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Why High-Fidelity Streaming is the Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For (forbes.com)
From a report: While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets. Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved "universal jukebox" is undergoing a significant upgrade.
Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices. Bang & Olufsen's most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Marti believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. "It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it."
Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices. Bang & Olufsen's most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Marti believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. "It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it."
Many studies have been done where people actually select the lossy compression as the better sounding choice.
Funny, back when I had a MiniDisc people swore they could tell ATRAC was inferior to MP3...
Except for dynamics (which the compressed formats solve), CD audio is way beyond the quality most people can hear. For some reason, a lot of people fall for the scam and pa a lot of money for things that do not at all improve audio quality, like this one here, audio cables for hundreds of dollars, or even very expensive audio-Ethernet cables (which is so far beyond stupid it is staggering). I am sure this scam will also be able to separate victims and their cash.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's about time vinyl quality music is available to listeners.
The same people clamoring for FLAC because of audio quality are also the same people snapping up vinyl and cassettes, and probably have already wrecked their hearing past the point of being able to tell the difference. High-end Audio is a bunch of snake oil.
You can have your hi-fi source, but ultimately it gets mangled by your bluetooth headphones.
Apple Homepod owners will have the last laugh as suddenly the latent sound field imaging and expanded dynamic range of these actually can be delivered. Suck it Alexa echo and google home-spy users.
Has anyone compared wired to wireless quality? Are there any blind A/B tests comparing the built-in DAC of the iPhone using wired headphones vs wireless? And also the built-in DAC with an external DAC?
i.e.
I'm wondering how much better quality a dedicated DAC and/or DAC+AMP is such as the Schiit Modi 3 (DAC) + Schiit Magni 3 (AMP) ?
Back on Topic: There is a reason us audiophiles ripped everything to FLAC in the first place. So we would never have to re-encode it. The problem is Apple pushed their own proprietary lossless format, ALAC instead of embracing open standards such as FLAC.
Good to see streaming services finally embracing FLAC.
Also, could one of the editors at least PLEASE fix (*) this clickbait: The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.
It should read: The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets, with decreasing returns.
i.e.
I doubt most people could tell the difference between variable 320 kbps (kilobits/s) and CD quality even with quality headphones for most music -- unless it is Classical or Jazz.
(*) Yeah, yeah, I know the editors have been a joke around here for ~20 years.
"for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone"
Thats pretty impressive. Pretty soon everyone will be using Deezer HiFi.
This is a sack of baldfaced lies and really cheeses me off. I'm going to grab my coat hanger and hook up my audio system. That'll calm me down.
that is why I subsribe to Stereophile Magazine. It lets me enjoy all the things I've been missing my entire life. It's good to be deaf when you have Stereophile Magazine at your bedside. Trust me. I know about what I talk. I learned it from Stereophile Magazine.
Came here to post a sarcastic thing about pseudoscience, but my fellow geeks have it covered. Thanks, guys.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I always used FLAC and wired headphones, so I guess I'm not in for a treat.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is a sack of baldfaced lies and really cheeses me off. I'm going to grab my coat hanger and hook up my audio system. That'll calm me down.
Are you referencing using your coat hanger as speaker wire? Because it'll do just fine, for short distances of
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
You obviously only say that because you've been drinking Deezer's cool-aid. Erm, I mean, lemonade.
Marketing grifters taking audiophiles for the suckers they are. No one cares about this.
Between AutoTune, and so little dynamic range in modern music, much modern music is going to sound the same no matter your bitrate.
If those fine details weren't recorded in the studio/in the master mix, changing the bitrates won't fix something which was recorded like crap to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not the old guy saying "all modern music sucks", but I am saying a lot of it sucks because of how it was recorded (often starting with no-talent acts put together by focus group).
FLAC isn't so much about quality as having a suitable format for archiving. If you have an audio cd which you intend to archive, then naturally you want a bit-for-bit identical copy of the cd. FLAC is the answer. From your master copy in FLAC you can then make any number of lossy copies in any format you want, whenever you want. I've been doing this for at least 15 years now, buying used cds from an online store like secondspin for an average of $4-5 per album, promptly archving them to FLAC format, and putting them away in storage.
Now, if you are talking about streaming FLAC, then I agree it's kind of ridiculous. 160 or 192 kb/s MP3 will be virtually indistinguishable from FLAC, and at least an order of magnitude less bandwidth.
Sorry, but as long as you produce the same bland, nondescript songs it won't matter. You can't polish a turd.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am not an audiophile because I don't always buy the best equipment, but I don't like to introduce unnecessary bottlenecks to the quality either. Bluetooth music just doesn't sound as interesting to my ear. It's lacking character in the bass or something.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yes, loudness wars / mastering is most of the issue. Music has been mastered to listen to on FM in the car. The only thing that makes MQA good is re-mastering.
sample rates > 48k = B.S.
MQA codec = B.S.
Sorry but streaming audio is a fad that will eventually die out. This will happen because people will get tired of the poor programming and paying for commercials. The "channels" on streaming services are badly programmed by people who have no idea what songs belong to what genre! It is highly irritating to hear country or jazz or blues on a rock channel for example, and it happens all of the time!
I would much rather spend my money to buy the tracks that I want. I can play them as often as I want, even when I don't have an internet connection handy!
sure, because most of it is done with pop music that's been compressed to hell and back, to the point of obvious clipping.
The biggest part of the problem. Is that most people have crappy speakers... Including me.
