So back to your question, I don't care what the retail price is.  I want to encourage a stream of releases that are before the final mastering of the CD where both the 16/44.1 conversion and loudness compression occur.  Yes, not all of them are free of the latter but more and more they are.

When I bought the album in question, the L2 Nordic Sampler, I opted for 96 Khz.  There was 192 at higher price still but it didn't matter to me.  I was happy to see that supersonic version but chose one notch lower.  In this case I knew there was no loudness compression applied to the 96 Khz so I opted for that.  But you know what?  I regret not getting the 192 Khz now just for the extra $4.  I might go back and get that one just to compare even though it would set me back another $28 (really crappy of them to re-charge you the full amount for another sampling).

If I ask them why they say they want to save some individual from wasting their money.

Here is the reality of it: the above is not the reason Krab, Any, AJ, mzil, xnor, etc. post what they post.  Nope.  We gather in these forums because it feels good to be known as an authority.  Many people pick what I call "good enough" as their platform.  It seems safe.  We can immediately wear the cloth of "science" and say nothing is better than another, listening test says this and that, some textbook that we have read says something else and we are golden.  We become the hallway monitor in school.  Walk around the forum and stomp on any kid we can find.

Losing that power is a big deal.  This is why xnor posts and posts.  And before him Krab, Arny, AJ, mzil, etc.  Mzil for pete's sake used to sell audio gear.  The very same gear he is here to say should be illegal to buy!  Give me a break.

I am not here to join a crowd for that reason.  And certainly won't join the camp and be requested to paper over faults in our arguments.  I want 100% transparency.  Let me repeat: I want 100% transparency.  If there is something wrong with our argument, we better offer it before the other camp does.

I have no limit and yes, people here are illogical to have one.

Answering your question then, my motivation ha nothing to do with the sampling rate.  I don't care if the pre-CD master is 48 Khz.  I take the better sounding one!

Where I think the vocal few go wrong is that they pick battles when no one is asking them.

I am writing this long post because this is the ultimate problem and the cause of all of these written battles.  People think they have some duty to fight these battles.

If I ask them why they say they want to save some individual from wasting their money.  Fine. But at what cost are you doing that? Xnor is determined to get there at the expense of looking totally unprofessional and going after someone who is interested in discussing the topic using double blind tests and science/research of audio.

Here is the reality of it: the above is not the reason Krab, Any, AJ, mzil, xnor, etc. post what they post.  Nope.  We gather in these forums because it feels good to be known as an authority.  Many people pick what I call "good enough" as their platform.  It seems safe.  We can immediately wear the cloth of "science" and say nothing is better than another, listening test says this and that, some textbook that we have read says something else and we are golden.  We become the hallway monitor in school.  Walk around the forum and stomp on any kid we can find.

Losing that power is a big deal.  This is why xnor posts and posts.

OK, I feel better now. 

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-21 23:24:20

Can you answer the psychology of this?

You know the psychology. We see folks pushing barely audible / inaudible improvements to the detriment of easily audible improvements. It impacts negatively on the equipment and recordings that are available. Why wouldn't people who care about audio be annoyed about this?

Also, I think you're taking the flack for all the wild and unsubstantiated claims for hi-res that are thrown around in other places, even though the main argument you've pushed here is merely "why not"?

If memory serves Brad Meyer studied Engineering at a well known Ivy League school, I think Harvard.

Given the monumental gross errors of yours that I corrected almost daily over at AVS, who are you Amir?

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-24 14:59:32

Quote from: 2Bdecided on 2014-11-24 12:23:07

These are real demonstrable benefits. It's not just about getting that warm fuzzy feeling from inaudible perfection.

As is the case with getting the high resolution master prior to loudness compression and remastering for CD/MP3/AAC release.  We need no double blind test, no signal processing lessons, nothing.

The original is the tracks prior to mix down, and this is almost never for sale.

So no, he doesn't have an engineering degree from Harvard.

Apparently it's not incumbent on those who *sincerely* believe there is some (small) freedom in having 'hi rez' choices,  to tamp down the wild claims made about hi rez elsewhere,  or by people like Neil Young or the Stereophile/TAS crowd.

Quote

It's like the Pono Kickstarter video where Neil Young had all those celebrities talking about how they never heard music sound that great outside of a studio.  Wow, so awesome.

Agree that is a bunch of nonsense.

They seem very reluctant to take up that task.

We could interrogate the 'psychology' of that reluctance , too.

