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Topic: Neil Young's new iPod killer! (Read 84180 times) previous topic - next topic
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Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #151
Is Are this these enough?

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Trust me you will hear the difference, I'm a music producer and I can hear a difference between 24 bit and 32 bit float so a jump from 16 bit to 24 bit should make the difference, 192khz May not be bearable but engineers will often use this to hear more and then bounce it down to 16 bit 44.1 khz ...Why would it be there as an option to producers and audio engineers if it did not make a difference ??? Go learn something

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Еven the best reproducing audio device is very very far from what we hear naturally.
Oh god! "I'm a music producer": fallacy appealing to authority.

I think I'm gonna puke.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
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Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #152
I am amazed that all these artists and "engineers" never stop to wonder how soundtrack and classical music engineers manage to make proper use of 16bit/44.1kHz audio CDs. I'm perplexed that they fail to notice the difference. I mean, upon hearing such a CD, the first question  should be "what am I doing wrong?", no? Especially if you call yourself an "engineer".


Or, they actually do.

As I very much doubt most of them don't enjoy the odd classical album: it's just good olde hypocrisy at its best, for the sake of keeping up with the loudness war, that's all.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
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Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #153
Not all the publicity is quite so informative.

Pono naysayers miss the point: It’s not about HD Audio, it’s about what’s inside 

They appear to be changing the marketing focus. It's not the hi-rez that makes it magic anymore. It's the quality of the player itself.

Such an original take, someone should invent a new category of logical fallacy for it. Wait, no.


Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #155
Pono naysayers miss the point: It’s not about HD Audio, it’s about what’s inside 

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Some of the gear I have is so good, it makes everything sound awesome
Everything is awesome?!

Seriously, really good audio gear makes different recordings sound different, and some of them really aren't awesome!

Cheers,
David.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #156
Neil Young's Pono: 192kHz 24-bit music player produces sound quality that is wasted on human hearing. So why pay the extra for it?
That is a stunningly technically accurate article to appear in such a mainstream newspaper. I wonder if it was in the print version?

Cheers,
David.

Read some of the comments on that article. Something that was brought up that I've seen before in these types of discussions is that CDs were a compromise because of storage capacity. Actually, CDs were about double the capacity of vinyl and there was a struggle to figure out what to do with that extra capacity. Filling up a CD vs a vinyl record was a shift that never got made completely in released albums. Kind of a moot point these days when many producers or consumers don't care about the "whole album experience".

Some artists may have released more material at a slower rate, but mostly we just get filler material or remixes so they can get the product out and sold.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #157
Read some of the comments on that article.
No, don't make me do that.

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Something that was brought up that I've seen before in these types of discussions is that CDs were a compromise because of storage capacity. Actually, CDs were about double the capacity of vinyl and there was a struggle to figure out what to do with that extra capacity. Filling up a CD vs a vinyl record was a shift that never got made completely in released albums. Kind of a moot point these days when many producers or consumers don't care about the "whole album experience".

Some artists may have released more material at a slower rate, but mostly we just get filler material or remixes so they can get the product out and sold.
Do any artist albums fill 74 minutes?

Ok, I know some must, but the full (74-80) minute CDs I have are almost all compilations. Artist albums are almost always 30-60 minutes.

A ~50kHz sample rate was chosen because it was sensible, 44.1kHz to write easily to video tape, 16-bits because it was sensible, 8 wasn't enough and even then people wanted mod(8).

It's true that a no-compromise future-looking format (in 1983) would have been 48kHz 20-bits, but 44.1kHz 16-bits is hardly a serious compromise over that.

If you're looking for faults in the CD format: pre-emphasis, the joke of a surround sound mode, index marks and the lack of on-disc metadata were the real "mistakes" in hindsight, but not that bad. With more hindsight you'd add perfect ripping and/or full track error detection and/or a filesystem - but not in 1983. All these things got worked out one way or another.

At what point did people really start suggesting that the audio quality of the format wasn't good enough?

Cheers,
David.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #158
At what point did people really start suggesting that the audio quality of the format wasn't good enough?

I'd bet a tenner not even the same audiophools who would later on flog CD as the new antichrist, did then.