I watch TV with the speakers that are on my TV, Which I expect are in the back because I have no idea where they are at. When I listen to music, I may have the default Apple Earbuds, or a set of headphones. I have a good pair which does make a noticeable improvement. However still I am listening to an audio signal with a speaker that vibrates air in less then 1mm distance. Compare that to a good set of speakers which can vibrate air in about 1 inch of distance. This just gives it that much more range in detail to play audio.
Now if you have a good set of speakers, you may be able to get the difference between no compression vs lossy compression. Mainly because you will be able to feel the notes that you cannot hear. Sound and music if often beyond just what you can hear, they are low and high frequencies. That we cannot hear but feel. Sub Sonic sounds, just resonate in your chest, while ultrasonic sound just causes a little more tension in your ear.
All that said, if you are listening to newer music. Made in the past 20 years or so. The music has been composed to be heard on such a compressed channel. So going to uncompressed there is no difference even with superior sound speakers.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes. That's the joke.
Most people can't tell the difference in A/B test
Many studies have been done where people actually select the lossy compression as the better sounding choice.
These two statements are somewhat contradictory: can they tell the difference (by choosing the lossy compression) or can't they?
I've found if you tell people what to listen for, they quickly learn to hear it. Listen to the cymbals, in heavily compressed music they just kind of are muddy, they don't have that nice crisp crack.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They've provided samples to audiophiles in labs. The audiophiles could not determine which samples were lossless vs compressed.
Obviously lossless has benefits. Like if you are using the raw audio to post process it to other forms, it's probably best to utilize raw data. And for archiving, obviously raw data is better.
Now, if the audiophile can not hear the difference,the average person will not get anything from lossless compression.
God, the average person thinks Bose and Beats are good. (Their fine but way overpriced).
Most people would be best served by getting some legitimate headphones for $80-$120. And the next step is then an external amp that would run $100-$300. This is for entry level type stuff.
And even with this good entry level gear, you will probably NEVER hear the difference if you go from lossy to lossless.
There so much more to good sound. Say "soundstage" to the average person and they'll be dumbfounded. It's a thing and very important if you are looking for nuances.
While that may be true, in my experience most people don't care about the loss in the lossy compression, because they don't listen on anything that can portray the difference anyways. This more and more people are buying high-end HiFi equipment, while may be true, is not due to their interest in high fidelity music. After all, "Kanye's" music is crap to begin with. It may have to do with population growth, the price of electronics having come down, etc.
Not sure what they mean by HiFi equipment anyways. The most important pieces of an audio setup are the source material and the speakers. Everything in between does a descent job of handling the signal in most cases. But you can't buy a Sony A/V receiver and call it HiFi. I don't see ANY of my friends spending anywhere near what I paid for my audio setup, which is actually very modest and all second/third hand to begin with. Like I said, the most important parts for me were the speakers, and my NHT 3.3s cost $1200/$2000 I spent on my setup (excluding the source materials). You can get a very descent DAC to piggy back on top of a Raspberry PI for a complete setup of
My friends, however, don't do any critical listening to begin with. As such, a bluetooth speaker at home does just fine for them. If they want to sit and listen to something, they'll most likely do it on their 5.1 A/V receiver that has little satellites and a subwoofer. At that point, playing a lossless FLAC vs. playing a 192Kbs MP3 doesn't make a difference to them.
At the end of it all, though, is whether you get enjoyment out of whatever you have in front of you, whether it'd be your car, your spouse, your job, or your stereo. If your car drives fine for you, then that's all that matters. If the music coming out of your stereo sounds good to you, that's all that's needed. After all, some other person will look at my audio setup and laugh, because they believe they have higher quality audio coming out of their speakers than I do, and that's fine, because that's what makes them happy, and my setup is what makes me happy.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
That's true when listening to the speaker run FLAT, especially cheaper speakers. Same goes with cheaper headphones run flat. Some of the cheapest ones ($10 to $20 average price range) absolutely need something like a 5 band equalizer adjustment (available in Android, I have no information about iOS) to allow the speaker or phones to sound better than its flat default sound. Otherwise, a singificantly high end/high priced speaker that plays well enough flat is necessary, or one passes up on Bluetooth audio.
That's a references to this Gizmodo article: https://gizmodo.com/audiophile... Yeah, for short cable lengths, any sufficiently large diameter wire works fine.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Can you say "Monster Cable"?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I have a pretty high end sound system - old NAD amplifier, Paradigm stereo speakers with sub-woffer, ADCOM CD player, Pro-Ject Turntable. Not state of the art, but several grand worth of components. I love having friends over and play them exactly the same song on LP, CD, mp3, and streaming (i.e. compressed) mp3. Watching their jaws drop is extremely satisfying.
Now, admittedly, modern music is specificly mixed for overbassed earbuds. Go get yourself an LP of Yello's One Second (1987), early electronica. (Yeah, you've heard it. OOOOOOHHH, YYEEAAHH) Put on the first track, La Habenera. Wait for the digital horns to reach out of the speakers, grab you by the throat and smack your face around like a soccer ball. Now try the CD of the same song. Nothing. mp3 - even worse. And then, try the same thing with the fourth movement of Beethoven's fifth, or some early Miles Davis, or some serious modern electronica like Solar Fields or Mauxuam. Yeah, thats what you're missing, kids.
I've been buying CDs for years, and I've also purchased a bunch of vinyl and high-res FLACs in the past decade. What I find is that the production and mixing of the recording itself matters more than the medium and/or resolution. YMMV.
