Shouldn't we upgrade the 20-20 audible range ?!

[Adis]

Absolutely, hence the hypocrisy of this thread. Everybody rejects the evidence that doesn't support their own beliefs.

Let's say you convince me that I need an improved system, and then I say "okay, make it happen" - will you do it?

 

[Julf]

Absolutely, hence the hypocrisy of this thread. Everybody rejects the evidence that doesn't support their own beliefs.

I can see why you think that, but I think psychologists call that "projection".

 

[Mort]

Absolutely, hence the hypocrisy of this thread. Everybody rejects the evidence that doesn't support their own beliefs.

Pot meet kettle

 

[welwynnick]

Lets form a self-help society.
Hello, my name's Nick, I'm guilty of hypocrisy and cherry picking in order to pander to my beliefs and prejudices.
Now your turn.
We all do it. When one person proposes some evidence that demonstrates their point of view, someone else will find a way to discredit that evidence, or will propose contradictory evidence instead. The reason I mentioned Goldensound was to counter what other people were saying about Hi Res inaudibility. I've got a folder called "Audibility" that has a lot of evidence that I haven't mentioned, but it also includes things like this and this that seek prove that CD is indeed transparent. If you want the right opinion, you can't decide the opinion first, and then look for evidence to reinforce it, you have to look at all the evidence, including the above. I've made plenty of mistakes, but I don't try to hide them any more. On the contrary, I highlight them, because that helps people to trust you. If you never admit error or guilt, you will lose trust, and it's difficult to get back. In audio terms, I used to be quite convinced that vinyl sounded better than CD, that jitter caused audible bit errors, that measurements didn't correlate with listening, that DRC had little value, or that preamps didn't help audio system performance. It took a long time, but all those things turned round, and it makes me wonder what I will learn next year.

 

[Julf]

Lets form a self-help society.
Hello, my name's Nick, I'm guilty of hypocrisy and cherry picking in order to pander to my beliefs and prejudices.
Now your turn.
We all do it. When one person proposes some evidence that demonstrates their point of view, someone else will find a way to discredit that evidence, or will propose contradictory evidence instead. The reason I mentioned Goldensound was to counter what other people were saying about Hi Res inaudibility. I've got a folder called "Audibility" that has a lot of evidence that I haven't mentioned, but it also includes things like this and this that seek prove that CD is indeed transparent. If you want the right opinion, you can't decide the opinion first, and then look for evidence to reinforce it, you have to look at all the evidence, including the above. I've made plenty of mistakes, but I don't try to hide them any more. On the contrary, I highlight them, because that helps people to trust you. If you never admit error or guilt, you will lose trust, and it's difficult to get back. In audio terms, I used to be quite convinced that vinyl sounded better than CD, that jitter caused audible bit errors, that measurements didn't correlate with listening, that DRC had little value, or that preamps didn't help audio system performance. It took a long time, but all those things turned round, and it makes me wonder what I will learn next year.

Yes, happy to admit that I, too, used to believe (and propagate) all sorts of audiophile folklore and superstition, until I actually got to do proper listening tests as part of my studies, as well as learning to understand signal processing theory.

One thing that helps against cherry picking is looking at established scientific consensus and standard textbooks, and applying Occam's Razor.
Yes, "established science" is shown to be wrong at times, but it takes rather strong, consistent and replicated evidence to reject it.

 

[Mart68]

If you want the right opinion, you can't decide the opinion first, and then look for evidence to reinforce it, you have to look at all the evidence, including the above.

I think you're missing that this argument is 40 years old and most of us have looked at all the evidence and seen it discussed / argued about many times. Also some of us have blind tested between different resolutions.

After all that we adopt a 'position' (not at all the same thing as a 'belief') on the matter and only revisit if some new evidence comes to light.

 

[solderdude]

The reason I mentioned Goldensound was to counter what other people were saying about Hi Res inaudibility

Except the test from Cameron had nothing to do with HiRes at all nor with the click-bate title for his article (PROOF that DACs can make a difference).
He did not prove any of that and did not test 2 DACs instead 2 filters near Nyquist with 44.1 bitrate.
Had this been done with 48kHz chances are he would not have gotten the same result..
What was shown is that he heard a difference between 2 filters that had a very small difference in frequency response between 20kHz and 22kHz and he had to pick a very small piece of a certain recording to tell the difference.

