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hi res

Leporello

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fact is a lot of people were disappointed with the sound of CD when it came out, no-one disputes that. It's just a question of why.
Digital just sounded different. Over time those people have gotten accustomed to the sound, while the sound of digital has not changed a bit (pun intended).
 

Mart68

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Digital just sounded different. Over time those people have gotten accustomed to the sound, while the sound of digital has not changed a bit (pun intended).

No I think it did sound poor in certain systems. I certainly heard that more than once., But when you played the same album on the turntable it sounded fine.

The UK hi-fi market was weird in the 1980s, a lot of not very good equipment was lionised.
 

sergeauckland

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Digital just sounded different. Over time those people have gotten accustomed to the sound, while the sound of digital has not changed a bit (pun intended).
That was also very true for most hifi enthusiasts which listened overwhelmingly to vinyl, as that was all there was. At the time (early to mid '70s), I couldn't understand why what I heard off tape in the studios where I worked, or indeed off microphone feeds in studios sounded so different to what I was hearing at home off LPs. It wasn't until CDs came along in the 1980s that I could get a sound at home comparable with what I was hearing in studios. Those that had never heard virtually uncoloured audio would find it disorientating when the old familiar colorations of vinyl were taken away.

S.
 

Headchef

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The people who aren't that fussed would seem to be be those who knew about the study and didn't participate, or went so far as to obtain the samples, but never submitted a result. There were ~450 people who made it past both those bars.

Of them, there are the 25%, who you seem focused on, who (presumably) listened to the samples and replied that they couldn't identify which were which.

It would be good to see a more detailed description of the study methods and the results. The paper/poster/presentation is available to AES members. I am not one of them.

thats my point, the ”findings” are only being leaked out across random articles and those drabs of the “findings” are then being used as some kind of proof of quite what I’m not sure? Does it exist? Is music real? why don’t some dogs like bluegrass? The majority of those asked had no interest in the niche subject and subsequently didn’t care? What makes soup soup?
 

Geert

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Because the findings are not clubbed in a single paper for your convenience they are not valid? The paper exists, it's with the AES and they approved it. And 90% of the story is explained in the podcast, enough details to conclude if the test is a bunch of nonsense or not.
 

Frgirard

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The aes is an association mounted by the business.
Only in the acoustic field, the aes is a pleasant joke.
 

Sukie

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For what it's worth, last night I double-blind tested a recent (2020) album (popular, not classical or jazz) that I have as a 44.1/16 download against a Qobuz 96/24 stream. Same mastering, same volume levelling. My 48 year old ears couldn't tell the difference.

The only times that I'm ever dissatisfied with redbook recordings is when the mastering/recording is poor, but the same applies when listening to hi-res.
 
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LeftCoastTim

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Whenever I hear a debate on hi-res, I'm reminded of my younger days of ABX-ing lossy codecs.

I used to be able to tell 320kbps MP3 (LAME) on certain samples. MP3 has problems with short attacks, so fatboy.wv always gets messed up, even in 2021. So I've always stuck with FLAC, and haven't really looked at lossy compression for 20 years.

I got interested in lossy codecs in the last few months for some reason, and I ran into this sample from this forum, which got me doing some ABX's with recent Vorbis and Opus. I can definitely tell the difference at Vorbis -q 5 (~160kbps) and Opus --bitrate 128 (100% ABX correctly). But it's more of "perceptable, but not annoying" variety. Bumping up the setting one notch, vorbis -q 6 (~192kbps) and Opus --bitrate 160, I can barely tell the difference (start to get one or two tries out of 20 wrong), and it's definitely in the "barely perceptable, not at all annoying" category. With most music, Vorbis -q 4 (~128kbps) and Opus --bitrate 96 is transparent to me.

I think all that means that lossy compression is a "solved" problem, meaning my flac collection is now perfectly overkill.

I've never been able to ABX a hi-rez file, even in my younger days.

Maybe you golden ears can appreciate hi-rez, but as far as I'm concerned, Apple AAC256 is perfectly fine for me in terms of format. These days, I care more about mastering quality (less dynamic compression, please), convenience, and interesting music.

Every hi-rez album I've tried has been boring as hell. Maybe the sound quality is amazing, but the music itself is dreadful.

YMMV.
 
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Willem

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And let us not forget that the higher the resolution, the more resources are used. Streaming costs a lot of energy, so resolutions above at least FLAC files of CD red book (and perhaps even those) are a waste of natural resources.
 
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