If you have an infinitely high sampling frequency and an infinitely high bit depth then the digital waveform is identical to the analog waveform.
This is true, but the implication is somewhat incorrect by way of being incomplete. You don't need infinity.
A discrete-time (sampled) signal holds all of the information of the analog original so long as the analog signal's frequency content lies entirely below the Nyquist frequency (enforcing that condition is the role of the antialiasing filter). So long as that criteria is obeyed, sampling and synthesis are both lossless.
The quantization of a sampled signal is not lossless, but we can consider it lossless if it covers the entire S/N ratio of the signal in question (or equivalently to our purposes, the ear's entire dynamic range and maximum S/N ratio). 16 bits linear is very close (with dither its even better) and 20 bits covers the entire dynamic range from inaudible to 'severe permanent damage'.
In this sense, even 16/44.1 linear PCM is already a very wasteful encoding; within a critical band, the ear only has 5-6 bits of S/N resolution, though each critical band can cover a dynamic range of almost 20 bits.
Um, we don't need to evaluate Young's music or his engineering acumen on this. I'm not understanding the attacks on his person and music. He's simply pointing out that the present standard in digital music is a drop in quality, which is 100% accurate. If you read about the history of MP3 you will see that preservation of the original fidelity of the music was not a goal. Compression and portability were.
With decent equipment many, many people can tell a difference. I would enjoy more opportunities to download FLAC-level quality music from major vendors like iTunes and eMusic. Even support for FLAC in iTunes would be nice. No, this is not the same major market as cheaper, more lossy compressed music files, but I like that Steve Jobs was hearing from an advocate on higher-quality digital music.
And goodness, would it be a *bad* thing if such a thing were to pass? Hardly.
So what's the difference between flac and Apple lossless (alac)?
Throw yourself right in with all the other people who came here and wrote a post that said in effect that all MP3 sounds the same no matter the bit rate.
I'm not sure that any of the posts were really trying to say that all MP3 sounds the same. Many were saying that lower-bit-rate MP3 is discernibly different from higher-bit-rate MP3 or lossless, and possibly not as good to listen to. I wouldn't read any more into it than that.
The threshold beyond which the perceived difference vanishes will vary with the quality of the original, the player, the D-A converter, the amplifier, the loudspeakers and the listener's ears.
I bet the only time Steve and Neil ever came close to having a conversation was if Steve was lip syncing to Suite Judy Blue Eyes... the Woodstock version.
The worst thing about "punching up the volume" is that it causes the signal to go into clipping, introducing horrendous sonic artifacts that are even heard in, MP3's, Clipping is the scourge of many re-releases. Its no wonder that even old worn out vinyl sounds better than the CD.
Well, this business of compressing dynamic range in many modern recordings is certainly not a good trend, and it obviates one of the major advantages that most any digital recording format has over vinyl, that being of course the advantage in dynamic range. Dynamic range compression was commonplace in vinyl recordings, particularly in recording of symphonic music where the dynamic range from the quietest to the loudest passages greatly exceeded the capability of vinyl. This of course was a major reason for the development of the CD format in the first place. Nowadays lots of people seem to have forgotten this, or perhaps the majority of population interested in music nowadays is not even old enough to have owned a collection a vinyl. At one point I had over a hundred easily. Now I don't have a single one, and I do not miss them in the least. There is not one thing about them that I miss. Only a handful of the vinyl recordings in my collection did not sound overtly inferior to a typical, run-of-the-mill CD, and even the ones that sounded half decent still did not sound in any way better to the same recording released on CD. And on top of that they were large and the collection was heavy and bulky. The cardboard folders constantly wore out at the corners and the backs, and the extra vinyl sleeves were cumbersome. There is nothing about that experience that I miss in any way. More recently I ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes using AAC and now this is the very first thing I do whenever I buy a new CD. When I want to listen to my music, I don't even have to get up off the sofa. The computer that I use for a music server stays powered on, and it is located in my office, and streams music digitally to the little Airport that sits close to my stereo. I reach for the remote control and switch the input, and then I reach for the iPad and touch the icon for the iTunes/Airtunes remote control app. In an instant, I am listening to whatever it was I wanted to listen to, without even getting up. And in general the sound quality is vastly superior to what it was with those old vinyl records. Why would anyone prefer to have to get up and walk to wherever that old orange crate full of dusty vinyl records is kept, flip through them to find the one of interest, pull it out of the sleeve and place it on the turntable, run the brush, lift over the tone arm, and then have to go and put it away afterwards. I would just as soon have a car that I have to start by turning a hand crank, and that has no heater to speak of for winter driving and no air conditioning for the summer, and hard bench seats, a three speed transmission that clunks and grinds every time I change gears, and that constantly drips oil down on to my garage floor.