Cheap consumer crap.
Search for 'Black Mamba' _power_cord_ to see true audiophile stupidity in all its glory.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
if you're listening over Bluetooth, or using one of those $15 iPhone dongles as a DAC.
Like, c'mon, really? You'd think many/most slashdot readers would've encountered it before. The quick refresher is that your sample rate needs to be twice the highest frequency sampled, and no more. Kind of a fundamental theorem that probably most every engineer and computer scientist encounters. The human hearing range maxes out at 20kHz. CD quality is a little over twice that at 44.1kHz. Anything above that is a complete waste of time and bandwidth. I welcome CD quality streaming, but if you're gonna pay more for 192kHz streaming, be sure to invest in some cochlear implants that can hear up to 96kHz, otherwise you're wasting your money.
If you know or can guess the input parameters, uncompression is a trivial task that any audio player should have built in.
Of course, since compression means losing a bit of the bit depth, you won't get that back but a 50%(!!) dynamics loss would still only lose you one of those 16 bits.
Still, of course as a musician, I boycot the loudness wars. Which is easy, since nowadays, every real musician (as opposed to business prostitute) boycots things like radio stations and "selling" records anyway. (They were always a negligible part of the total income, and it's better to spread your music as far as you can and call it marketing [for your concerts and merchandising, etc])
But you can't buy a Sony A/V receiver and call it HiFi.
That depends. Are you trying to say it's hot shit now, or that it would have been hot shit back when the term was coined? Because any half-assed Sony receiver from today would be at least decent back then so long as it didn't fail. You don't have to use the DSP crap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just find it odd that all of a sudden people demand better quality? People don't even buy good headphones or speakers anymore. Its Bluetooth and crappy ear buds that make up most people's ideal of good sound equipment. Lossless streaming is a good thing, but worthless if your not willing to invest in quality reproduction hardware to actually hear the difference. I for one am a audiophile who would appreciate such a service but I am skeptical that this has become a thing.
I'm talking about buying a receiver that says it is 100 wpc (7 or 9 of them), but weighs only 25 pounds. The transformer for a class AB receiver of that size alone would be 40 pounds. Operating a receiver in class D (even if it's part-time) so that you can undersize the shit out of everything automatically disqualifies it as being a HiFi receiver.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
A good streaming service I just found is radioparadise.com.
They have four streams, their main mix (eclectic), a rock mix, a mellow mix, and a groovy mix.
The eclectic and rock mix are pretty good, NO commercials, and unlike Pandora, you can skip as many songs as you don't like with no penalty.
They offer 5 levels of audio quality, the top two are 320kbs (way good enough for most) and an uncompressed (Flac).
I thought the new thing was fizzy tube amps and scratchy records. No?
Hi def audo!
But records produce "warmer" sound!
It's all snake oil designed to make you spend money on crap you simply don't need and can't actually differentiate from a reasonably high bit-rate current MP3/FLAC/WMV while using ridiculously expensive "audiophile" equipment, let alone most standard computer speakers or or headsets.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Whats the point of having the best equipment if the music is created on a computer in the first place or put through a program to make it sound better because the singer can't sing or guitarist can't play?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Did Deezer HiFi pay for this advertisement, or did Bang and Olufsen? Deezer probably needs the exposure more but Bang and Olufsen has the budget to easily pay for this, so it's kind of a toss-up in my mind.
Yeah, that's why vinyl is "warmer".
It means "audiophiles" actually *like* low-quality audio. As long as they paid enough for it.
Well people (at least most people) prefer what thay are used to, and for tbe most part that is(sadly) lossy compression, so thet the lossu get puced ib the studies is not surprising, when most people get presented with things that soubnd different to what thay are used to the first reaction eil ve that is sounds wrong.
Quit pretending that quoting a company rep whose whole company purpose is to sell high end audio equipment would have anything but good news and large increase in demand for audio content which helps us to sell more product.
Why is this quoted here? It's same as asking a car salesman if their cars are any good and if they are flying off the shelf.
Semi-click bait material.
Former audiophile here.
If you went back to the 80's and 90's high quality audio equipment really made a difference. A Nakamichi cassette deck killed the competition, assuming your ears wanted more than loud, which about 80% of the population just wanted loud.
Today MP3 sounds quite good at 160kbs or above, assuming the original recording was done well.
My point in this case is a high bit rate MP3 (320kbs) country album I purchased just 6 months ago, please no snide remarks about country, and the recording quality was horrible. The voices were over-driven and distorted.
The outside of the recording studio fad is killing quality. Do I think FLAC is better than MP3, maybe when transcoding to another medium such a as CD, another MP3 (lower bit rate), or an ogg format.
I happen to be a fan of HDTracks where they remaster albums and yes the quality is much improved to the discerning ear.
Okay - launch into your tirades!
Perfect digital audio has been available since the ubiquitous availability of CDs. The problem is that nearly no recording studio or producer seems to be able to use that technology properly to its full extent.
Encoding the garbage most producers put out today will simply put out garbage again. As long as the input to the encoders is not hifi, it does not matter how many bits you waste on it.
I love the audio threads.
:takes giant whiff of own farts:
We have so few topics here which enable folks to so passionately and smugly tell others that they are wrong
Then you get modded +5 insightful for comparing 24-bit digital audio, the recording studio standard for about 30 years now, to some bullshit about $1000 speaker cable.
And as always, it's the same "*I* know that my 1978 pcm audio format is all I will ever need!"