Talk about following tendencies.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
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Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #159
I think some in the recording industry now see the CD as a mistake, because it is already at the limits as far as audio quality goes, and it can be copied perfectly. They lost control at that point.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #160
Perhaps if Sony hadn't insisted on 16-bit (instead of Philips' 14-bit) for CD, SACD could have been a success.
OTOH, CD might not have been successful at 14-bit.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #161
Apparently Young has been doing the rounds defending himself/Pono

http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/07/neil-yo...pono-interview/

There's a terribly written article, not just because its complete uncritical assertions (it's cute how they try to appear skeptical: "Sure, six to 30 times the resolution of MP3s looks great on paper, but will we really be able to hear the difference?"), but also it's not clear what the source is. Googling the quotes, it only leads to that blog post, and they don't say Engadget themselves interviewed him.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #162
"the best reproducing audio device is very very far from what we hear naturally."



That one is kind of correct actually.  Our best audio systems still aren't recreating the original sound in 3D space.  It has nothing to do with CD vs high rez  though.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #163
There's a terribly written article, not just because its complete uncritical assertions (it's cute how they try to appear skeptical: "Sure, six to 30 times the resolution of MP3s looks great on paper, but will we really be able to hear the difference?"), but also it's not clear what the source is.


I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought this.  Not to derail the topic but I think engadget has gone downhill ever since Josh (and others) left to form The Verge.  The comments in the engadget article, like all others, are pretty humorous.  There is one person saying they prefer WAV over FLAC because WAV sounds better.  Someone explained, multiple times, how lossless works and what you can do to check lossless rips but that person still stuck their head in the sand.  Others even came to their defense.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #164
I am going to enter a comment as an HA regular that goes something like this...Why are we debating whether or not high resolution audio provides audible benefits. Aside from the fact that I don't get a physical hard backup, I am not against record companies selling "straight from the studio" audio. Is there any reason to be AGAINST this? Monty's explanation is fine enough as to why 192 could be detrimental to audio, but what if said audio was 192 to begin with? Is it wrong to actually know that you are getting audio straight from the source, unfettered? What I have a major issue with, is hdtracks, selling audio that skips the downsampling part, but charges more?! Can somebody entrenched in the music industry explain to me how skipping downsampling to our mediocre cd audio quality somehow costs you MORE, hence the prices?


Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #166
I would truly love for the 'transients above 20khz' people to eff off and die. It's such a tired old argument. The impediments to hearing anything at 20khz or beyond go beyond the source of the recording. Besides the obvious, "your headphones can't do it" and "your speakers can't do it". No matter what these nutjubs tell you, you don't have the cilia to detect it. Period. No matter how expensive that DAC from Zanden audio is, you have  a scientific, physical barrier that cannot be broken. Please go away.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #167
What I have a major issue with, is hdtracks, selling audio that skips the downsampling part, but charges more?! Can somebody entrenched in the music industry explain to me how skipping downsampling to our mediocre cd audio quality somehow costs you MORE, hence the prices?

Well that's the thing, ain't it? It's hard to not think by now that all these "HD" formats are just cynical ploys to bilk more money out of audiophiles.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #168
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought this.  Not to derail the topic but I think engadget has gone downhill ever since Josh (and others) left to form The Verge.  The comments in the engadget article, like all others, are pretty humorous.  There is one person saying they prefer WAV over FLAC because WAV sounds better.  Someone explained, multiple times, how lossless works and what you can do to check lossless rips but that person still stuck their head in the sand.  Others even came to their defense.

Color me surprised, Gizmodo apparently has been pretty critical of Pono and HD audio in general, since the beginning. http://gizmodo.com/what-is-high-resolution...3/+marioaguilar

I think we all remember their article where the reporter went to Fremer's house or something about "why we need audiophiles"?

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #169
Is there any reason to be AGAINST this?


It propagates gross misinformation and consolidates audio myths among the masses. It's a huge waste of bandwidth and storage, and possibly CPU power for downsampling the end product to something sane.
Edit: and, it could make artists, producers and everyone else believe that all they need to do in order to improve sound quality, is to record and release at 24 bit, 192 kHz. So we might end up with brickwalled recordings yet again.