CDs started the compression era. Apple Lossless encode of a CD is a lossless encode of a lossy source. SACD is almost dead in the US but struggles on. I import.
Yeah, right. (wink, wink). Anyone who knows the first thing about it knows that long before the CD was introduced, vinyl was lamented for several reasons, one of which was that you had to filter out practically all the bass before you could squeeze the signal into that little groove with undulating walls (and then vainly hope to restore a reasonable facsimile of the bass upon playback), and another of which was that even after filtering out almost all of the bass, you still could not record anywhere near the dynamic range of most symphonic music. It was generally necessary to compress the dynamic range as part of the signal processing that had to be applied before the signal could be placed in that little groove. That was the sad reality of vinyl, and still is, yet you claim that "CDs started the compression era". You've got it completely backwards. Dynamic range compression was one of the notable problems with vinyl that CDs sought to solve, and did. If you are talking about data compression, there is no data compression of CD unless the sound is recorded originally at a higher sampling rate and sample size. But even if so, that it itself is a bogus criticism for reasons that have been beaten to death and that are well understood by anyone who truly desires to understand such things.
...snip Why would anyone prefer to have to get up and walk to wherever that old orange crate full of dusty vinyl records is kept, flip through them to find the one of interest, pull it out of the sleeve and place it on the turntable, run the brush, lift over the tone arm, and then have to go and put it away afterwards.../snip
Totally agree, getting up every 22 minutes to change "sides" still looks no better through rose coloured glasses, so the crackle, hiss and pop has gone, so what, it was just crackle, hiss and pop.
Give me a 20,000 playlist and the surprises that "shuffle" brings, any day of the week.
The quality of iTunes match is surprisingly good, even the 128k MP3 tracks I "acquired"* from Napster last century have gained a new lease of life.
I agree. But audiophiles will always think that can hear something that the human ear cannot detect; well at least the difference between one recording and the next.
It's the same people who think super expensive vodka is better than a $10 bottle.
What you're advocating is the McDonalds mindset. Never mind the quality feel the width - Why pay more, It's good enough, It's a niche market, blah blah.
I don't eat at McDonalds, I will pay more for a really good bottle of wine, I will pay more for good quality fresh produce. I would happily pay more for HD music just as I will pay more for HD video on iTunes over SD video.
There is most definately a market there. It may not appeal to the kids or 20 somethings with a crappy iPod speaker system in their bedroom but it would appeal to 40 somethings like me who have invested in a good quality hifi system and would like to move from CD to something more convenient and better quality like 24bit.
Yeah, right. (wink, wink). Anyone who knows the first thing about it knows that long before the CD was introduced, vinyl was lamented for several reasons, one of which was that you had to filter out practically all the bass before you could squeeze the signal into that little groove with undulating walls (and then vainly hope to restore a reasonable facsimile of the bass upon playback), and another of which was that even after filtering out almost all of the bass, you still could not record anywhere near the dynamic range of most symphonic music. It was generally necessary to compress the dynamic range as part of the signal processing that had to be applied before the signal could be placed in that little groove. That was the sad reality of vinyl, and still is, yet you claim that "CDs started the compression era". You've got it completely backwards. Dynamic range compression was one of the notable problems with vinyl that CDs sought to solve, and did. If you are talking about data compression, there is no data compression of CD unless the sound is recorded originally at a higher sampling rate and sample size. But even if so, that it itself is a bogus criticism for reasons that have been beaten to death and that are well understood by anyone who truly desires to understand such things.