No, the step before CD mastering is the stereo mix at the recorded/mixed bit rate and sampling rate which is almost always higher than the CD.

They don't jump from the multitrack recording directly to an MP3.

Haven't you claimed that 48 sounds better than 44.1 (let's ignore your lame excuses about not telling us what you heard)?

Without going through the circuit design details, let's say it is challenging to create a passive filter that filters out the switching frequency but leaves the audio band perfectly flat. You see the ramification of this in response anomalies of some class D amplifiers that “ringing” at higher frequencies (frequency response has oscillations to it).
In comparison testing I have done, switching amplifiers using the classic class D configuration always sport incredible low frequency control and power. They beat out linear class AB amplifiers almost regardless of price. What they give up though is high frequency fidelity which I find somewhat harsh. The distortion is highly non-linear and challenging to spot but it is there. The Mark Levinson No 53 is the first switching amplifier I have heard which does not have this compromise. Its bass is amazingly authoritative: tight and powerful. Yet the rest of the response is absolutely neutral and pleasant.
If you have not heard these unique amplifiers, I highly encourage you to come into our showroom for a listen.

We know based even on just the highly flawed and biased recent Meridian AES paper that whether it sounds different than the CD version of it is difficult or impossible to determine, particularly if we wish for that determination to be adequately reliable.

The proof of that is the manifold asymmetries and errors that it took to produce data to that end that supported the false conclusion even 56% of the time.

Quote from: amirm on 2014-11-24 17:47:53

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2014-11-24 17:10:32

We know based even on just the highly flawed and biased recent Meridian AES paper that whether it sounds different than the CD version of it is difficult or impossible to determine, particularly if we wish for that determination to be adequately reliable.

Putting aside the mischaracterization of Stuart paper, no we don't know that Arny.  High resolution masters not suffering from loudness compression have clearly audible fidelity difference that you have to be blind in addition to deaf to not hear it .

Irrelevant. This discussion is about Audibility of Typical Digital Filters in a Hi-Fi Playback System, not the audibility of loudness compression. Mention of this highly irrelevant topic is so far off topic that it raises serious questions about the mental acuity of any person who would try to bring this irrelevant issue into the discussion.

If you were the AES, an industry organization, or for that matter all the many companies that make up the industry, what would be in your best financial interest? Would it be to manufactures best interests and promote hi-res because you can just sell a ton of sh!t or would you make a stand and actively look to reverse the loudness trend or whatever else is needed to improve recordings? In the former case, the chips fall where they may while in the second you run up against that people want to accommodate their bosses. Actually you have the same issues with the former. More cowbell.

Amir, please help us out here.
[...]
The reason I ask, is because here, you say:

Quote

Without going through the circuit design details, let's say it is challenging to create a passive filter that filters out the switching frequency but leaves the audio band perfectly flat. You see the ramification of this in response anomalies of some class D amplifiers that “ringing” at higher frequencies (frequency response has oscillations to it).

Quote from: MLXXX on 2014-11-23 18:03:29

I was really more interested in your trying 2Bdecided's linear phase file _50.wav (as I mention below). I recall that I was unable to discern any audible difference with that file, in January 2009.

Oh sorry.  I was wondering why at the same time you were saying I took the test and I didn't .

I did very quick try and these are the results for linear phase:

=======================
[color="#0000FF"]foo_abx 2.0 beta 4 report
foobar2000 v1.3.5
2014-11-23 13:38:11

File A: limehouse_linear_phase_050.wav
SHA1: 661058f46dfb7de9fd2687344ece857f0ae1531a
File B: limehouse_reference.wav
SHA1: e8ad96830d23cad4bba5bf822ce875ae452b9e7c

...
Total: 14/16
Probability that you were guessing: 0.2%
...

I distinctly remember losing concentration the couple of times above.    But since the results show 99.8% non-chance outcome, I figured it is good enough to post and not suffer any more .

..., I downloaded your latest tracks.  At 50.9 to 51.1 I thought the "s" in street sounded distinctly different.  There was more lisping in one than the other.  In the trial mode I was able to consistently tell the difference for a good sequence of trials.  But when I ran with the test without feedback, I think I got down to 30% probably of chance or some such thing.  I am just not motivated to try again and don't remember where the critical segment was in my original testing.  So if you like to declare this a loss for me, you can .  I am just too lazy to try harder and see if I can pass it.

