I´ve tried to broaden your mind just a tiny little bit - but apparently some people are very narrowminded. I even went so far admitting mistakes I´d done myself in communicating my ideas & opinions. Did you? I think not. 90% of you people didn´t even bother to consider the slightest possibility that you are in fact incapable of accepting another ones opinion without critzising it.

Now please, everyone back to the subject at hand which was... eh... let me see... ah yes! "Why we need Audiophiles."

Quote from: rpp3po on 2009-04-30 19:58:48

That October 2008 reference proves me wrong, thanks. After a longer pause I had become active again at HA not before January '09. Wasn't LAME quite ahead a couple of years before that? Has your codec been continuously under development or is this the result of a rather large revision?

I think LAME was only ahead a few years ago in terms of VBR quality. I think back then Fraunhofer didn't focus on VBR. So yes, over the last years our codec has undergone tuning and bugfixing just like LAME did. As you can see, we do monitor HA listening tests  Whether there was a large codec revision in between, I don't know (I working on AAC, not MP3).

Chris

Quote from: C.R.Helmrich on 2009-04-30 19:48:55

Quote from: Stereoeditor on 2009-04-29 23:40:03

As I said in the article, the codecs used were the Fraunhofer, as implemented in Adobe Audition...

Mr. Atkinson, which version, by the way?

Adobe Audition 1.0, which I purchased in 2003.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

Quote from: krabapple on 2009-04-30 04:20:21

I mean the ones from posters that seem to be almost sympathetic, or at worst *resigned* or *rueful* or *patronizing*, saying in effect, hey, look, what do you expect from the guy?  He's got ad space to sell!  He can't go telling his readers that CD players aren't generally likely to sound different if they compare them fairly, or that they could easily make mp3s that they likely couldn't tell from an SACD without specific training.

I've been pretty hardly avoiding that line of argument, actually, but I will say that I've only responded to about 30% of the posts that I'd like to respond to, with infinite time and concentration. (Including several of yours)

Some of the most skeptical and intelligent people I know are firm believers in astrology, and believe it has a genuine scientific basis. And, y'know, empirically, calling their beliefs pseudoscientific just does not get me very far. Nobody believes their own beliefs are pseudoscience - it's always somebody else's. It's kind of like calling somebody a "dumb sheep", actually.

ZOMG. Statements perceived as overly emotional get mistaken for statements on the losing side of an argument? Film at 11.

Quote from: Stereoeditor on 2009-04-30 13:23:49

I am sure that that claim hasn't been made on HA. But it is widely made in the outside world, in places like the "Circuits" section of the NY Times, and in advertising. Even the low-bit-rate audio offered by satellite radio is routinely described as "CD quality."

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

If your primary complaints are that people involved in the selling of this still comparatively new technology make exaggerated claims about their products in order to drum up business and that journalists do too much of their work from press releases without any substantial critical examination or analysis then all I can respond with are hoary cliches about pots and kettles that don't even make sense to me because my teapot is a lovely shade of turquoise.

I would let this thread become the black hole of Hydrogenaudio. Eventually the whole universe itself might collapse into it.

I don't know what to think about the whole new lossy frequency plot contemplation thing in this thread, that Axon started.

The proximity and content of these two posts is nothing short of amazing.

Mr. Atkinson,
7 year old encoders sound like 7 year old encoders.
Your sample for your demonstration will not even be close to being representative of what a modern mp3 encoder can achieve.

Insofar as JA's article deliberately avoided the whole issue of observed audibility of lossy encoding artifacts, and that (as I pointed out) a modern codec shows similar numerical issues, I'm not sure how important the Audition/Fraunhofer thing is in the context of the article itself.

The more important issue here is that Stereophile readers are being kept in the dark about important lossy encoding information that can and will affect their listening quality. I'll grant to John that, for the high-end audio person who demands all sorts of perfection, losslessness etc out of playback stacks, MP3s have no place in them. But these same people - like Mikey - have iPods, and cell phones, and all sorts of other things which have very finite storage space. Until we all have terabytes on our cell phones, or download all our music losslessly from the cloud, people will continue to have a need for lossy encoding of audio into the 64-192k bitrate regime. And the real point krab and others are making is that there are real mistakes being perpetrated in these encodes - there really are "good" and "bad" encoder settings - and that by not describing them, Stereophile is ultimately performing a disservice to its readers. It's easy and a cop-out to just tell people to use 320kbps MP3s. Where's the discussion about inherent preecho issues at that bitrate, and why other codecs at lower bitrates may be superior? Or any kind of discussion about which encoders to use when a lower bitrate is required?