Continually amazing to me that here on slashdot, supposedly a technology forum, will you find such passionate arguments that a lower data rate rather than a high data rate is the better representation of an analog signal.
.
This is so cool. Now please someone tell all this to the phone manufacturers who think bluetooth headphones are enough for us.
I listen to a lot of electronic myself. No singers, and they very much care about the quality of the sources if that is what they are using.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
...time to whip out some Monster Cables.
BT using the SBC is abysmal. (Linux, shitty hardware)
AAC is a bit better (iDevices, mostly)
aptX is even better (Windows, some Android Phones)
LDAC can do 96kHz/24bit (Oreo+ Android phones, specialized hardware)
BT really gets a bad name due to SBC.
Most BT devices only support SBC.
If you hear a difference, your hearing is impaired and you should see a doctor.
I did nearly the same thing using my personal torture test for MP3 encoders - the opening snare roll of Royal Oil by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It's a quiet roll that quickly gets louder with an electric bassline underneath. When compared to the original uncompressed version, it's very easy to tell the difference up until you hit pretty high bitrates.
Check it out on Youtube, which I believe encodes most audio at 96kbs AAC. You can hear some warbling and other compression artifacts at the start. The original is steady from the quite part right up until the snare hit.
Unless you have Monster Cables, you won't be able to hear the difference.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
ntr
Please explain. From the electrical performance perspective I can't see any reason why class D shouldn't be a win. It is used in a lot of scientific instrumentation.
Don't blame it all on SBC, which is bad, to be sure. Most BT devices are lucky to have 40mm speakers in them.
This is also the MQA company trying to insert itself everywhere as a monopoly to reintroduce DRM into your music and extract licensing tolls. It's not a superior format sonically.
MacOS supports aptX, although I had to hack around with Xcodeâ(TM)s BT tools to stop it using the lesser codecs. It apparently supports AAC over BT, but I havenâ(TM)t been able to get that to work despite having a speaker that claims to support it.
Sounds like a challenge. I see your "short" and raise you this.
Itâ(TM)s not about feeling it, you can hear it. Itâ(TM)s the audio equivalent of jpeg compression where you see compression artefacts and loss of clarity. And just like with jpeg, higher bitrates produce better fidelity. MP3 generally sounds like utter shit on most speakers. AAC these days can sound reasonable, except on a good system where itâ(TM)s noticeably poorer compare to CD quality.
I can't attest to use of amplifiers in scientific instrumentation, but performance is not everything, specially when it comes to audio applications. Yes, it's great that most class D amps reach 90% or higher efficiency, but that comes at a price.
Class D amps achieve their efficiency by turning the transistors completely off when not in use, as opposed to class AB which one of the transistor sets are on at all times or class A where the output transistors are on all the time. The switching off of the transistors is controlled via Pulse Width Modulation. This is the same concept used in most power supplies today, from PCs to phone chargers to LED bulb replacements for incandescent bulbs. This control can be via a digital circuit or an analog circuit. The digitally controlled circuit introduces too much error and distortion to be usable in audio applications. The analog controlled class D amps have historically been pretty hard to design correctly. They have complicated circuits and have mostly been non-linear in their reproduction of 20-20K Hz spectrum, something audiophiles strive really hard to achieve. I realize there have been new advents in overcoming these issues, but these usually come at a high price. A well-designed class D amp costs many times that of a well-designed class AB amp. Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles. By comparison, I can pick up a used Aragon 4004 MKII for $500-$600 on ebay and be done with my amplifier needs, although my own amp is an ATI 1502 which can be had for even cheaper. These class AB amps provide completely linear audio amplification of their input signal at a fraction of the price of a comparable (in terms of quality) class D amp.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Yep, it's real: a $600 power cable! Also hilarious, but available everywhere: HDMI cables with gold-plated connectors! For the uninitiated, HDMI is a _digital_ signal; it's either off or on, so there is zero degradation of signal to to impedance (down to the point where the signal is so bad it can't tell a 0 from a 1).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
its waxing lyrical with lemons. You know those bright yellow juicy lemons as i squeeze them slowly just above your tongue. Its surprising but it can be as real as the actual thing. Now I wax lyrical about your audio which now has more leptons per sample and added planar q-bit quantum resync tech and guess what it sounds better! Of course bullshit artists like whoever wrote this article are well aware of that.
Remember when the Pono was going to be the savior of HiFi? Not a streaming solution of course, but going after the same general market. I wonder if Deezer HiFi will have any better success.
https://gizmodo.com/dont-buy-what-neil-young-is-selling-1678446860
And iOS does not support AptX... For some strange reason... The case where people are more likely to stream music - from phone - is the case where Apple explicitly blocks you from the higher quality solution.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
SPL is Sound Pressure Level. That little 30-50mm transducer (or even a 6-10mm unit, if an in-ear product) has to move a LOT less than your home audio speaker to pressurize the chamber in the earcup or your ear canal. Calculate the amount of displacement of your home audio speaker relative to your listening room; now calculate the amount of displacement of that headphone transducer relative to the tiny front volume between the transducer and your ear. It's why headphones can easily reach 120+ dB SPL, even in the bass range - and it's nigh-impossible for anything but a massive home system to do the same.
By the way, you can hear down to single digits - it just take additional SPL. Audibility to 2-3 Hz is documented, but requires very high SPL levels.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Do you listen to rap? Yes? Then you have no idea what quality is.