I came from the tape, avoided vinyl when I could and now sacrifice with CD when SACD titles are not available or in my budget. I thought the range compromises with vinyl and the degredation made for bad tech so I avoided when I could. I did oversimplify my argument about CD being first mainly because most people think CDs aren't lossy. I'll still argue that removing information from the source material to save space is a form of compression whether it's sampling rate or bit depth. I'm not a vinylphile and overstated for the sake of the general audience.
Nice insult at the end though.
Edit: Damn - reading more of your posts and you like to not be polite. "Neil Young does not know one damned thing about anything." ??? I'm gonna check the forum rules to find where it states you have the exclusivity on hyperbole.
I'm worried Apple's leadership team will think that staying the course instead of trying to invent the next big thing will keep Apple afloat. It will in the short term, but if Apple is not actively trying to disrupt the future, someone else, perhaps people like Neil Young who were inspired by Steve Jobs, will. And that, in 20 years, may turn out to be Steve's real legacy.
There's nothing to back up that statement. Starting with the fact that tech moves so slow that the stuff that Jobs started 2 years ago as an idea won't be seen for another 10 or so. Second, Jobs wasn't the only brain at Apple. Heck he might not have even been the biggest brain.
Nothing to back up my statement?
OK, then - you remember how Apple was handling everything back in the mid-90's before Jobs came onboard? No?
As for the headphones, I mostly listen through a pair of Sennheiser HD580. As for the particular Sennheiser headphones in the post to which you replied, that pair happens to be a DJ model and not one of their best. The closed back has the single advantage of noise isolation, to the detriment of sound quality. The air spring effect can be used to good effect if and only if the driver itself is over damped so as to avoid a high Q resonance. And even in that case, there will still be a cavity resonance, i.e., standing waves set up between the back side of the diaphragm and the wall in back. These are the reasons that Sennheiser's better headphones always have been open back and always will be open back.
Thanks, I'm sure I'd never heard of issues of acoustics & resonance before. Did you know room acoustics are subject to similar issues? :roll eyes: Or is your argument that the person talking about his Sennehisers can't hear the difference because they're 'not one of their best' and just DJ models? (Yet presumably better than the ear buds that come bundled with the phone/pod.)
Quote:
But as for your comments, the analogy to display resolution and bit depth and so on is always one that is easy to make. But it and of itself it does not prove anything at all. And the comparison with imaging is a bogus comparison for a fundamental reason. With any image, it is always potentially possible to display it on a display with greater pixel resolution, and for this reason there is always a potential advantage for using greater quantity of pixels in the image file. But bit depth is another matter. It translates into the amount of fine variation in brightness, hue, and saturation. There is inherently a limit to the ability of human vision to detect these differences. To keep it simple, consider the case of grey scale. Initially as you increase the bit depth, the brightness of the reproduced image gets closer and closer to the original, i.e., is neither whiter nor blacker than the original. But at a certain point, the human eye simply can no longer perceive the difference. Double the bit depth and scan and encode again, and you cannot tell any difference at all between that copy and the previous one, or between either and the original. Common sense tells you that eventually this will happen. It is not a question of whether it will happen. It is only a question of what the bit depth has to be, in order for this to happen. And once you have reached that point and are entirely certain that you have reached that point, there is absolutely no reason to increase the bit depth of the scan any further. It is the same with audio encoding, and even with perceptual encoding.
Ummm... yes, it was an analogy, not a proof. I find find pictures difficult to listen to. But as for your comments, you're essentially spending a lot of energy explaining that infinite resolution isn't needed because at some point we can't perceive it? No kidding?
