This could indeed result in a huge fail for the hi-res peddlers.
By suggesting to the masses that it is the format that makes the music sound better instead of the recording, mixing and mastering "choices", the people responsible for the horrible sound quality would get a free pass for what, another decade, two, until ultra-hi-res comes along?

The rationale behind this is that by making hi-res a commodity just like the CD, the uninformed average listener will just happily buy a crappy hi-res product as he/she is doing today with crappy CDs. CD audio would become obsolete, hi-res crap the norm rather than the exception.

I can already imagine amirm in 10 years, still wasting Internet traffic, but this time about ultra-hi-res, and how bigger is always better (except if it doesn't fit his momentary argument).

But you want to make CD obsolete, right?

Addressing this bit of pseudo science:

Quote from: xnor on 2014-11-24 02:09:00

1. Where on earth do you see non-linear distortions? You don't even know what an LTI system is, but talk big about filters? What the..

Down conversion involves both filtering and quantization.  Quantization error is anything but a linear distortion.

When he was invited to sit on Ludwig’s Platinum Mastering Panel this year, Doug Sax suggested they discuss mastering for multiple formats. “Ten years ago, you made a CD master and you were done,” Sax says. “Now you do a CD master, a master for iTunes, a high-resolution master for HDtracks, and a cutting master for vinyl.”

See? Separate mastering. You think he is going to do the same thing he does for iTunes? or CD? He doesn't or he wouldn't have specifically named that as another branch.

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-25 22:32:15

When he was invited to sit on Ludwig’s Platinum Mastering Panel this year, Doug Sax suggested they discuss mastering for multiple formats. “Ten years ago, you made a CD master and you were done,” Sax says. “Now you do a CD master, a master for iTunes, a high-resolution master for HDtracks, and a cutting master for vinyl.”

We hear each one of those samples as they come. The brain doesn't collect them all and then say, "ah, that was a FIR filter."

From math/signal processing point of view we can say all of this ringing is benign.  The theory says this is what must hear the in time domain to implement the low pass function.  But that is not how the psychoacoustics works.  We hear each one of those samples as they come.  The brain doesn't collect them all and then say, "ah, that was a FIR filter."  It hears the individual samples as they get processed by the transfer function of the low pass filter.  This is why you can't use your logic of "it is a linear function."  Those sample transforms taken individually do not represent such.

Addressing this bit of pseudo science:

Down conversion involves both filtering and quantization.

Let's start at the top.  This is the title of the paper:The audibility of typical digital audio filters in a high-fidelity playback system

No, I am not being pedantic .  Please pay attention to what I have highlighted: digital audio filters.  That is the mission of the paper.  They start with 192 Khz music samples, then apply two filters to it.  One is to represent CD sampling rate of 44.1 Khz and the other, 48 Khz.  Here is the paper itself in technicolor to make sure these key points are not lost:

2.3. Signal processing and test conditions

Two kinds of linear-phase FIR (fnite impulse re-
sponse) filter were used, both of which operated at
192 kHz and both of which were implemented us-
ing TPDF (triangular probability density function)
dither at the 24th bit.

Do you really think what they heard in Stuart's listening test was linear distortion?  Linear distortion garners such adjectives?  "Echoes, when audible, were identied as being aected the most clearly by the ltering. It was felt that some of the louder passages of the recording were less aggressive after ltering, and that the inner voices (second violin and viola) had "a nasal quality".  I don't think so.  Not at all.

But go ahead and move the green line up 6 db if it makes you feel better. It is still below the threshold of hearing.

Remember, you will lose a much larger battle if you stay on this path Arny.  That such noise levels is audible in a 105 db SPL playback.  And that they are so audible as to be an obvious flaw in the test.

So keep going at your peril.

Let's look at the impulse response again:
[...]
We hear each one of those samples as they come.  The brain doesn't collect them all and then say, "ah, that was a FIR filter."  It hears the individual samples as they get processed by the transfer function of the low pass filter.  This is why you can't use your logic of "it is a linear function."  Those sample transforms taken individually do not represent such.

To understand this topic fully, you must have broad understanding of multiple disciplines.

No, the war has been lost.

From math/signal processing point of view we can say all of this ringing is benign.  The theory says this is what must happen in time domain to implement the low pass function.

But that is not how the psychoacoustics works.  We hear each one of those samples as they come.

False claim. The above appears to be the response of a linear phase low pass filter to an impulse. However all low pass filters are not linear phase. For example a low pass filter can be minimum phase in which case there is no pre-ringing.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2014-11-26 12:37:11

False claim. The above appears to be the response of a linear phase low pass filter to an impulse. However all low pass filters are not linear phase. For example a low pass filter can be minimum phase in which case there is no pre-ringing.