BTW, could we maybe change the title of this thread to something that we'd prefer to see showing up in Google results?

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #170
Monty's explanation is fine enough as to why 192 could be detrimental to audio
IIRC that part of the explanation is incorrect, wrt the audible range - and also incorrect wrt actual A>D and D>A implementations which run at neither 44.1kHz nor 192kHz natively. Using 192kHz doesn't make the audible range worse.

Cheers,
David.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #171
I would truly love for the 'transients above 20khz' people to eff off and die. It's such a tired old argument. The impediments to hearing anything at 20khz or beyond go beyond the source of the recording. Besides the obvious, "your headphones can't do it" and "your speakers can't do it". No matter what these nutjubs tell you, you don't have the cilia to detect it. Period. No matter how expensive that DAC from Zanden audio is, you have  a scientific, physical barrier that cannot be broken. Please go away.


Apparently my speakers can reproduce up to 50kHz. Why? I have no idea, and it's not like they're marketed towards audiophiles. They're studio monitors, black ugly boxes with LEDs on the front, active crossovers, tone controls that can't be bypassed and class-D amplification, everything an audiophile doesn't want.

I mean yeah, the treble is wonderful in the audible range (up to ~17kHz in my case), so what does it even matter that the speakers' response range is so ridiculously extended?

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #172
What I have a major issue with, is hdtracks, selling audio that skips the downsampling part, but charges more?! Can somebody entrenched in the music industry explain to me how skipping downsampling to our mediocre cd audio quality somehow costs you MORE, hence the prices?


That's exactly what Pono Music is going to do as well.  The price range for albums from their storage has already been released, I believe albums will be $14.99-$24.99 on average.  As previously stated, you are essentially paying more to have them do less.  That's if the FLAC files that Pono Music sells are actually from the studio masters.  Some believe that HDtracks sells 16-bit, 48KHz content that has been sourced from the audio CDs (16-bit, 44.1KHz) yet "upscaled" during the ripping and encoding process.  Frampton Comes Alive (Peter Frampton) is an example of an album that was upscaled on HDtracks.  They originally sold it as a 24-bit, 96KHz download but a lowpass filter had been applied at 22KHz.  It was later relabeled to 24-bit, 48KHz.  There have been other cases of 24-bit, 96KHz downloads from HDtracks having a lowpass filter at 22KHz.  Maybe that's why they charge more?  The process of taking the CD and ripping it to 24-bit, 96KHz FLAC files adds extra steps to the process.  Until it starts, whose to say that Pono Music won't do the same thing?

I don't inherently see anything wrong with obtaining digital downloads (I could really care less about having a physical copy these days) direct from the studio masters.  However, as pointed out by skamp, these services give into the audio myths that audiophools have been spitting out for decades.  Instead of offering reasonable 16-bit, 44.1KHz/48KHz lossless files from the studios, services like Pono are giving into audiophool mindsets and blowing things out of proportion.  They are taking bloated lossless files, selling them at an equally bloated price, all while pushing out typical placebophile jargon.

Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #173
Unless I'm grossly mistaken, this thread is about most of their claims being totally shattered to pieces under any ABX test worth its salt, not whether we should embrace high resolution audio or not.
 
As said claims cannot survive that crucial step (which, if I'm not wrongly assuming again, is one of the very pillars of this community's foundations), we carry on with our every-day rant, as whatever their claims are, they're just another truckload of audiophile BS begging to be unmasked. And we, as usual, are more than happy to oblige.
Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
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Neil Young's new iPod killer!

Reply #174
Monty's explanation is fine enough as to why 192 could be detrimental to audio
IIRC that part of the explanation is incorrect, wrt the audible range - and also incorrect wrt actual A>D and D>A implementations which run at neither 44.1kHz nor 192kHz natively. Using 192kHz doesn't make the audible range worse.

The usual explanation is that some amplifiers might become unstable when fed with that material, lots of noise at high frequencies. Non-linearities with not very well build amplifiers could fold back into the audible range. Still, 192kHz PCM is much better than DSD in that respect, so that's probably not a sound argument either.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.