Quote:
The question of whether perceptual encoding can be indistinguishable from the original is a moot question. The only question that is even worth considering is what amount of compression, given a specific encoding scheme, can be tolerated without introducing some artifact by which any listener would be able to hear any difference between that recording and the original. IF you are entirely certain that the bit rate that you have used is perfectly adequate such that no person could every detect any difference between that recording and a non-lossy recording with arbitrarily high quantization rate and word size, then there is no discernible reason to use a higher bit rate. Because, IF it is true that no one can hear then difference, THEN it is true that no one can hear the difference. The only meaningful, valid questions are what people can and cannot hear. To dismiss all perceptual coding techniques in the manner that manner people do is equivalent to asserting that it is not possible, using a perceptual coding technique, to make a recording that no person would be able to recognize as different from a master using arbitrarily high quantization rate and word size. It is manifestly ludicrous to suggest that this would be the case, yet this is precisely what people are in effect asserting when they criticize perceptual encoding categorically. It is logically preposterous.
"IF it is true that no one can hear the difference, THEN it is true that no one can hear the difference." Jesus, seriously? What a bit of pedantic tossing. To summarize: infinite resolution isn't needed and at some point people can't hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed. Astonishing.
The original argument was whether the lossy low-bit-rate encodings used for PMPs are so good that nobody can tell them from the high res audio that's out there. I've heard the difference, so I'm going to go with no, they're not that good. Unfortunately you haven't actually helped to resolve whether that's the case or where that point may be.
I want access to the higher res audio for home, while the lower bit rate on my phone is good enough for on the go. Apparently I shouldn't want the better sound because infinite resolution is too much? What!?!?
As for 24/192 files. If anyone knows of double blind listening tests that clearly show people can hear the difference between them and 16/44.1, please post a link.
I am still waiting for someone to show they can hear the difference between 223kbps AAC and the original source, let alone higher resolution originals.
i don't have a link to double blind test that you ask for. but 24/192 files smoke the 16/44 and the 256k files from anywhere hands down no question about it. My 256 k rips i make from 24/192 files also smoke the files from iTunes and they sound as good or better than the cd. They sound far superior on any piece of equipment I have listened to them on. iPod, iPhones, and either of them plugged into car stereo or through the apple tv/ home theatre. i am not just saying that to troll you. I am not an audiophile by any means, but I know what I hear when playing the hi-res files. The volumes you can reach with clarity is unprecedented. And every voice and instrument in these recordings are dripping wet with this clarity.
you don't have to have these hi-res files to enjoy music, but there are some albums and some musicians where you appreciate the higher format. Flaming Lips-yoshimi battles the pink robots is an awesome sonic experience in hi-res compared to its cd16/44 counterpart.
Given that he was an old hippie, it isn't all that surprising to me. The reason would have been partly that he no doubt had a huge collection of vinyl. But the fact that he listened to vinyl is no indication that he had any misgivings about the superiority of digital recording. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have believed that vinyl recordings were inherently superior to digital recordings given a good encoding scheme and adequate bitrate.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
Given that he was an old hippie, it isn't all that surprising to me. The reason would have been partly that he no doubt had a huge collection of vinyl. But the fact that he listened to vinyl is no indication that he had any misgivings about the superiority of digital recording. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have believed that vinyl recordings were inherently superior to digital recordings given a good encoding scheme and adequate bitrate.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
Everyone knows this story is rubbish. Steve Jobs got up on stage and said he got rid of his expensive audio equipment and only used the iPod hi-fi unit, so one of them is lying
Young was actually one of the first rock artists to actively investigate the value of broader fidelity in digital recording ages ago when tracking at 16 bit/44.1 was accepted not only as the delivery standard but as all anyone needed to begin the process at. He was certainly the first and probably the only non classical or jazz musician to put his own money toward pursuing this as opposed to being simply a bystander in all this, or buying the latest commercially available gear and using it. Whatever one thinks of him or his music, he's been involved in this, along with his engineers, for a long time.
Comments
Bingo.
If you have an infinitely high sampling frequency and an infinitely high bit depth then the digital waveform is identical to the analog waveform.
