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Topic: do mastering engineers know best? (Read 27517 times) previous topic - next topic
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do mastering engineers know best?

Reply #76 –
Quote from: ShowsOn on
Quote from: shadeLL on

There seems to be a great deal of group think on this forum.

You mean that information, that can provisionally call facts, needs to be supported by evidence?

If that's what you mean, then I'm 'group thinking' with you.


Don't fall into the Audiophile trap.  A certain subset of the audiophiles feel the need to impress people with their so called golden ears and description of their music that resemble that of wine.  Often that same group will practically always bring up the fact that vinyl is way, WAY superior to anything digital (to them, SACD is an improvement over CDs, but vinyl with it's infinite resolution  will always be superior to anything digital).  Right now, the popular thing to bitch about in these audiophile subset is over-compression which leads to listening fatigue, CDs that are mastered for the mass to be listened to on peoples computers, boomboxes, cars and the loudness and brightness of "modern" mastering jobs.  For all these reasons, vinyl would be the only medium to listen to music on a really good stereo setup.

Anyway, the common characteristic of that subset of the audiophile population is that they absolutely refuse to back up their claims with science, facts, measurements, etc.  They will evade all that with whatever crazy argument they have in their back pocket.

Conclusion : you are wasting your time if you try to reason one of 'em.  I now just see it as a pompous hobby.  If they need that to feel good about themselves, well... just let them.

They don't have a perceptible economic impact on the music business (CDs are still the norm), so I really don't care for them.  If they would be dictating the music world, then I would take it more seriously.

do mastering engineers know best?

Reply #77 –
Quote from: KikeG on
I have heard that explanation from a long time ago. It's possible that it is true, but then this would indicate that the power supply design of those CD players is very bad. It shouldn't happen on properly designed equipment (but who knows what is out there). I'd like to see some actual measurements that quantify this effect.


That explanation  was probably first proffered in Dennis, Dunn & Carson's white paper (I believe there was also either a related preprint or article in the JAES) investigating perceived differnece between numerically identical CDs.  Note that Dunn was one of the foremost investigators of jitter in his lifetime.  Yet neither disc-relate nor servo/motor related sampling jitter proved to be the problem.  Notably, they found instead amplitude modulation of the CD player output, via modulation of the reference voltage of the DAC by servo and motor electronics.  They described two forms of distortion of the analog output of some one-box CD players (circa 1996) due to such interference: the first was disc-dependent and low-frequency, with distortion sidebands close to the center frequency and thus likely to be rendered inaudible by masking; the second was track-position-dependent and generally of higher frequency and thus more possibly audible.  As the distortion traced to interaction between the box electronics and the DAC in the same box, they understandably didn't find these distortions in two-box DAC/transport setups.

Note again, the MORE likely audible one was not a disc-to-disc thing, it was a position-to-position thing WITHIN discs.  Which contrasts with the reports of difference *between* discs.

Now, even given that, they ALSO found that numerically identical CDs *they* made, could NOT be told apart in blind listening tests , some of which employed 'golden ears' as subjects.  Indeed, in their conclusion they write:

"Whilst it is unlikely that more massed listening tests will show
anything further, there may be some useful benefit to be gained
by more blind testing of expert listeners. It would be a
breakthrough if any listener could be found who can reliably
tell any two numerically-identical discs apart."

To my knowledge *no one* else has ever reported the results of a well-done blind test that showed this, nor, of course, one that also tested the gear for jitter or interference effects.


CliveB has already referenced it, but here's the white paper again

http://www.prismsound.com/m_r_downloads/cdinvest.pdf

do mastering engineers know best?

Reply #78 –
I've read the paper. It's not strange people were not able to hear the measured differences, since they were of quite low amplitude, being the sideband distortion products below the -100 dB level.
 

do mastering engineers know best?

Reply #79 –
Quote from: KikeG on
I've read the paper. It's not strange people were not able to hear the measured differences, since they were of quite low amplitude, being the sideband distortion products below the -100 dB level.



Indeed.  So I don't think it's plausible to suggest servo/motor interference as the likely reason behind the frequent (sighted) perception of audible difference between digital clones, as was done earlier in this thread by the poster who said there were too many 'closed minds' here.  The usual sighted biases seem to me to be a much more likely explanation.