Audibility of "typical" Digital Filters in a Hi-Fi Playback
Reply #463 – 2014-11-22 00:27:04
FYI, I passed all of my double blind ABX tests using my laptop and headphones. You probably think you're getting a hard time here, but you should take it as a compliment that no one has challenged you on this. The assumption must be that, given your employment history, you must know what you're doing. Anyone else who arrived on HA and made this claim would get a really hard time, due to a long history of drivers, sound cards, and transducers that don't take kindly to ultrasonic content. ABXing hi-res vs 16/44.1 on such crappy equipment is easy, and it's not because hi-res is audibly better. Cheers, David.Are there some details on the system amir used? Which operating system/version, which headphones, which soundcard, which sound API, which DirectSound common sampling rate was configured (if applicable) ... ? You spoke too soon David. As you see Xnor and AJ are on full bore inquisition with no regards to my prior experience. I didn't answer you xnor because all of this has been hashed out on AVS Forum. And mzil gave you part of it. I know you haven't seen them but I thought you would at least pay attention to what David said. So that you know what he is referring to, my team at Microsoft was responsible for entire Audio/Videos tack in Windows including DS, mixing and resampling pipeline, etc. I championed ditching the horrible one in XP and creating a proper one. I hired JJ to head that activity and the results were a major step up from XP. Most of my testing was done on my rather new HP Zbook 14. I take these tests casually in our family room with TV on and such (hence the dogs barking). I like to use my Etymotic headphones because they seal so well. I was challenged on that so I repeated the test with my Shure IEM. To really put that argument to bed, I also ran a test with my uncomfortable Paradigm IEM. I have a stock audio stack in my laptop and have Foobar running in default configuration. Since all of the tests have been at 24-bit/96 Khz, I have set that as the audio property of the sound card. There is still dither added on the way in/out of the kernel stack but seeing how I had positive results, I didn't need to go with WASAPI or ASIO to eliminate that. I have run Arny's Ultrasonic IM test and passed that (I post that in one of the threads here). New version of Foobar ABX spits out the audio stack selection so here is David's test I ran: foo_abx 2.0 beta 4 report foobar2000 v1.3.5 2014-11-13 09:16:06 File A: limehouse_maximum_phase_100.wav SHA1: 722dc26db8d4ce666dc03875b2c8d4570d22b521 File B: limehouse_reference.wav SHA1: e8ad96830d23cad4bba5bf822ce875ae452b9e7c Output: DS : Primary Sound Driver 09:16:06 : Test started. 09:16:48 : 01/01 09:16:56 : 02/02 09:17:04 : 03/03 09:17:14 : 04/04 09:17:21 : 05/05 09:17:29 : 06/06 09:17:38 : 07/07 09:17:45 : 08/08 09:17:52 : 09/09 09:18:02 : 10/10 09:18:08 : 11/11 09:18:14 : 12/12 09:18:20 : 13/13 09:18:28 : 14/14 09:18:36 : 15/15 09:18:42 : 16/16 09:18:42 : Test finished. ---------- Total: 16/16 Probability that you were guessing: 0.0% -- signature -- 5b42b06c414b6ba77a3998695bf119a2d57663c0 Edit: Forgot to mention the OS. It is Windows 7 Pro. BTW, you asked me what test to run. Start with the above. It is in the parallel link. Please post your answer here. AJ, same to you.