This is true, but the implication is somewhat incorrect by way of being incomplete. You don't need infinity.
A discrete-time (sampled) signal holds all of the information of the analog original so long as the analog signal's frequency content lies entirely below the Nyquist frequency (enforcing that condition is the role of the antialiasing filter). So long as that criteria is obeyed, sampling and synthesis are both lossless.
The quantization of a sampled signal is not lossless, but we can consider it lossless if it covers the entire S/N ratio of the signal in question (or equivalently to our purposes, the ear's entire dynamic range and maximum S/N ratio). 16 bits linear is very close (with dither its even better) and 20 bits covers the entire dynamic range from inaudible to 'severe permanent damage'.
In this sense, even 16/44.1 linear PCM is already a very wasteful encoding; within a critical band, the ear only has 5-6 bits of S/N resolution, though each critical band can cover a dynamic range of almost 20 bits.
Um, we don't need to evaluate Young's music or his engineering acumen on this. I'm not understanding the attacks on his person and music. He's simply pointing out that the present standard in digital music is a drop in quality, which is 100% accurate. If you read about the history of MP3 you will see that preservation of the original fidelity of the music was not a goal. Compression and portability were.
With decent equipment many, many people can tell a difference. I would enjoy more opportunities to download FLAC-level quality music from major vendors like iTunes and eMusic. Even support for FLAC in iTunes would be nice. No, this is not the same major market as cheaper, more lossy compressed music files, but I like that Steve Jobs was hearing from an advocate on higher-quality digital music.
And goodness, would it be a *bad* thing if such a thing were to pass? Hardly.
So what's the difference between flac and Apple lossless (alac)?
Apart from wasting space on portable devices.
Throw yourself right in with all the other people who came here and wrote a post that said in effect that all MP3 sounds the same no matter the bit rate.
I'm not sure that any of the posts were really trying to say that all MP3 sounds the same. Many were saying that lower-bit-rate MP3 is discernibly different from higher-bit-rate MP3 or lossless, and possibly not as good to listen to. I wouldn't read any more into it than that.
The threshold beyond which the perceived difference vanishes will vary with the quality of the original, the player, the D-A converter, the amplifier, the loudspeakers and the listener's ears.
Poor 'ol Neil, one burnt out dude.
The worst thing about "punching up the volume" is that it causes the signal to go into clipping, introducing horrendous sonic artifacts that are even heard in, MP3's, Clipping is the scourge of many re-releases. Its no wonder that even old worn out vinyl sounds better than the CD.
Well, this business of compressing dynamic range in many modern recordings is certainly not a good trend, and it obviates one of the major advantages that most any digital recording format has over vinyl, that being of course the advantage in dynamic range. Dynamic range compression was commonplace in vinyl recordings, particularly in recording of symphonic music where the dynamic range from the quietest to the loudest passages greatly exceeded the capability of vinyl. This of course was a major reason for the development of the CD format in the first place. Nowadays lots of people seem to have forgotten this, or perhaps the majority of population interested in music nowadays is not even old enough to have owned a collection a vinyl. At one point I had over a hundred easily. Now I don't have a single one, and I do not miss them in the least. There is not one thing about them that I miss. Only a handful of the vinyl recordings in my collection did not sound overtly inferior to a typical, run-of-the-mill CD, and even the ones that sounded half decent still did not sound in any way better to the same recording released on CD. And on top of that they were large and the collection was heavy and bulky. The cardboard folders constantly wore out at the corners and the backs, and the extra vinyl sleeves were cumbersome. There is nothing about that experience that I miss in any way. More recently I ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes using AAC and now this is the very first thing I do whenever I buy a new CD. When I want to listen to my music, I don't even have to get up off the sofa. The computer that I use for a music server stays powered on, and it is located in my office, and streams music digitally to the little Airport that sits close to my stereo. I reach for the remote control and switch the input, and then I reach for the iPad and touch the icon for the iTunes/Airtunes remote control app. In an instant, I am listening to whatever it was I wanted to listen to, without even getting up. And in general the sound quality is vastly superior to what it was with those old vinyl records. Why would anyone prefer to have to get up and walk to wherever that old orange crate full of dusty vinyl records is kept, flip through them to find the one of interest, pull it out of the sleeve and place it on the turntable, run the brush, lift over the tone arm, and then have to go and put it away afterwards. I would just as soon have a car that I have to start by turning a hand crank, and that has no heater to speak of for winter driving and no air conditioning for the summer, and hard bench seats, a three speed transmission that clunks and grinds every time I change gears, and that constantly drips oil down on to my garage floor.