One can see that as definitive proof that DACs make a difference (not all DACs are audibly transparent anyway) or as proof that some people can hear beyond 20kHz or as proof that Hi-Res is audibly 'better' but this was NOT shown by the test.

As with every test it needs to be repeated and needs to be verified/witnessed. That was supposed to have happened a long time ago and was planned to happen.
There was no verification/repeat of the test ... one can only wonder why.

 

[krabapple]

Consider that there was a physical size and playtime constraint as well as optical method limiting the CD format.
I don't know if it is true but the Sony guys had the demand that the disc should fit in the breast pocket of a shirt and at least must be able to play a full performance of a certain overture. Turns out it was a rumor. That defined playtime and size and thus the amount of info that must be on that disc.

There may be more recent summaries of what's known about this, but this, from Snopes in 2001, still gets referenced a lot. The verdict is "Undetermined'

CD Length​

Were CDs designed to be long enough to hold Beethoven's 9th Symphony?​

 

[krabapple]

So then I've yet to understand what your criticism of my simple two sentence post is?

OK, in the simplest terms: "Not Good Enough" for what, exactly?

20 Hz is actually almost exactly between E and E flat, a couple of cents closer to E flat.
Bösendorfer makes pianos that go down to C0, a frequency of (nominally) 16.3516 Hz. 16 Hz is the speed of 32nd notes at 120 quarter notes per minute.
Note that a piano sound is not a sine wave, so even if the fundamental frequency were below the human hearing limit, we still hear the overtones and other higher frequency components contained in the sound.
The Boardwalk Hall Auditorium Organ in Atlantic City and the Sydney Town Hall Grand Organ are two of the very few organs that have a 64 foot pipe. These produce subsonic fundamentals of about 8 Hz (C−1) (along with harmonics). Rather than what we usually think of as "sound," they are perceived as physical sensations like pressure and rumbling.
C0 (about 16 Hz) is featured in the finale of Saint-Saëns' Symphony No. 3, also known as the "Organ Symphony" (1886).
So: maybe 8Hz or 16Hz should be the lower limit?

The lower limit of CD is 0 Hz.

Below 20Hz human hearing grades into 'tactile' sensation...more felt than heard.

 

[Sal1950]

OK, in the simplest terms: "Not Good Enough" for what, exactly?

Simple, it's "not good enough" anymore, when better is so readily available.

 

[Julf]

The lower limit of CD is 0 Hz.

Just to pick nits, for fun, the lower limit of CD is actually not 0 Hz, but 0.0002 Hz (as the longest waveform a CD can reproduce is 5400 seconds (90 minutes) long.

 

[welwynnick]

One can see that as definitive proof that DACs make a difference .....
or
as proof that some people can hear beyond 20kHz ......

It's one or the other.
Yes, the title is misleading, and in the ASR thread many objected that it was a test of filters, instead of DACs.

I go along with that, and took it instead "as proof that some people can hear beyond 20kHz".
Since he got a good win rate in a good number of tests, the result has a high degree of confidence.
I don't think it needs to be repeated as it was a Foobar2000 ABX DBT. It's a real, trustworthy result, it's what everyone wants to see.

If you want to see another one, here's another Foobar2000 ABX DBT on HydrogenAudio by googlebot, who compared 24/96 and 16/44 tracks. He identified them 16/16, which is high confidence. Two other participants went over 95% confidence.

 

[krabapple]

If return to the actual origianl question "Shouldn't we upgrade the 20-20 audible range ?!" i say 0-20 ,given that infrasound can be felt with the body .

Redefining 'audibility', then. Are earthquakes audible to humans because we feel our bodies shake?

Simple, it's "not good enough" anymore, when better is so readily available.

You didn't answer the 'for what' question.

Better, in what normally audible respect, and under what conditions -- which codecs used, which settings, which audio did you test and what was the listening/comparison setup?
Is it safe to generalize that lossless should sound better in the intended use, than constant bitrate 96 kbps stereo LAME mp3? Yeah.
CBR 320 kbps? Better show your work.
Professional multichannel codecs? Same.

