Audibility of "typical" Digital Filters in a Hi-Fi Playback
Reply #585 – 2014-11-24 17:47:53
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 . From the bible of good enough camp, here comes a quote from Meyer and Moran:Though our tests failed to substantiate the claimed advantages of high-resolution encoding for two-channel audio, one trend became obvious very quickly and held up throughout our testing: virtually all of the SACD and DVD-A recordings sounded better than most CDs —sometimes much better. Had we not “degraded” the sound to CD quality and blind-tested for audible differences, we would have been tempted to ascribe this sonic superiority to the recording processes used to make them. Plausible reasons for the remarkable sound quality of these recordings emerged in discussions with some of the engineers currently working on such projects. This portion of the business is a niche market in which the end users are preselected, both for their aural acuity and for their willingness to buy expensive equipment, set it up correctly, and listen carefully in a low-noise environment. Partly because these recordings have not captured a large portion of the consumer market for music, engineers and producers are being given the freedom to produce recordings that sound as good as they can make them, without having to compress or equalize the signal to suit lesser systems and casual listening conditions. These recordings seem to have been made with great care and manifest affection, by engineers trying to please themselves and their peers. They sound like it, label after label. High-resolution audio discs do not have the overwhelming majority of the program material crammed into the top 20 (or even 10) dB of the available dynamic range, as so many CDs today do. " Missing that is missing the forest from the tree.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. Sorry, no. How many times must we correct this misconception? 56% is the threshold line. The medians for all tests are higher than that. So is the standard deviation with the exception of one. 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 didifferent 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 signicance at the 5% level (t=1.58; p=0.067). Do members have this much difficulty understanding such language?