CDs started the compression era. Apple Lossless encode of a CD is a lossless encode of a lossy source. SACD is almost dead in the US but struggles on. I import.
www.sa-cd.net
Yeah, right. (wink, wink). Anyone who knows the first thing about it knows that long before the CD was introduced, vinyl was lamented for several reasons, one of which was that you had to filter out practically all the bass before you could squeeze the signal into that little groove with undulating walls (and then vainly hope to restore a reasonable facsimile of the bass upon playback), and another of which was that even after filtering out almost all of the bass, you still could not record anywhere near the dynamic range of most symphonic music. It was generally necessary to compress the dynamic range as part of the signal processing that had to be applied before the signal could be placed in that little groove. That was the sad reality of vinyl, and still is, yet you claim that "CDs started the compression era". You've got it completely backwards. Dynamic range compression was one of the notable problems with vinyl that CDs sought to solve, and did. If you are talking about data compression, there is no data compression of CD unless the sound is recorded originally at a higher sampling rate and sample size. But even if so, that it itself is a bogus criticism for reasons that have been beaten to death and that are well understood by anyone who truly desires to understand such things.
...snip Why would anyone prefer to have to get up and walk to wherever that old orange crate full of dusty vinyl records is kept, flip through them to find the one of interest, pull it out of the sleeve and place it on the turntable, run the brush, lift over the tone arm, and then have to go and put it away afterwards.../snip
Totally agree, getting up every 22 minutes to change "sides" still looks no better through rose coloured glasses, so the crackle, hiss and pop has gone, so what, it was just crackle, hiss and pop.
Give me a 20,000 playlist and the surprises that "shuffle" brings, any day of the week.
The quality of iTunes match is surprisingly good, even the 128k MP3 tracks I "acquired"* from Napster last century have gained a new lease of life.
*as "fair use" backups of work I already owned.
I agree. But audiophiles will always think that can hear something that the human ear cannot detect; well at least the difference between one recording and the next.
It's the same people who think super expensive vodka is better than a $10 bottle.
What you're advocating is the McDonalds mindset. Never mind the quality feel the width - Why pay more, It's good enough, It's a niche market, blah blah.
I don't eat at McDonalds, I will pay more for a really good bottle of wine, I will pay more for good quality fresh produce. I would happily pay more for HD music just as I will pay more for HD video on iTunes over SD video.
There is most definately a market there. It may not appeal to the kids or 20 somethings with a crappy iPod speaker system in their bedroom but it would appeal to 40 somethings like me who have invested in a good quality hifi system and would like to move from CD to something more convenient and better quality like 24bit.
Yeah, right. (wink, wink). Anyone who knows the first thing about it knows that long before the CD was introduced, vinyl was lamented for several reasons, one of which was that you had to filter out practically all the bass before you could squeeze the signal into that little groove with undulating walls (and then vainly hope to restore a reasonable facsimile of the bass upon playback), and another of which was that even after filtering out almost all of the bass, you still could not record anywhere near the dynamic range of most symphonic music. It was generally necessary to compress the dynamic range as part of the signal processing that had to be applied before the signal could be placed in that little groove. That was the sad reality of vinyl, and still is, yet you claim that "CDs started the compression era". You've got it completely backwards. Dynamic range compression was one of the notable problems with vinyl that CDs sought to solve, and did. If you are talking about data compression, there is no data compression of CD unless the sound is recorded originally at a higher sampling rate and sample size. But even if so, that it itself is a bogus criticism for reasons that have been beaten to death and that are well understood by anyone who truly desires to understand such things.
