Audibility of "typical" Digital Filters in a Hi-Fi Playback
Reply #89 – 2014-11-13 16:04:50
How many people here have actually bought the paper? I am an AES member and so I have the paper.Here's a rundown of some of the relevant things I don't think have been mentioned yet (or if they have they've largely been glossed over). I am pretty sure there are more relevant things than what you listed .Seriously, all this paper seems to show is that if you don't dither at all, or dither improperly, a group of carefully trained listeners will, on some sample material, be able to distinguish the 16-bit content from the original content, albeit with a fair-to-great amount of difficulty (they did much better worse with rectangular dither than with no dither). You just gave away the farm with that summary. If we are sensitive to such things as dither types then all the talk about any and all small distortions not being audible is proven to be wrong. These are small differences. Right? If we can hear them then we can hear a lot of other artifacts we shove under the rug. As to "carefully trained listeners," that is a sign of merit for any such tests. Using untrained listeners goes against the best industry practices as outlined in ITU BS-1116. The training here was very limited to this one test alone. The listening group were not trained experts. They were allowed to listen to the music and hear a controlled FIR filter test.Some small differences with distinctly diminished sample sizes are then used to come to some very strange conclusions. There's all sorts of guff about temporal smearing, and a ramble through some decidedly dubious literature (yes, Ooashi et al make an appearance) to portray the 'prima facies' case for hi-res as a reasonably solid one. Seems like you read it in an emotional state of mind given this description. I would love to see your read of Meyer and Moran so that I get calibrated on how you judge such things. Is there a link for that?