That's not even the problem of his momentary claim (he changes them whenever he sees fit). To justify his repeated false comment about non-linear distortion in filters (that's what we were talking about) he had to go back to quantization, which he himself discarded before in this thread as being an audible problem - and that was with noise-modulating 16-bit RPDF.

Quote

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If you have not heard these unique amplifiers, I highly encourage you to come into our showroom for a listen. We have a pair on hand driving our Revel speakers. I am confident that they will improve the sound of your current speakers given the ease with which they can drive any load regardless of how difficult they might be (and many high-end speakers are difficult to drive). We are happy to let you evaluate them with your own system to see the benefits of this technology. Hearing this amplifier was an eye-opener for me. I think it will be for you too.

 

Quote

But that is not how the psychoacoustics works.  We hear each one of those samples as they come.

Not on the planet earth, not if the listener is a human being, and not if the sample rate is much higher than a few 100 Hz at the most.

A good reference in this matter is found here: http://www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ppt/jj/fund_of_hearing.ppt

"The inner ear is a mechanical filter bank, implementing a filter whose center-frequency tuning goes from high to low as one goes farther into the cochlea"

in short the stimulus that the brain responds to is the spectral content of the sound, not any imagined sample-by-sample analysis of digital data clocked in the 10s of KHz.

The above are two unbelievably poorly informed comments, especially given the alleged credentials of its author, and the fact that he has quoted the document I just referenced in this thread very recently.

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2014-11-26 12:37:11

Quote

But that is not how the psychoacoustics works.  We hear each one of those samples as they come.

Not on the planet earth, not if the listener is a human being, and not if the sample rate is much higher than a few 100 Hz at the most.

A good reference in this matter is found here: http://www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ppt/jj/fund_of_hearing.ppt

"The inner ear is a mechanical filter bank, implementing a filter whose center-frequency tuning goes from high to low as one goes farther into the cochlea"

in short the stimulus that the brain responds to is the spectral content of the sound, not any imagined sample-by-sample analysis of digital data clocked in the 10s of KHz.

Really?  Here is the other JJ ES presentation I referenced earlier which you said you had read and were quoting sections from it:



It is exactly what I said.  That the ear analyzes samples in time.

Why aren't we discussing the BS paper and what they claim to have heard, instead of some subjectivist audiophile with a long history of absurd GE claims about hearing (via "listening") linear vs SMPS, SPDIF cables, DACs with +/-10% volume methodology, class d filtering, power regenerators, etc, etc, etc?
Last I checked, Amir was not present for the BS tests and was not part of that supervised listening panel (or any other, recorded, ever). He is not mentioned anywhere in the BS paper, which is purportedly the thread topic.

cheers,

AJ

Sorry, but as written this is very misleading. The response shown is that of a digital FIR filter. In whole or in part, it is a linear transform, down to the arithmetical limits of the DSP. Such limits were 120dB down a couple of decades ago. You talk about hearing this. I am not convinced.

I guess when jj talks about problems of ringing it is a problem especialy for lossy because the filters work near the audible band when cutting out masked content.

btw. i once saw nice pictures done with iZotope RX that shows the ringing together with its spectral distribution. Can anyone create one so that we don't have to look at this silly ringing picture the marketing uses since years?

As I just correct Arny, JJ's slide very clearly confirms the same that the brain is not a DSP machine where it captures a bunch of samples and then decides what it means.  Note how JJ wrote that in capital letters.  And this was my key point to xnor.  That he can't use DSP explanations to rule out audibility.  The brain's model of perception does not match the mathematical model of filter transforms.  At the risk of stating the obvious, it can't hear the future!  It has to judge the samples as they arrive and modified by the filter coefficients.

So sure, we can have our doubts but we can't rule it out as impossibility based on combined science of signal processing and psychoacoustics as xnor attempted.

Stuart's listening test showed audibility of such

No, the presentation is not about lossy compression.  He is using what he is hoping to be a familiar analogous problem in lossy compression as I did.  Here is the title of the presentation:

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-26 17:08:43

No, the presentation is not about lossy compression.  He is using what he is hoping to be a familiar analogous problem in lossy compression as I did.  Here is the title of the presentation:

You seriously cherry-pick the title of a presentation over the actual content of the actual slide you were just talking about a moment ago? You even highlighted CODECS yourself.

Wow... I'm speechless.

amir credibility = 0

btw. i once saw nice pictures done with iZotope RX that shows the ringing together with its spectral distribution.