I came from the tape, avoided vinyl when I could and now sacrifice with CD when SACD titles are not available or in my budget. I thought the range compromises with vinyl and the degredation made for bad tech so I avoided when I could. I did oversimplify my argument about CD being first mainly because most people think CDs aren't lossy. I'll still argue that removing information from the source material to save space is a form of compression whether it's sampling rate or bit depth. I'm not a vinylphile and overstated for the sake of the general audience.
Nice insult at the end though.
Edit: Damn - reading more of your posts and you like to not be polite. "Neil Young does not know one damned thing about anything." ??? I'm gonna check the forum rules to find where it states you have the exclusivity on hyperbole.
I'm worried Apple's leadership team will think that staying the course instead of trying to invent the next big thing will keep Apple afloat. It will in the short term, but if Apple is not actively trying to disrupt the future, someone else, perhaps people like Neil Young who were inspired by Steve Jobs, will. And that, in 20 years, may turn out to be Steve's real legacy.
Exactly.
There's nothing to back up that statement. Starting with the fact that tech moves so slow that the stuff that Jobs started 2 years ago as an idea won't be seen for another 10 or so. Second, Jobs wasn't the only brain at Apple. Heck he might not have even been the biggest brain.
Nothing to back up my statement?
OK, then - you remember how Apple was handling everything back in the mid-90's before Jobs came onboard? No?
I rest my case.
What else can you tell us, oh mighty visitor from the future?
Having a bad day, today?
So far, no one has been able to tell me where the splice points are
At a guess I would say about 1:35 it changes.
Also there is a noticeable difference in the vocals between the start and end, the music in that one is difficult as there is a lot of bass
But, your argument is specious.
Nope, but I'm afraid yours is sophistic.
As for the headphones, I mostly listen through a pair of Sennheiser HD580. As for the particular Sennheiser headphones in the post to which you replied, that pair happens to be a DJ model and not one of their best. The closed back has the single advantage of noise isolation, to the detriment of sound quality. The air spring effect can be used to good effect if and only if the driver itself is over damped so as to avoid a high Q resonance. And even in that case, there will still be a cavity resonance, i.e., standing waves set up between the back side of the diaphragm and the wall in back. These are the reasons that Sennheiser's better headphones always have been open back and always will be open back.
Thanks, I'm sure I'd never heard of issues of acoustics & resonance before. Did you know room acoustics are subject to similar issues? :roll eyes: Or is your argument that the person talking about his Sennehisers can't hear the difference because they're 'not one of their best' and just DJ models? (Yet presumably better than the ear buds that come bundled with the phone/pod.)
But as for your comments, the analogy to display resolution and bit depth and so on is always one that is easy to make. But it and of itself it does not prove anything at all. And the comparison with imaging is a bogus comparison for a fundamental reason. With any image, it is always potentially possible to display it on a display with greater pixel resolution, and for this reason there is always a potential advantage for using greater quantity of pixels in the image file. But bit depth is another matter. It translates into the amount of fine variation in brightness, hue, and saturation. There is inherently a limit to the ability of human vision to detect these differences. To keep it simple, consider the case of grey scale. Initially as you increase the bit depth, the brightness of the reproduced image gets closer and closer to the original, i.e., is neither whiter nor blacker than the original. But at a certain point, the human eye simply can no longer perceive the difference. Double the bit depth and scan and encode again, and you cannot tell any difference at all between that copy and the previous one, or between either and the original. Common sense tells you that eventually this will happen. It is not a question of whether it will happen. It is only a question of what the bit depth has to be, in order for this to happen. And once you have reached that point and are entirely certain that you have reached that point, there is absolutely no reason to increase the bit depth of the scan any further. It is the same with audio encoding, and even with perceptual encoding.
Ummm... yes, it was an analogy, not a proof. I find find pictures difficult to listen to. But as for your comments, you're essentially spending a lot of energy explaining that infinite resolution isn't needed because at some point we can't perceive it? No kidding?