With perception, it just isn't a straight line from 'certain numbers are higher --> therefore the audio is perceptually better'. Which seems to be what you do.

What higher numbers are undoubtedly better at doing, is soothing audiophile nervosa. The nagging feeling that it could sound better.

 

[uliwer]

Simple, it's "not good enough" anymore, when better is so readily available.

Well, „better“ than 20 - 20000hz is available for me right now when I look at the amount of „hires“ files I have stored as well as when I look for the specs of my gear for replay. Though if I were asked whether the efforts of improvement should go in Infra- and Ultrasonics or in the mundane region between 100 and 12000hz I’d clearly vote for the latter.

 

[krabapple]

Just to pick nits, for fun, the lower limit of CD is actually not 0 Hz, but 0.0002 Hz (as the longest waveform a CD can reproduce is 5400 seconds (90 minutes) long.

Hmm, but CD only holds ~80 min of uncompressed audio.

We demand complete cycles at all wavelengths!

 

[Sokel]

Lets form a self-help society.
Hello, my name's Nick, I'm guilty of hypocrisy and cherry picking in order to pander to my beliefs and prejudices.
Now your turn.
We all do it. When one person proposes some evidence that demonstrates their point of view, someone else will find a way to discredit that evidence, or will propose contradictory evidence instead. The reason I mentioned Goldensound was to counter what other people were saying about Hi Res inaudibility. I've got a folder called "Audibility" that has a lot of evidence that I haven't mentioned, but it also includes things like this and this that seek prove that CD is indeed transparent. If you want the right opinion, you can't decide the opinion first, and then look for evidence to reinforce it, you have to look at all the evidence, including the above. I've made plenty of mistakes, but I don't try to hide them any more. On the contrary, I highlight them, because that helps people to trust you. If you never admit error or guilt, you will lose trust, and it's difficult to get back. In audio terms, I used to be quite convinced that vinyl sounded better than CD, that jitter caused audible bit errors, that measurements didn't correlate with listening, that DRC had little value, or that preamps didn't help audio system performance. It took a long time, but all those things turned round, and it makes me wonder what I will learn next year.

Guilty? Why guilty?

I like just the same the fact that a DAC can do -110dB THD+N and a DAC that can do EQ all the way up to 24/705.6kHz (I don't like the 48kHz family, too round and video-ish for me ) , like RME.
Pure for the engineering, and messing that with audibility would be my kind of hypocrisy.

 

[Julf]

I don't think it needs to be repeated as it was a Foobar2000 ABX DBT. It's a real, trustworthy result, it's what everyone wants to see.

It is one single unverified and un-replicated data point. It doesn't in itself prove much.

 

[welwynnick]

It is one single unverified and un-replicated data point. It doesn't in itself prove much.

That sounds like cherry picking.

 

[krabapple]

If you want to see another one, here's another Foobar2000 ABX DBT on HydrogenAudio by googlebot, who compared 24/96 and 16/44 tracks. He identified them 16/16, which is high confidence. Two other participants went over 95% confidence.

Again, being able to ace an ABX only tells you that the sample and method they used to identify a difference, worked.
It's important to ask: how does it relate to 'real world' listening samples and conditions, and 'real world' claims? Does it support the typical audiophile claim to hear 16 vs 24?

googlebot, who did this test and reported it on HA, actually changed two variables, sample rate AND bit depth. Which is one issue. But he knows how to frame claims properly:
"I do not hear a difference over my regular Canton speakers, which top at about 20kHz! Neither over my Grado headphones. Since both act as a mechanical low pass, I think they just cause the same artifacts in the pass band as the digital low-passing.

Until today I have mostly laughed at high resolution apologists. But that ABX result somewhat changed my perspective. Maybe those, who say that you do need excellent speakers to hear a difference are actually right? On the other hand this is just one very artificial and synthetic sample. The results can very likely not be extrapolated to real world recordings. I don't know. What do you all think?"

It's good to read the entire thread after that.

 

[Julf]

That sounds like cherry picking.

Indeed. Your picking (and interpretation) of that single data point and making your case based on it is indeed cherry picking.