John, I think it's really too easy for people here to question your motives given your silence on stuff like that. The impression I get about Stereophile is that it is, first and foremost, a luxury audio magazine, and should be compared to other luxury magazines than other magazines covering audio. And frankly, I can grant luxury people their snobbery, because to do otherwise is in its own way elitist. But in the absence of a magazine catering specifically to lower end audio - and the absence of reviewers and review protocols revolving around that - I think Stereophile has also, willingly or unwillingly, also taken the mantle of a magazine of authority for mainstream audio as well as high-end audio. And if the magazine can review entry-level turntables and iPod sound quality, why can't it also review low bitrate codecs?

And more specifically, why can't it review them on their own terms - with ABX testing?

I mean, god, I'd write the article myself gratis if you'd let me. I'd just summarize all the collective HA wisdom into "go lossless if you can, but if you can't, and storage is at a premium; these are the encoders and settings people tend to be using at these bitrates; this is how you should be thinking about selecting a codec <...>; consider running your own ABX tests to evaluate the importance of sound quality defects." Surely that isn't that terribly misleading or contrary to the goals of the magazine.

Good points all. But it presupposes a role for Stereophile which is not one I intend. To resort to analogy, Stereophile is a magazine that caters to people who cook using so-called organic ingredients but is then asked if it could discuss which fast food restaurant offers food that gets closest to that experience. My answer is that I don't think it really matters; eat what you like best or for reasons of convenience -- the Wendy's is 3 blocks closer to your office than the Burger King -- but just don't make fast food your entire diet.  Obviously the analogy breaks if examined on more than a superficial level, but it's close enough.

Again a good point. But I'd have to reinvent who we are first. Maybe a task for the next editor. :-)

Quote from: Stereoeditor on 2009-05-01 04:11:02

Again a good point. But I'd have to reinvent who we are first. Maybe a task for the next editor. :-)

Perhaps you might consider that your intransigence on this one thing is going to ultimately make the next editor's job that much more difficult because you've made your mag irrelevant to practically everybody under forty by pissing on their listening preference.

How is Stereophile, its advertisers and your hobby prepared to cope with the potential loss of an entire generation?

Perhaps you might consider that your intransigence on this one thing is going to ultimately make the next editor's job that much more difficult because you've made your mag irrelevant to practically everybody under forty by pissing on their listening preference.  How is Stereophile, its advertisers and your hobby prepared to cope with the potential loss of an entire generation?

Actually, if that's true, a useful weak to Stereophile's business model isn't accepting DBTs - it's draping tasteful but beautiful females across the products it photographs, e.g. an upmarket version of this. Then again, it would be a bad for subscription figures to give the older readers heart attacks.

This discussion goes to the crux of the reason why people like the Giz writers think we "need" audiophiles, and why they think those people have any more authority to speak on reality than anyone else.

The "lad's gadget mags" seem successful, and fun, while completely unreliable in terms of discovering the real technical performance of the items reviewed - maybe Stereophile is just a "posh" version of these magazines, and saw the niche first?

Actually, if that's true, a useful [tweak] to Stereophile's business model isn't accepting DBTs - it's draping tasteful but beautiful females across the products it photographs...

The high end press has been minting profits by churning consumer paranoa for decades.  The hidden subtext in the "Everthing sounds different" myth is that everything you currently have sounds really bad, so run right out and spend the big bucks on what we advertise.

The consumer has limited resources for making their buying decisions.

Traditionally government has taken the resposibility for safety issues, and private organizations in many cases examine quality issues.

Quote from: pdq on 2009-05-01 14:19:19

The consumer has limited resources for making their buying decisions.

  ... completely not true at all, in fact, consumers have never had more resources! Indeed, what would you call this website?

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on 2009-05-01 13:17:50

The high end press has been minting profits by churning consumer paranoa for decades.  The hidden subtext in the "Everthing sounds different" myth is that everything you currently have sounds really bad, so run right out and spend the big bucks on what we advertise.

So what? I've always thought that in a free market, the onus was on the consumer to make informed choices, or not.

Don't people have a right to sell or purchase the products they want to?

Without resorting to any audio issues whatsoever, since there's going to be a segment of the population that will spend money on expensive audio gear, won't there always be companies supplying that demand?

Making it sound like people are being forced to buy this stuff, is factual incorrect.

Furthermore, clearly if people are happy with their gear, what's the problem with that?

As well, audio isn't the only endeavor that relies on subjective opinions in order to promote products.

Isn't it unreasonable to expect only audio companies, and their promoters, to be completely "objective" and without bias?

Or to put it more bluntly, if it was medicine rather than audio, the practice would be illegal (in most parts of the developed world!).

Or to put it more bluntly, if it was medicine rather than audio, the practice would be illegal (in most parts of the developed world!).