If only we could do things like a switchmode power supply, where we can get a rock-solid 1+ kW of power in something that weighs a few pounds... Someone should invent that, they'd be RICH!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
For me, the easiest way to hear BT and other compression artifacts is with a recording with lots of cymbals. They'll take on a "watery" sound as the compression really screws with the harmonics.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
That's nothing compared to that $10,000 ethernet cable that Denon was trying to push.
Price has come _way_ down. Must be something 'better' now.
I mean besides a dedicated 200A audio electric service, hard fat wiring and a big old 120 to 120 transformer (to smooth out the sine wave with hysteresis)...Unless you do that, your sound will never be truly warm. Might as well leave a light dimmer in the house, if you just don't care about sound...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
LDAC can do 96kHz/24bit (Oreo+ Android phones, specialized hardware)
Only compressed. So can AptX HD.
None of them can do 44kHz 16bit uncompressed :(
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles.
You'll probably find a much better price/performance ratio if you look at amps targeted towards studios and hi-fi PA applications.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
CDs, 16 bit/44.1khz. 96db of headroom, 22khz of bandwidth, no wow and flutter, no distortion, completely flat frequency response. Sure you can go up to higher bit rate and frequency if you need to record a gnat having sex on the top of a hydrogen atom. People either do not know, or forget, that more bits does not mean more quality. Nor does "more frequency." Why? Almost no music on earth has a larger dynamic range than 96db, and most producers are compressing and limiting their "music" to death anyway. As far as frequency, hardly any, if any, people on earth can hear past 20khz. I know people say, "oh, well ultrasonic sounds can really make a difference. That's dubious and inconclusive. Well, maybe if an atom bomb goes off near your recording studio and puts a huge amount of ultrasonic sound out... it might creep into the audible range. Even then, you'll be fried.
And you've backed this up with ABX testing? Because otherwise you're introducing a bias in the results.
What a load of horseshit. 44.1kHz, 16-bit sampling more than covers the frequency and dynamic range of human hearing.
The only advantage offered by higher sampling rates is for the manufacturers of playback hardware - it allows them to get away with cheaper anti-aliasing filters.
Pick up a CD player from the early 1980s that's in good condition and use it to listen to a CD from that era and you'll be amazed at the fidelity and dynamic range the format is capable of.
Your iPhone and the lossy compressed audio formats it can play have superior capability to that old kit, but you'd be hard-pressed to know it on account of the way that published music is mastered these days. I can't listen to a modern album without becoming fatigued within ten minutes from the "wall of sound". The same applies for going to the movies.
If you've played a video game anytime in the last 12 years, chances are the audio was generated by the market-leading audio middleware that I used to work on.
No you can't hear the difference, as its all bs!
Even digital signals are subject to SNR degradation - a crappy cable will increase the Bit Error Rate, eventually overwhelming the error correction capabilities of the protocol and introducing errors in the data.
Remember that, once you put a digital signal on a wire, it's now an analog signal (google "telecommunication eye pattern").
And the worms ate into his brain.
Flag and EAC are essential for analysis. Sonic Visualizer has pretty much a pitch perfect log FFT (silvet iirc) with phase adjustment, and it can give different results with mp3 vs flac/wav.
If you're not doing wav you're doing flac, or you're doing it wrong.
It's not much difference. Just enough to me.
Me too. Anyone who says that electronic music isn't real music is a fucking idiot with extremely limited taste. I'd love for anyone to listen to Infected Mushroom, BT, Thievery Corporation, Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk or similar quality musicians say with a straight face that they don't care about quality.
Also, one could say that music created with electric guitars, keyboards or microphones isn't real music either. If it's not an orchestra, opera or minstrels, then it's not real music...
CDs, 16 bit/44.1khz. 96db of headroom, 22khz of bandwidth, no wow and flutter, no distortion, completely flat frequency response. Sure you can go up to higher bit rate and frequency if you need to record a gnat having sex on the top of a hydrogen atom.
CDs are in no way "flat" or distortion free -- the bass and instruments suck on a hifi speaker/headphones.
Listen to these vinyl youtube videos on proper hifi speakers -- it will blow away any CD version of the songs on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/user/M...
CDs are distorted, muted unpleasant sounding messes -- I bet the audio engineers recording the master CD screw up the input sounds royally. What most people listen to is garbage mastered CDs.
Three reasons come to mind: Oneâ" AptX is lousy first generation audio codec which fools suckers in the cult of "the bitrate is higher". AptX requires a much higher bitrate than SBC to even sound remotely acceptable.
Reason number two is that AptX is being aggressively pushed by QualComm. We all know how much Apple is getting along with them.
Finally, AAC lets the audio go unmodified (no transcoding) directly from the iDevice to the decider on the Bluetooth device. Anybody who cares to look at the testing done knows that AAC is perceptually transparent at 128 kbit/s - but to satisfy the âoebitrate cultâ Apple uses 256 kbit - far past the level humans can actually tell the difference.
Golden ears don't exist, just like we don't find people who can see X-ray or Infrared light.
Of course s/he hasnâ(TM)t. ABX is for us that don't see x-rays, and are subject to physics.
Ears aren't magic. Ever notice we don't hear about people who claim to see more colors than everybody else? People who actually have tetrachromatic eyes aren't critical of an RGB TV the way the audiophile cult carries on about digital audio.
I do buy gold plated 3.5mm jack cables, and in a brick and mortar store. It's got nothing to do with analog vs digital, too.
