I would love to have a moment with you with double blind listening test. What would come out of it, aesthetically .. based on listening impressions of yours.
Dude, I'd love to do a blind test - I'd be so full of myself thinking I'll hear everything and then I'd probably pick a $20 bluetooth speaker over a B&W 805.
But here's a funny story using our eyes (not our ears) and HD vs 4k that happened to me the other day. I just found out that my Netflix plan is HD which is not 1080p but 720p and I was streaming many movies at 1Mbps. I was livid
So I upgraded to the 4k UHD plan that is just $4 more expensive cursing a storm at Netflix over the phone.
This is where things got interesting cause I wanted to check the difference so I could justify my lividity. How on earth can I run an A/B test, let alone a blind test? I'd need the same display and I'd need to force it to play SDR and HDR.
Well, the means magically presented itself. I have an Dell XPS OLED 4K laptop that supports 4K, Dolby Vision and can hit 1,000 nits in everything much like the $30,000 Sony reference monitor. It appears that only IE is capable of UHD playback so I could use Chrome for HD playback (thank you IE for once being superior). I synced the 2 browsers and ran 3-4 tests playing 720p HD on Chrome and 4k Dolby Vision on IE. The HD bitrate is 1Mbps (Altered Carbon, Uncharted, Bullet Train) and 5Mbps (Planet Earth). The UHD bitrate was 16 Mbps so 16x times higher in most cases. Also, SDR vs HDR. I was expecting a huge difference to the tune of at least twice as good given the 16x differential and the Dolby Vision implementation.
I hit Alt-Tab between the windows to switch constantly. Eventually after switching 20 times, in playback I had no idea what browser I was looking at and had to rely on my eyes to decide. I failed to identify the UHD Dolby Vision over the HD consistently. I even sat 1 foot away from the laptop turning it into a 130 inch TV to try and detect the pixels. Then I used stills and on some I was able to see the difference (some textures, foliage) but others I couldn't tell any difference even when swapping quickly where the higher res should appear very crisp compared to the lower res one. I was shocked how close 720p SDR looked to 4k HDR Dolby Vision.
But then I realized that I'd watched a test on youtube of a famous video that mixed 720p, 1080p and 4k footage and even the creator couldn't tell them apart having done the mixing - he thought 720p sections were 4k but it turned out that he'd used the 720p for that scene.
Now the bitrate for Altered Carbon dropped to 340Kbps for a while in a 2nd test and that's when I noticed a clear difference - 340 Kbps vs 16 Mbps (48x difference). It was muddy vs crisp and it was clear that the UHD was better. It wasn't a connection thing because that laptop has a 500Mbps and could download the entire 2 hour movie @ 340Kbps in 5 seconds - it can download the UHD version in 4 minutes ;-)