If you were the AES, an industry organization, or for that matter all the many companies that make up the industry, what would be in your best financial interest? Would it be to manufactures best interests and promote hi-res because you can just sell a ton of sh!t or would you make a stand and actively look to reverse the loudness trend or whatever else is needed to improve recordings? In the former case, the chips fall where they may while in the second you run up against that people want to accommodate their bosses. Actually you have the same issues with the former. More cowbell.

Unskilled people go and look up signal processing algorithms and implement them.  Without critical listening skills, they think the job is done and ship it.  This yet again demonstrates that there are two types of listeners: those that can hear non-linear artifacts and those who can't.

Anyone who disagrees should try to duplicate our results. They can try to find the flaws just the same.

And given that proof, you cannot extrapolate from your hearing to the rest of the people.  Just because you don't hear the difference doesn't mean it is inaudible and sufficient justification for you to go around and accuse people are being wrong to observe otherwise.

Actually they duplicated a real-life situation.  Took a professional audio workstation tool, Sonic Solutions, and converted the files to 16/44.1.  Precisely how real music is produced.  That in double blind tests we could tell the difference it means that what people observe in the wild can very much be true.  That transparency is not there.

It matters not that the timing difference may be the reason.  What matters in this context is that we are wrong.  We are wrong to say they are imagining things when they compare the high res to 16/44.1.  We are making idealized assumptions that are not true in reality.

So I think it is good that we discovered how professional resamplers are not the animals we think they are.  There is no visibility into their design as I have mentioned.  I imagine hardly any music is produced using Sox resampler.  Engineers use the professional tools.  And if those tools produce non-transparent results, then we should get the masters and not be subject to this.

These are 100% logical and defensible conclusions we can draw.  Anyone who doesn't want to go there has fingers in the ears and in denial.

Quote from: Chu Gai on 2014-11-24 18:10:02

If you were the AES, an industry organization, or for that matter all the many companies that make up the industry, what would be in your best financial interest? Would it be to manufactures best interests and promote hi-res because you can just sell a ton of sh!t or would you make a stand and actively look to reverse the loudness trend or whatever else is needed to improve recordings? In the former case, the chips fall where they may while in the second you run up against that people want to accommodate their bosses. Actually you have the same issues with the former. More cowbell.

AES is doing both; *but* I find it saddening that they are giving so much oxygen to 'high resolution' as if it were a game-changing problem-solver in consumer audio.  I'm sure's there's at least a few notable AES members who feel the same.

'High resolution' certainly does not solve the problem of loudness wars mastering;  that trend has *nothing to do* with the comparative performance of standard and high resolution formats.

Well, that era is over.  Far more careful test has been run which is the topic of this thread.  And what do you know?  It has a different outcome!  What to do now?  What?  Oh, let's attack the messenger.  Let's say that Amir is a cheater and see if we can create some smoke.  Let's keep saying that an authority like James Johnston, my former audio architect and AES Fellow, would never agree with any of this.  Well, this is another page from his presentation:



This is from JJ's presentation to the local chapter of AES on basics of digital audio: sampling and quantization.  This doesn't paint a picture of transparency of 16/44.1 in any music you buy.  If JJ volunteers it, we better darn well do the same.  Anything else is a political move to censor data in order to achieve self-importance on some forum.

Am I the only one who sees that a very well known best practice, the use of perceptually  shaped dither, was specifically excluded?

If stuff is already being recorded in hi-res then later down sampled to CD with subsequent tunes in various lossy formats, then I would guess its because you can charge more for hi-res. I saw where Sony was saying they hoped that hi-res would comprise something like 20% of downloaded material. From my perspective, the industry is seeing a steady increase in streaming music. Spotify, Pandora, Sirius/XM and many other outfits are supplanting traditional AM/FM and this is shifting the balance away from downloads. If lossless CD and its lossy offspring are going to comprise fewer downloads, then the problem comes how to recoup the profits that are and will be lost? Hi-res provides an answer or at least part of one.

The way we listen is changing rapidly and many simply no longer prop down in a chair listening to the exclusion of everything else. They're streaming what they want from their devices while checking email, tweeting, got the sports update going on and so forth.

There is also statistical analysis in this regard.  Here is the paper itself:

One-sided t-tests were performed for each condition to
test the null hypothesis that the mean score was not
significantly different from 56.25% correct: the out-
come of these is shown in Table 2. All means were
significantly different from chance other than that
for condition 4, although this t-test just failed to
reach significance at the 5% level (t=1.58; p=0.067).

Do members have this much difficulty understanding such language?