The actual reason I buy them is the price. I can't find any cheaper, they're less than 1 euro. Whatever you've had for dinner costs at least two orders of magnitude more than the amount of gold on these HDMI cables
Even digital signals are subject to SNR degradation - a crappy cable will increase the Bit Error Rate, eventually overwhelming the error correction capabilities of the protocol and introducing errors in the data.
This is HDMI we're talking about. There is no error correction whatsoever.
Audio codecs sent over HDMI generally do at least have (shitty) internal error detection.... AC3 (Dolby Digital) for example uses CRC16.. this results in transmission of nothing to speakers 99.999% of the time a random failure occurs.
When you weigh chance of garbage transmitted to speakers against the reality of listener becoming so annoyed by audio drops they replace cable long before a single instance of garbage ever makes it thru the argument as a practical matter becomes entirely specious.
Your "garbage mastered CDs" were probably from 2000 onwards.
You can't blame the CD when the problems were created at the source or in mastering.
Why wouldn't you want gold-plated connectors? You don't want oxides forming on the connectors and degrading the connection, do you? That's especially useful on a connector like HDMI where there are lots of pins and they're too small to effectively clean.
Sure, it's not a requirement, but it's nice to have, and it's not like the micrograms of gold add more than pennies to the price.
dom
BS. HDMI audio does have error correction.
For me, the easiest way to hear BT and other compression artifacts is with a recording with lots of cymbals.
Cymbals are odd because they generate two waveforms when hit, a triangle off the bell and sine of the edges. It's the combination of this that produces the cymbal sound in various timbre. When the psychoacoustic tries to drop the less "important" information it seems to me that, depending on how the cymbal was mic'd, it algorithm has to select which of these has a higher amplitude and what results is low resolution pink noise.
I suspect the cymbals create a lot of non transient sine data from 5KHz - 20KHz, considering data lossy as the context for compression, opposed to amplitude of a transient triangle wave in the initial 10-40ms of the initial hit of the cymbal being selected for preservation.
They'll take on a "watery" sound as the compression really screws with the harmonics.
I did some comparisons using a spectral analyzer (where I could zoom in on a moment) and I suspect this is because every other instrument has clearly defined transients and that what you are hearing is the bitrate that the music is being encoded in as the harmonics are thrown away. Consequently some A/B tests are very easy to identify if you've trained your ears. I'm not %100 sure, these are the conclusions I've drawn from doing music production and observations based on curiosity as a motivation.
The steaming model is a shit model for music for this and many other reasons.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have performed true ABX (hardware switching both inputs of outputs) comparison of a cheap class D (70 $ SMSL) with a reasonably good class A/B amp and nobody can tell the difference.
https://www.lesbonscomptes.com...
It's not related to the recording medium, especially if you are able to hear the difference on youtube.
But of course, as you say, it is not impossible to get better mastering on a vinyl than on a CD. Given their target market (people interested in audio quality, with significantly high-end audio equipment), it would not surprise me than most re-printed vinyls are better mastered than a lot of CDs.
No-one is saying that. You listen to music on good equipment to hear the finer bits of playing. Electronic music a great but does not need really expensive equipment to listen to it. Listening to something compiled on a computer is not going to have any nuances like a guitar solo from the likes of Dave Gilmour, Mark Knofler or a soloist in an orchestra.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Even digital signals are subject to SNR degradation - a crappy cable will increase the Bit Error Rate, eventually overwhelming the error correction capabilities of the protocol and introducing errors in the data. Remember that, once you put a digital signal on a wire, it's now an analog signal (google "telecommunication eye pattern").
Unless you have a really bad, damaged wires those 1 and 0 are going to come out the exact way they went in. With cables, always buy the second cheapest option.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
And you've backed this up with ABX testing? Because otherwise you're introducing a bias in the results.
You don't need tests to notice low bit rate cymbals sound like they're underwater.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
IME, the Apple earbuds are actually pretty good bits of engineering. They sound better driven by a good DAC than by the DAC in my phone or tablet. Even if most of the music I listen to is from Youtube...
I listen to most of my music through Youtube Music to a Bluetooth dongle, a Radsone Earstudio specifically. Say whatever else you like about Youtube's music service, but I've never had a problem with their audio compression. Instead, the biggest improvement I made was the high-quality DAC in my Earstudio. I particularly love the noise-floor I can't hear, even though I can barely hear the same from my phone's inbuilt DAC.
However, this is not intended to be a shill for the Earstudio. I'm just pointing out one of the best improvements I had switching to it. Other Bluetooth dongles aimed audiophiles are probably the same or similar.
48kHz only on aptX HD, actually.
LDAC has considerably more bandwidth to play with.
It doesn't quite sound wired (I think it may be a bit noisier than wired) but it is noticeably better sounding than aptX HD.
That all being said, I'm not all that picky. I can listen to AAC streams without gritting my teeth or anything, but you can hear the better quality encodings. It's beautiful.
I'm using a Sony WH-1000XM3. It supports SBC, AAC, aptX, and LDAC. It has a little app to tell you what the currently connected audio source is using for Codec.
Highly recommended. Listening to LDAC encoded FLAC over BT is 99% amazing.
Yeah, I also used to think that most any decent amp would deliver good audio to the speakers. Then I listened to a really good amp on really good speakers. Holy Amplifier, Batman! Where did all that detail come from? My ears aren't particularly good, but the improvement from that amp was startling.
I'm talking about buying a receiver that says it is 100 wpc (7 or 9 of them), but weighs only 25 pounds. The transformer for a class AB receiver of that size alone would be 40 pounds.
