High resolution audio(not impressed)

[Electro]

To look at this from another angle.

In nature we are surrounded by ultrasonic noise from 20khz upwards to over 120khz .

To hear these noises you would have to be very close to the source because these high frequencies are absorbed by the air very quicky.

I personally have never noticed these ultrasonic noises affect, change or alter any noises that I can hear in my hearing range, for instance when I am surrounded by bats or other creatures that use echo location or high frequency communication.

This makes me question the theory that reproducing music above 22.5 khz has any useful pupose.

All imo of course .

 

[lindsayt]

Listening on Spotify premium the remaster of Foxtrot sounds fantastic compared to the murky muddy sound on my older CD and vinyl. It's totally transformed it IMO.

Is that the same remaster that was used on the 2008 CD release of that album?

 

[BigH]

Listening on Spotify premium the remaster of Foxtrot sounds fantastic compared to the murky muddy sound on my older CD and vinyl. It's totally transformed it IMO.

Is that the same remaster that was used on the 2008 CD release of that album?

Yes its the 2008 remaster.

 

[lindsayt]

Well TrevC might like listening to the sound of excessive dynamic compression (distortion). I don't.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/dr?artist=genesis&album=foxtrot

And if he thinks the original vinyl version sounds murky and muddy, I'd suggest he trys playing it on a better vinyl front end.

 

[TrevC]

Well TrevC might like listening to the sound of excessive dynamic compression (distortion). I don't.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/dr?artist=genesis&album=foxtrot

And if he thinks the original vinyl version sounds murky and muddy, I'd suggest he trys playing it on a better vinyl front end.

Have you actually listened to it, or is it all about point scoring for you? The mix originally was murky and muddy, both original CD and LP, and the vocals and instruments can now be clearly heard. OK, so they made it louder, just a bit. The entire album is transformed IMO, it sounds vibrant and alive. Another very good remaster is the Steely Dan Countdown To Ecstasy one.

 

[Blacksabbath25]

I have brothers in arms on sacd+ cd I felt when I played the sacd on a marantz 8005 sacd player I could not tell much of a difference between sacd + cd but I just got the Yamaha S2100 sacd player and I now notice a difference between the two versions so a lot also comes down to how good your gear is too

So talking about master tapes the first black sabbath album was made for vinyl as cd was not around when the first sabbath record was made but I have a remastered double cd was it copied from the vinyl master tapes or a new master tape just for CDs ?

 

[lindsayt]

TrevC, anyone making any sort of a post on any forum with which someone else disagrees could be defined as being there for the "childish point scoring".

I could just as easily say the same about your contributions to this thread. Or just about anyone's contributions to any thread. But I prefer not to make such an observation as I think that's far too negative a spin to put on it. The way I'd put it is that we're having the equivalent of a chat about the football down the pub.

Do you really think I need to listen to the 2007 / 2008 Foxtrot remasters (with a mediocre DR of 10) to know that they will sound noticeably more compressed than the earlier releases (with a better DR of 13)?

I was really quite surprised that you didn't mention the excessive compression on the 2007 / 2008 version.

Did you really not notice it?

If you didn't notice, that tells me that your system / ears / tastes are totally different to mine. They're also different to everyone whose opinion I hold dear when it comes to hi-fi.

If you did notice it, and decided not to mention it, in the context of the way you described the various versions, that would indicate that you decided not to give a balanced view.

Either way this indicates that I should not place any value whatsoever on anything you say about hi-fi on this forum.

 

[lindsayt]

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=steely+dan&album=countdown

1974 vinyl and 1986 CD versions DR 13

1998 and 2014 versions DR 11

Maybe TrevC really does like the sound of excessive compression (distortion)?

I don't.

 

[TrevC]

Do you really think I need to listen to the 2007 / 2008 Foxtrot remasters (with a mediocre DR of 10) to know that they will sound noticeably more compressed than the earlier releases (with a better DR of 13)?

So all of a sudden measurements are more important to you than your ears. Have a listen, compare and get back to me.

 

[chebby]

I caught myself Googling for that dynamic range database a couple of days ago.

Then I realised what a knob I was being. I don't give a flying furball which subsequent versions of some tired old 1980s hi-fi 'demo' music sounds best. (Actually no future versions would be ok with me )

Edit: Steely Dan?!! I mean, come on. Next it'll be Dire Straits or Phil Collins.

 

[TrevC]

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=steely+dan&album=countdown

1974 vinyl and 1986 CD versions DR 13

1998 and 2014 versions DR 11

Maybe TrevC really does like the sound of excessive compression (distortion)?

I don't.

Audio compression isn't distortion, most classical music was compressed in the age of vinyl (it had to be with only around 45dB to play with) and almost all music played on the radio is compressed. I personally don't like the extreme compression used on Radio 2 because it sounds unnatural on some tracks. Forget the compression, listen to the music. Both of my examples have been remixed to perfection. Use your ears man.

 

[TrevC]

I caught myself Googling for that dynamic range database a couple of days ago.

Then I realised what a knob I was being. I don't give a flying furball which subsequent versions of some tired old 1980s hi-fi 'demo' music sounds best. (Actually no future versions would be ok with me )

Edit: Steely Dan?!! I mean, come on. Next it'll be Dire Straits or Phil Collins.

Steely Dan is not hifi demo music. I bet you've never listened to a whole album. Try Aja, Gaucho or Two Against Nature. Brilliant, timeless stuff.

Just out of interest who do you like?

 

[chebby]

I caught myself Googling for that dynamic range database a couple of days ago.

Then I realised what a knob I was being. I don't give a flying furball which subsequent versions of some tired old 1980s hi-fi 'demo' music sounds best. (Actually no future versions would be ok with me )

Edit: Steely Dan?!! I mean, come on. Next it'll be Dire Straits or Phil Collins.

Steely Dan is not hifi demo music. I bet you've never listened to a whole album. Try Aja, Gaucho or Two Against Nature. Brilliant, timeless stuff.

Just out of interest who do you like?

Obviously nothing you'd like. Yes i had to sit through whole albums of SD out of respect for some of my friend's tastes. Funny you should mention Gaucho, that was the worst.

With a few exceptions I hate all the music I grew up with apart from some two-tone classics and some early reggae and ska. The early-mid 1970s did give us Dr Feelgood and Ian Drury. I can still enjoy home grown stuff from XTC and The Cure also.

Some Sly/Robbie/Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse, Scientist, Yellowman, Parliament / Funkadelic.

On a more 'easy' note, about 50 percent of the tracks played by Trevor Nelson on his BBC R2 shows.

No prog, no HM, light/choral/non-symphonic classical. Jazz but a very narrow selection from the 1950s be-bop genre and a few exceptions like Count Basie (only really with his stripped down Kansas City 7 or particularly with Frank Sinatra) and Oscar Peterson and Erroll Gardner.

Overwhelmingly I listen to the hundreds of BBC Radio CDs (drama, comedy, documentary) that i have amassed and ripped over the years.

I also consider ABBA and The BeeGees to be amongst the finest craftsmen (and women) of the pure pop genre ever.

My favourite single ever (in Desert Island Disks mode) is 'My Boy Lollipop' by Millie Small.

Today I have listened to 'So Fine' by the Chambers Brothers and some Edith Piaf on Apple Music and the live performance of La Mer by Julio Inglesias (the version you hear at the end of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie).

You can kick the crap out of all that to your heart's content. I am going to get some Samba and Argentinian tango related 'radio' streams going for background while I work this afternoon.

 

[Electro]

I caught myself Googling for that dynamic range database a couple of days ago.

Then I realised what a knob I was being. I don't give a flying furball which subsequent versions of some tired old 1980s hi-fi 'demo' music sounds best. (Actually no future versions would be ok with me )

Edit: Steely Dan?!! I mean, come on. Next it'll be Dire Straits or Phil Collins.

Steely Dan is not hifi demo music. I bet you've never listened to a whole album. Try Aja, Gaucho or Two Against Nature. Brilliant, timeless stuff.

Just out of interest who do you like?

I agree,

Dire Straits when they first appeared were revolutionary, there was nothing else like it, a completely new genre of music that captured many peoples musical imagination, if you care to listen to them again now it is very easy to hear just how good they were if you put the silly labels to one side.

As for Phil Collins I did some of my best courting to the sound of Phil Collins in the background so I will hear nothing bad said about his music . *i-m_so_happy*

 

[TrevC]

I caught myself Googling for that dynamic range database a couple of days ago.

Then I realised what a knob I was being. I don't give a flying furball which subsequent versions of some tired old 1980s hi-fi 'demo' music sounds best. (Actually no future versions would be ok with me )

Edit: Steely Dan?!! I mean, come on. Next it'll be Dire Straits or Phil Collins.

Steely Dan is not hifi demo music. I bet you've never listened to a whole album. Try Aja, Gaucho or Two Against Nature. Brilliant, timeless stuff.

Just out of interest who do you like?

Obviously nothing you'd like. Yes i had to sit through whole albums of SD out of respect for some of my friend's tastes. Funny you should mention Gaucho, that was the worst.

With a few exceptions I hate all the music I grew up with apart from some two-tone classics and some early reggae and ska. The early-mid 1970s did give us Dr Feelgood and Ian Drury. I can still enjoy home grown stuff from XTC and The Cure also.

Some Sly/Robbie/Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse, Scientist, Yellowman, Parliament / Funkadelic.

On a more 'easy' note, about 50 percent of the tracks played by Trevor Nelson on his BBC R2 shows.

No prog, no HM, light/choral/non-symphonic classical. Jazz but a very narrow selection from the 1950s be-bop genre and a few exceptions like Count Basie (only really with his stripped down Kansas City 7 or particularly with Frank Sinatra) and Oscar Peterson and Erroll Gardner.

Overwhelmingly I listen to the hundreds of BBC Radio CDs (drama, comedy, documentary) that i have amassed and ripped over the years.

I also consider ABBA and The BeeGees to be amongst the finest craftsmen (and women) of the pure pop genre ever.

My favourite single ever (in Desert Island Disks mode) is 'My Boy Lollipop' by Millie Small.

Today I have listened to 'So Fine' by the Chambers Brothers and some Edith Piaf on Apple Music and the live performance of La Mer by Julio Inglesias (the version you hear at the end of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie).

You can kick the crap out of all that to your heart's content. I am going to get some Samba and Argentinian tango related 'radio' streams going for background while I work this afternoon.

I like SD, FC and Robbie, but not the Williams idiot. Bolivian boogie works for me. Ian Drury? Who he?

The Cure, don't like whiney singing. Dr Feelgood, OK for a pub band.

Favourite single, The tracks of my tears, Smokey Robinson. Not on a computer disk but a compressed 45.

Pet hates, acronyms I can't decipher.

 

[manicm]

To David and lindsayt - DDC et al are correct in theory. You take a hires file, downscale it to 16/44 and compare the latter to the original hires file, ideally in ABX testing as everyone espouses. But as always the devil is in the details...

If, for example, one is using Foobar then does it do automatic bit depth switching? And if not then are you setting the output to maximum resolution?

If the former does not occur, and subsequently you don't do the latter then the test is comparing apples to oranges. I want someone who's done such ABX testing to give precise details and then one can judge.

 

[davedotco]

To David and lindsayt - DDC et al are correct in theory. You take a hires file, downscale it to 16/44 and compare the latter to the original hires file, ideally in ABX testing as everyone espouses. But as always the devil is in the details...

If, for example, one is using Foobar then does it do automatic bit depth switching? And if not then are you setting the output to maximum resolution?

If the former does not occur, and subsequently you don't do the latter then the test is comparing apples to oranges. I want someone who's done such ABX testing to give precise details and then one can judge.

At the time I was involved in such testing I was unable to set them up myself as I have absolutely no idea how to do anything on a Windows based computer, and at that time Foobar was PC only.

The test was set up by the technical editor of a well known hi-fi mag and auditioning mostly carried out on a decent (Absolute Sounds) system and Sennheiser HD600 headphones.

Using material that was not known to me, I had absolutely no idea which was which, even using my usual 'trick' of listening for specific artifacts was of no help.

None of us who tried this were able to tell which was which, my thought being that, were the settings incorrect, we should have been able to hear something.

 

[manicm]

That's fine, but those who have done testing on PCs - I want to know the setup.

 

[davedotco]

That's fine, but those who have done testing on PCs - I want to know the setup.

Anecdotal is just that.

The 'technical' people involved were quite sure of themselves but of course they would be.

At some point I am going to have to try this sort of stuff for myself.

Not today though, too hot...*dirol*

 

[TomSawyer]

That's fine, but those who have done testing on PCs - I want to know the setup.

Sorry to post this in two places but there are two very similar discussions going on. Essentially, I've done here what you say but instead of ABXing it and listening to the difference, I've subtracted one from the other to see if there was anything left. The problem with listening is that it's not objective enough even if it's properly blind you need a big sample size before the results can be relied on.

I've downloaded a hi-res sample from the Sony website into Audacity and created an exact replica using copy/paste:

I then downsampled/reduced bit-depth to 16/44:

I then inverted the lower sound file to create a mirror image (I also zoomed in to make it easier to see):

I then added the two tracks together and this was the result:

I can also confirm the file is silent to the naked ear when played.

What I'd like to do is the same thing creating matching hi-res and 16/44 files and then run them through a DAC and re-record them at a full 24/192, and then compare them. The reason being, no-one in contending that a 24/96 file looks the same as a 16/44 file - that's not the debate, the debate is whether the recreated waveform after the DAC is identical and so feeding the resultant output straight back into an ADC sampled super high would show the resultant waveforms.

 

[shadders]

Hi Tom,

You may need to increase the magnification of the two waveforms added together, to see the difference.

Regards,

Shadders.

 

[TomSawyer]

Hi Shadders, sure, but its inaudible, not because of frequency but because the amplitude is negligible. Like I say, the true test, in my simple mind, would be to get a DAC to turn then both into reconstructed output waveforms and compare.

 

[shadders]

Hi Shadders, sure, but its inaudible, not because of frequency but because the amplitude is negligible. Like I say, the true test, in my simple mind, would be to get a DAC to turn then both into reconstructed output waveforms and compare.

Hi Tom,

DAC's will sound different, so you would be comparing DAC's.

If you increase the magnitude of the added waveforms, you may be able to see the difference. Even though the difference signal is small, it will indicate that there is a difference.

Regards,

Shadders.

 

[TomSawyer]

Hi Shadders, i think you misunderstand, I'd put both files through the same DAC one after the other and record the resultant output wave then compare. Simply subtracting the digital waveform doesn't categorically prove 16/44 is as good as 24/96 because obviously there are differences in the digital info - theres a whole lot more data points. My little experiment does show that those differences are so small as to be inaudible, though.

However, according to Nyquist-Shannon, the 16/44 file contains enough points such that there is only one unique waveform that fits the data and it's the same as the 24/96 file when played through a DAC so I'd like to give it a go. My only concern is that the only means I have to record it is also digital so I'd be resampling the waveform but if I do it using the same ADC in both cases at 24/196 for maximum accuracy so it should show any differences. It would be better if I could think of a truly repeatable method to record and compare the waves that was purely analogue.

i'm off on holiday this weekend so it may be a while.

 

[manicm]

Well those little 'data points' could mean life and death for some - simply because it could mean a smoother listening experience. I've said this before - hires is not just about dynamic range as 99% here proffer.