quality 44.1/16. In many cases I can't. And if you need to subject the brain to some sort of stress test to discern such differences then it indicates that they are irrelevant to the enjoyment of music. And I see no point going beyond RBCD for playback formats in two channel. Articles like the one linked are just click bait to feed audiophile voodoo.

I can't tell 320k but 256 and lower i can on most music with mp3. While with 192K AAC?, nope. I do really love how audiophiles tout better gear to hear lossy but even with my ER4SR and then Shure SRH1540/SE425 i couldn't tell VBR 192k AAC for 99% of my music. While MP3 even with Lame is just easy to break old codec.

 

[AudioSceptic]

I may be the odd one out here but I see nothing inherently bad about lossy digital formats. I may have dud hearing but I find it extremely difficult to discern audible differences between 320k (and 256k) MP3 and RBCD quality 44.1/16. In many cases I can't. And if you need to subject the brain to some sort of stress test to discern such differences then it indicates that they are irrelevant to the enjoyment of music. And I see no point going beyond RBCD for playback formats in two channel. Articles like the one linked are just click bait to feed audiophile voodoo.

Same here. Philips used to run a Golden Ears website. One of the tests was to listen to a selection of music at different levels of MP3 compression and see at which point you couldn't differentiate between the MP3 and the CD original. Even at 128 k it took careful listening, showing that if it's not the night-and-day some claim. I do wonder whether some conflate "MP3" with the thin sound of many phone earbuds? The one has nothing to do with the other!

 

[AudioSceptic]

I can't tell 320k but 256 and lower i can on most music with mp3. While with 192K AAC?, nope. I do really love how audiophiles tout better gear to hear lossy but even with my ER4SR and then Shure SRH1540/SE425 i couldn't tell VBR 192k AAC for 99% of my music. While MP3 even with Lame is just easy to break old codec.

I think that 192 k AAC is probably the sweet spot for size vs quality. That's what I have on my iPhone and I doubt that I could tell if from lossless even though it uses ¼ the storage of ALAC or FLAC (4x the music for a given capacity!).

 

[Cosmik]

Very true. It seems knowing that you don't know something is no longer a legal thought.

It's not that simple. If a person says "This amplifier has 0.1% THD..." then that may be a 'fact' but an incomplete one (no load, frequency, power level, etc. specified). And if they then add "... which is very low distortion.", a cornucopia of questions arise (low for an amplifier? a solid state one or valve? below human perception? true for all signals? etc. etc.).

Did that person know what they were talking about? Did they know that they didn't know something relevant? Maybe, or maybe not. I think discourse is impossible without 'knowing' that 'knowledge' is a very ambiguous concept.

 

[Soniclife]

I think discourse is impossible without 'knowing' that 'knowledge' is a very ambiguous concept.

That's not remotely what I was saying.