This is very common, manufacturers overselling their products. It may say "100wpc" but because of the small transformer if you try to drive all channels you won't get 100wpc. 100wpc is measured with 2 channels driven. Consumers are becoming wary of this so you'll see power output given for 'all channels driven'.
Operating a receiver in class D (even if it's part-time) so that you can undersize the shit out of everything automatically disqualifies it as being a HiFi receiver.
Why? Have you've got a citation for this? There's nothing in the definition of 'hifi' that specifies the type of amplifier technology that must be used. The latest Pioneer receivers (e.g. later SC-LX models) all use class-D amps, they have still received very positive reviews and various audio certifications, so I can't imagine there's any inherent inferiority to class-D. Also, the vast majority of PA amplifiers today are class-D too. I suspect this is just bias against class D hardware on your part.
It saddens me that this blatant bias against class-d technology still exists, and even worse that people would mod this FUD up. Your information was correct 10 or 15 years ago, things have moved on. Digital Class-D amps are lighter, cheaper, run cooler and waste less electricity than a class-AB of the same power output. Your cherry picked examples are exactly that, cherry picked to agree with your (biased) viewpoint.
Example: Lab-Gruppen FP14000 (Class-D), 2 x 7000W @ 2ohm stable, 112dBA SNR, + 0 / -3dB 2Hz - 34.2kHz, 12KG, £4000. Even if you ignore the weight, you won't find anything class-AB that can deliver this amount of power for the same price, not even close. If such an amp existed the wasted heat would be enormous, a serious problem requiring lots of cooling, probably even water-cooling if limited for space, the lab gruppen has 3 standard 80mm fans, and barely gets warm running at full output. All amps targeted at audiophiles are overpriced for what you get, like another poster said look at studio/PA amps for more honest pricing, and you'll find the majority are class-D, I wonder why that is.
The decent quality streams you currently can get are as accurate as a human can perceive.
Use good compression settings with good source material and the fidelity is beyond human scrutiny.
Audiophiles are idiots, see monster cable. (I'm an audiophile....)
"AudioQuest - Diamond 6.6' High-Speed HDMI Cable: $1495.99" at Best Buy... and those are silver plated, not even gold plated! Yeah, "pennies"...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
it. Listening to something compiled on a computer is not going to have any nuances like a guitar solo from the likes of Dave Gilmour, Mark Knofler or a soloist in an orchestra.
You are an idiot. A computer is just another instrument and can be used to produce music with as much or as few "nuances" as desired. A computer is capable of producing sounds and frequencies and tempos that you could never do with your guitar solos. In fact, a computer can be used to produce guitar solos *better* than a real guitar solo.
The electronic musicians I listed are much more talented than any musician you listen to. That's guaranteed. You'll never hear any of your shitty bands produce anything even approaching the complexity or flow or seamlessness of Infected Mushroom or BT.
Jesus, we're not trying to run a PA system, DJ, or run a rock concert here. Who needs 14,000W in a home audio setup? The example you gave completely doesn't apply to the argument you're trying to refute.
Let me elaborate.
I will not argue most of your points in your first paragraph. Class D amps ARE lighter (I said that up above already), run cooler, and waste less electricity than a class AB of the same power output. NONE of those are any concern to a person interested in a high fidelity sound system. You mentioned "3 standard 80mm fans" in the amp you gave an example of. An audiophile would cringe at the thought of having a fan in their system, let alone 3 small sized fans which would certainly be audible. I suppose the amp could be smart and turn them on only when the temperature goes up, but if you look at all the amps which were marketed to home audio before 2000, none of them had a fan and they were all class A or AB. When I'm critically listening in my setup, I turn the HVAC system in my house off because I don't want it to come on when I'm listening.
Which brings us to the price. The amp you referenced is over $5000. Granted it's that much because it is 14000 watts, but like I said, you would still pay a lot for a good class D amp, where you can pick up a really good class AB amp for a very reasonable price.
Finally, there's no mention of sound quality at all in your statements. I'm not arguing that a class D amp would not be a great amp for a DJ. I think it would, specifically for the characteristics you mentioned above. I just don't believe it stands up to the linearity of a class AB amp when it comes to amplifying its input signal without distorting it. I know a couple of posts above someone linked a tiny web page that tried to do ABX testing between two class D and AB amps. His result sums up everything I've been saying throughout my posts. "as far as I can hear, [the class D amp] sounds the same". If that's what makes him happy, then by all means he should stick with that. But a more objective test would have been to hook up the output both amps to an oscilloscope and raise the frequency, where the class AB is supposed to continue to shine when the class D is supposed to falter.
I am not saying that there aren't good class D amps out there for a home audio setup. I'm just saying that a real good (used) class AB amp is still cheaper and probably sounds better.
Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Low end gold plated cables do exist. Though, it is more likely to die of wire or connector damage (or insulation near the connector), decades before oxydation is a problem!
I decided to web search on this issue and found an interesting opinion : https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-of-a-gold-plated-HDMI-cable?share=1
(...)
When selecting a suitable connector planting material for a plug you need to consider also what is the material used on the other side. If the connector is mated with a connector made of the same metal will not result in an electrolytic reaction. If you mate connectors made of different materials, there is a risk of electrolytic reaction especially if the environment is not dry.
if the connectors on your gear are not covered with gold, the gold connectors on the cable would not be the best choice. If you mate a gold male RCA plug with a tin plated RCA female receptacle, the result can cause a resistive connection (HRC) over time, because of metal migration, electrolytic corrosion etc. The problem is real on humid environments. In a dry room it is usually quite rare to see serious problems with different metals mated to each other.