The question of whether perceptual encoding can be indistinguishable from the original is a moot question. The only question that is even worth considering is what amount of compression, given a specific encoding scheme, can be tolerated without introducing some artifact by which any listener would be able to hear any difference between that recording and the original. IF you are entirely certain that the bit rate that you have used is perfectly adequate such that no person could every detect any difference between that recording and a non-lossy recording with arbitrarily high quantization rate and word size, then there is no discernible reason to use a higher bit rate. Because, IF it is true that no one can hear then difference, THEN it is true that no one can hear the difference. The only meaningful, valid questions are what people can and cannot hear. To dismiss all perceptual coding techniques in the manner that manner people do is equivalent to asserting that it is not possible, using a perceptual coding technique, to make a recording that no person would be able to recognize as different from a master using arbitrarily high quantization rate and word size. It is manifestly ludicrous to suggest that this would be the case, yet this is precisely what people are in effect asserting when they criticize perceptual encoding categorically. It is logically preposterous.
"IF it is true that no one can hear the difference, THEN it is true that no one can hear the difference." Jesus, seriously? What a bit of pedantic tossing. To summarize: infinite resolution isn't needed and at some point people can't hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed. Astonishing.
The original argument was whether the lossy low-bit-rate encodings used for PMPs are so good that nobody can tell them from the high res audio that's out there. I've heard the difference, so I'm going to go with no, they're not that good. Unfortunately you haven't actually helped to resolve whether that's the case or where that point may be.
I want access to the higher res audio for home, while the lower bit rate on my phone is good enough for on the go. Apparently I shouldn't want the better sound because infinite resolution is too much? What!?!?
So how was Neil going to do this. does he have an electrical engineering degree with expertise in signal processing?
Haven't seen much of his efforts at producing a viable electric car.
http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=71135
As for 24/192 files. If anyone knows of double blind listening tests that clearly show people can hear the difference between them and 16/44.1, please post a link.
I am still waiting for someone to show they can hear the difference between 223kbps AAC and the original source, let alone higher resolution originals.
i don't have a link to double blind test that you ask for. but 24/192 files smoke the 16/44 and the 256k files from anywhere hands down no question about it. My 256 k rips i make from 24/192 files also smoke the files from iTunes and they sound as good or better than the cd. They sound far superior on any piece of equipment I have listened to them on. iPod, iPhones, and either of them plugged into car stereo or through the apple tv/ home theatre. i am not just saying that to troll you. I am not an audiophile by any means, but I know what I hear when playing the hi-res files. The volumes you can reach with clarity is unprecedented. And every voice and instrument in these recordings are dripping wet with this clarity.
you don't have to have these hi-res files to enjoy music, but there are some albums and some musicians where you appreciate the higher format. Flaming Lips-yoshimi battles the pink robots is an awesome sonic experience in hi-res compared to its cd16/44 counterpart.
Given that he was an old hippie, it isn't all that surprising to me. The reason would have been partly that he no doubt had a huge collection of vinyl. But the fact that he listened to vinyl is no indication that he had any misgivings about the superiority of digital recording. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have believed that vinyl recordings were inherently superior to digital recordings given a good encoding scheme and adequate bitrate.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
Given that he was an old hippie, it isn't all that surprising to me. The reason would have been partly that he no doubt had a huge collection of vinyl. But the fact that he listened to vinyl is no indication that he had any misgivings about the superiority of digital recording. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have believed that vinyl recordings were inherently superior to digital recordings given a good encoding scheme and adequate bitrate.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
I was on the thinking of, SJ is a true Audiophile, as any audiophile would know, no digital media, CD, DVD what so ever with tens of thousand worth of equipment would replace the sound of Vinyl.
It is also the reason we still keep using Tube Amps!.
Everyone knows this story is rubbish. Steve Jobs got up on stage and said he got rid of his expensive audio equipment and only used the iPod hi-fi unit, so one of them is lying