- Thread Starter
- #1,161
And I have explained in that video why it is. It has nothing to do with M-scaler. Or the USB cables you tested. Neither makes this kind of audible difference. The reason you perceive such is because you don't know how your perception confuses you this way. You have not lived through embarrassing situations where reality was different than what you perceived. And your livelihood depended on being right. I have been so situated so let me repeat a story I have told before.But, with all that said, I clearly hear a difference with the M-Scaler running at 16x and therefore remain curious as to why this is.
I managed the signal processing team at Microsoft which developed our lossy audio codec (WMA). I was sick home for a week and manager of the group asked me if I could evaluate their new psychoacoustic model for the encoder. I said sure. He sends me a couple of samples and I tell him that there is degradation. He made some changes and it was still bad. The process of going back and forth was slow so I asked him to just give me the encoder with some parameters that I could tweak. He does this and gives me a config file with half a dozen floating point values.
I start testing and tuning all the variables. I get them to sound great using whole numbers. Then I realized that the decimal places also made a difference. With little else to do, I spent a week narrowing down all the variables to a few decimal places. I then email my signal processing manager the results. He writes back all confused telling me that the encoder actually doesn't use any of those fractions! I told him that was wrong and that I could easily hear the differences.
Next thing I know, he sends me two sets of encoding and ask him which is better. I easily find one set sounding better. Frustrated that the team couldn't hear that obvious difference, I wrote to him which was better and my anger at why he couldn't here the difference. You know what he wrote back? That the two sets of files were identical! Yes, identical!
I didn't believe him. My ears told me there was a big difference. Then I do a binary comparison and find the files were all identical just as he said! I then listened again. Now they sounded the same. So I assume that there could be a difference and once again, I could hear (really imagine) the difference! My perception was that variable.
So no, it is not sufficient to think you are right. You are advocating that people spend $6000 on a box that may do absolutely nothing. You owe it to your viewership to give them reliable information. And that is only made possible with a controlled/blind test. You know, the kind where only your ears are involved. After all, you don't want consider measurements or engineering explanation of why this device doesn't make a difference.
The sooner you arrive at this truth as the rest of us have, the sooner you will be on the right path to spend money in audio where it matters, and where it does not. It might now make for popular videos but it will be truth.