IKR? As if the playing of an instrument has ANYTHING to do with the fidelity of signal reproduction a system is capable of...
Different metals do react like that, except for noble metals such as gold.
I did not "try" abx testing, I did it, with multiple people, music lovers, some young enough to have perfect ears. Nobody can tell the difference. Also tiny web page? How is this relevant? Just fyi the speakers cost more than my (cheap) car.
The best music has rich sounds, whether it is a synthesized sound or a 200 year old violin. Listening to most any kind of music is better if you can hear it with the highest fidelity possible.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
For myself? Yep. Pretty easy to hear compression artifacts on well recorded cymbals with anything less than 320 kbps; it's tough at that level, and requires really good speakers that are well-damped with well-behaved CSDs to hear the difference - but I can usually get it 7 out of 10 times. Of course, I work in the audio industry designing speakers and headphones, so my life kind of revolves around listening for these very things...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree typical streaming sucks, but I use Tidal right now and get at least CD quality or better... There is a definite audio difference when listening to the exact same track streamed on Google Music (320 kbps) and Tidal.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree typical streaming sucks, but I use Tidal right now and get at least CD quality or better...
Thanks, I've never tried tidal. I think CD quality is about where it should be, mp3 is like a step backwards - like an advertisement for a song.
There is a definite audio difference when listening to the exact same track streamed on Google Music (320 kbps) and Tidal.
I've noticed that some browser codecs are pretty horrible as well if Google Music is browser based vs Tidal.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Fair play, I see more clearly now where you are coming from. Yes I know the Lab gruppen is an extreme example. Regarding the fans, yes they are noisy but replacing them with better quality silent PC fans is well within the capability of even the most novice of hobbyists, but I'm getting off the point.
I would argue that in the last 5 years Class-D has caught up to Class-AB in terms of sound quality, linearity, SNR and (almost caught up, expect class-D to catch up and exceed class-AB in next 5-10 years) THD figures. I will look for evidence (ideally using an oscilloscope as you say) to back this up and get back to you. If we ignore audiophile manufacturers that charge over-the-odds prices for their hardware (over the top aesthetics or just paying for the brand name, McIntosh I'm looking at you) and restrict ourselves to new products rather than used, then I would say we are just past the tipping point where Class-d is becoming better value than Class-AB. By that I mean Class-D will provide equal sound quality, equal power at a slightly lower cost, but that has only become true in the last year or two. This can be shown by the fact that many of the large volume AVR manufacturers are already switching to class-D, Pioneer already have for their SC-LX series as I said in previous comment. Onkyo/Denon/Marantz/Sony will almost certainly make the switch soon if they haven't already.
But manufacturers are doing this very quietly, they know there is a lot of bias out there against class-D technology (I'm not accusing you anymore because you explained your position, but I bet a lot of the people who modded you up only did so because your post supports their bias). For example models that are still Class-AB will have "Class-AB" plastered all over their marketing materials, models that have made the switch to Class-D are mostly keeping very quiet about it. Some manufacturers are even adding mass/ballast to their class-D consumer amps because they know there is a strong bias amongst audio enthusiasts that heavier = better, which is broadly true for speakers (because bigger magnets) and class-AB (because bigger toroidal transformer) but not Class-D.
I think comparing new vs used is unfair. Yes ofcourse a used class-AB will be cheaper than a new class-D (I would disagree that the class-AB would sound better in the general case), using used prices is not a good measure of value for anything because there are huge variations in prices depending on location, item condition, seller knowing what the item actually is and what its worth etc.
All I know is I will be going to class-D for all my future amplifier purchases, unless I come across a used class-AB with similar specs for a lower price of course, but I won't be actively looking at class-AB. I would say if you're currently looking for an AVR or general-duty amplifier its a toss-up between class-AB and class-D depending on your power requirements and whether you look at the consumer space or the professional/PA space right now but the balance is swinging more towards class-D all the time. If you are a bass-head like me and want to really feel the ULF (ultra-low-freqs, less than 30Hz) and need thousands of watts of clean power to achieve it then Class-D provides much better value than class-AB for this use-case and has for several years now.
This is absolutely absurd. You're seriously saying a lossy-compressed digital recording of vinyl is going to do better than CD in fidelity?
Ok that makes some sense, but of course the mastering has NOTHING to do with the technical specs of CD. PCM is PCM.
Man, I couldn't care less about most audio, but even I drew the line at the built-in TV speakers. They were so tinny and weak it was terrible, and if pushed loud enough to hear across the room then prone to really noticeable distortion. I only bought a $100 soundbar and that by comparison is great. (I actually tried to get by with old computer desktop speakers, and they would have been fine except the TV pushed an enormous electrostatic pop over the old audio jack when it powered on. The soundbar had digital audio and no crackling explosions, so that was better.)
I actually remember Apple's earbuds being a pretty big improvement when they first came out over older headsets, which might have been over-ear foam pads from my Walkman. Probably just being in-ear made a difference, but I think it was a bump up in quality, too. Again, that was enough to notice ... and probably the last time I really noticed. I do have a slightly nicer over-ear headset (like $35, maybe on sale) and it may be a touch better, but it also may be I'm using them at home where it's quiet instead of outside. Mostly that's for comfort.
A huge majority of my audio listening happens in the car, where the road noise is bad enough and 4 months of studded snow tires means I couldn't tell the sublime from a literal garage band most of the time.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay