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."

Comments

Quasi-religious nonsense

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[DigiShaman]

It's called the loudness war for a reason. The best raw source for music will always been CDs prior to the year 2000. Every re-release after will have been compressed (audio, not digital/mathematical).

I'm all for 24-bit audio so long as it doesn't suffer from compression, otherwise a giant waste of time and money.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[gyp casino]

From the perspective of the new article, CDs would be considered lossless. What the article means by "lossy" is MP3 compression. Those new streaming services stream FLAC files (that I assume are ripped from CDs).

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a sony CDP-101 when they first came out. The thing about CD's back then was they painstakingly tried to get everything perfect to showcase the dynamic range. I recall one classical CD I have where I can hear the conductor hit something with the baton. Telarc would find ultra quiet mic preamps. I could hear the HVAC system on some. Now it is squish everything up to 11. It is sad really as the technology of today would allow for fantastic realism with zero compression.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

CD-DA is generally considered lossless because most people can not tell the difference between it and an analog recording. There is of course dataloss from the A/D conversion but its not perceptible. This also applies to formats such as FLAC which are the same quality. MP3 on the other hand is inferior at any bitrate.

When talking about compression and how it ruins digital audio we have two different types. Digital compression of the data which makes it lossy, generates artifacts and reduces the frequency range. And dynamic compression which makes everything the same volume makes the volume sound flat. The first is inherent to lossy formats and the second is only related because it became common place at the same time. The loudness wars, producers competing against one another because some bad data had told labels that the loudest songs got the most attention. This of course ignores the fact that both Radio and Streaming services apply their own gain compensation and make everything the same volume regardless.

The first issue can be solved by using higher quality formats such as FLAC. The second can only be solved through remastering the tracks from the stems and deciding not to apply such brutal compression, or in many cases limiting.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[gweihir]

Tube amps are cool for a lot of reasons, but audio quality is not one of them.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Luthair]

Maybe relevant for you - https://people.xiph.org/~xiphm...

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[DigiShaman]

ESS Technology - ES9016

+124dB

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[bill_mcgonigle]

There are biases on remasters too. Listen to the Black Sabbath Paranoia remaster, for instance. Yeah, there's a lot of cleanup and some clarity from DRC but the high-hats are nearly impossible to hear on some tracks, even when they're providing the syncopation. Total WTF - who buys this shit?

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a sony CDP-101 when they first came out. The thing about CD's back then was they painstakingly tried to get everything perfect to showcase the dynamic range. I recall one classical CD I have where I can hear the conductor hit something with the baton. Telarc would find ultra quiet mic preamps. I could hear the HVAC system on some. Now it is squish everything up to 11. It is sad really as the technology of today would allow for fantastic realism with zero compression.

Exactly!

I have found it absolutely ridiculous that the trend toward ultra-compressed "Everything Louder than Everything Else" started AFTER we finally got a playback medium that covered 95% of the dynamic range of human hearing.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anubis IV]

You claim DTS sounds "way better" and has "more fidelity", but what's the basis for that comparison? So far as I know, no albums have been mastered using DTS Surround (or DTS-HD Master Audio and the like), so you couldn't have done any A/B testing from the same material, which leads me to believe that you declared a winner after watching some random movies and listening to some random CDs. I imagine that's exactly the sort of quasi-religious nonsense that the OP was railing against.

To be fair, DTS Surround (i.e. what I assume you're talking about, since it's the standard DTS codec, as opposed to the extensive list of other DTS technologies that support 5.1 channels) does have better fidelity than an audio CD (24-bit at 48 kHz vs. 16-bit at 44.1 kHz), but the OP was saying—and as someone with decades of experience mixing sound (though not professionally, lest anyone think I'm an expert), I'm inclined to agree—that most people can't tell the difference. Blind tests have shown repeatedly that most people can't reliably pick the better one between lossless and a 128 kbps MP3, and among those that can, only a vanishingly small number can still pick the better one consistently once you bump it up to 192 kbps for the MP3. I'd wager that the number who could pick the better between DTS Surround and CD audio would be similarly small.

That doesn't mean people have defective ears; it just means there are limits to what we can perceive. Just as the printer dpi wars became meaningless once we got beyond the human eye's ability to perceive a difference, so too did the camera megapixel wars eventually become meaningless, so too did the display ppi wars become meaningless (despite ongoing marketing), and so too have these audio fidelity wars become meaningless.

I mean, seriously, where do you think that CDs are coming up short? They're already capable of a larger dynamic range (~90 dB) than what you can get in a concert hall (~80 dB), they already capture frequencies (0 Hz to 22.05 kHz) that are both below and above what people can hear (20 Hz to 20 kHz), and they already have enough detail that the vast majority of the population is incapable of picking the better audio at better than chance would allow.

You're welcome to have preferences, of course. A lot of people love pumping up the bass (see Beats headphones). Maybe you prefer the "warmer" sound that's popular among the audiophile crowd (hence why it's become known as the "audiophile" sound). Maybe you prefer a brighter or punchier sound. But with any of those preferences, you need to be aware that you're actually reducing the fidelity by moving away from what was originally there, in much the same way that adding cream or sugar takes you away from the original flavors in your tea or coffee. For my part, I've generally leaned towards a "reference" sound (i.e. as close to the original as possible), but I'm weird that way, since most people find it unpleasant to listen to and end up suffering ear fatigue as a result.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[tlhIngan]

I'm all for 24-bit audio as long as the hardware is of sufficient quality that it can make any conceivable difference, and if it doesn't cost a lot more. Otherwise, CD quality is at least adequate, if not ideal. I'd rather have more tracks and more channels than more bits (and with the ability to assign the former to the latter dynamically.)

The dynamics of a 16 bit converter are sufficient for practically any real world situation, listening OR recording.

The average living room will have around 40dB of dynamic range - it's got a relatively high noise floor.

Even an sound chamber will rarely get you more than 80dB of dynamics.

A 16 bit converter has 96dB of dynamics - and your recording equipment, be it tape (90dB tops, -3dB per generation copy, so after a backup copy for safety, you'll be mastering from an 87dB, producing a 84dB "master" which you replicate at 81dB, for an all analog path). or other equipment (microiphone, etc) will generally have far less dynamic range.

Granted, to get full hearing range is around 120dB or so (a 20 bit converter) though the situations involving such large dynamic range in volume is rather limited practically.

And to DSD fans with their "1bit" converter, well, at 6dB, all DSD did was push the noise above 22.05kHz. (You can tell when you have a DSD recording that's improperly filtered as you get normal audio below 22.05kHz (1/2 44.1kHz, which is the equivalent sampling for DSD running at 2.something MHz) and a brick wall of crap above 22.05 on a spectral plit).

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[EMN13]

One thing that article glosses over a little too quickly (at least - I'm not convinced) is the bit depth, and specifically the fact that appropriate dither means that 16bit is enough (and by explicit implication, that more is wasteful).

So, for uncompressed audio... sure!

But almost nobody listens to uncompressed audio, and the argument was about "what kind of format should my music files be in".

Compressing dither isn't trivial. Usually dithered signals don't compress as well. Certainly in visual applications they do; I'm not sure about audio - but I'd be surprised if it were different.

And that suggests that if 16bit is transparent because of dither, then you're possibly better off using 17-20bits without dither, and (if necessary) dithering post-decompression to playback on a 16bit output.

Then again, I rarely use headphones, so I'm never going to hear the difference anyhow. A 64kpbs opus file sounds perfect to me ;-).

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Master Moose]

I'm Still playing my CDP101. Ahh Sony, you used to make good things

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Btrot69]

Yup, same stupid argument was made to promote the Pono Music Player, which is now discontinued.
https://www.ponomusic.com/

They, had their own music store, with everything remastered in digital "high resolution".

Thing is, they didn't address the LOUDNESS issue at all.
Everything is still squeezed to the top of the dynamic range.
Good for most pop music (?), bad for most everything else,

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[hackertourist]

The loudness wars started before that, it's all the fault of radio.
I worked in radio for a while in the 1990s. The national radio stations were compressed all to hell even back then, and the multiband compressors they used were just starting to become affordable for smaller stations like the one I worked for.

These were seen as desirable because of the way listeners find a radio station: they scroll through the FM band until they find a signal. The stronger the signal, the better. Quieter signals can get overlooked or skipped. Radio is also used in really crappy listening environments with lots of background noise, and stations wanted to be usable in those situations.

So stations compressed their audio, then started using compressors specially designed to use their FM radio signal to the maximum allowed (Orban Optimod).
Then music producers got in on the act, optimizing their CDs for radio playback.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[thegarbz]

I'd wager that the number who could pick the better between DTS Surround and CD audio would be similarly small.

I'd imagine given a perfect comparison the answer would be zero, not similarly small. All differences between high resolution mediums and their CD counterparts are due to differences in mastering. You can absolutely convert the high resolution to a CD with no discernable audible difference, even on the best systems with the most sure of themselves self-proclaimed audiophile doing the ABX test.

This is claptrap

[fliptw]

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.

Re:This is claptrap

[dfghjk]

This is the true insight. The same justification used here is used for other, decidedly lower fidelity formats. It's not the fidelity.

Also note conspicuous statement "The higher the audio file resolution, the better it gets." Audio file? Audiophile? Why wouldn't you just say resolution? Of course, because the author thinks that "audio file" implies audiophile.

There is an incredible amount of study and research that has gone into digital audio formats for a long, long time. Not the slightest bit of that is reflected in anything said here.

Re:This is claptrap

[fermion]

IN fact the vinyl format gave a very specific reproduction quality that, if you are listening to music form the era is integral to the experience. Modern LPs are going to be of superior quality because they are not pressing a million of them to sell to kids with no discerning musical judgement.

That said the mistake here is that there encoding quality in only one of the many factors in reproduction, although it is obviously a limiting factor. When I was a kid we had a high fi amplifier that used vacuum tubes, a dedicated very very heavy turn table with very expensive gearing, and s speaker system that essentially used the entire room . On the other hand, most people had a boom, boxer an integrated stereo, with laughable frequency response.

It makes little sense to take about the media when for most people the hardware, or the listening conditions, is the limiting factor.

Speaking of phones ...

[UnknownSoldier]

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.

Re:Speaking of phones ...

[FrankSchwab]

>>> I doubt most people could tell the difference between variable 320 kbps (kilobits/s) and CD quality even with quality headphones for most music

Well, back in the day when we were encoding with pirated copies of the Fraunhofer codec, I actually tested this. I created an audio CD with 4 sets of DDD tracks - one classical, one Rolling Stones, one solo piano, one something else. Each set had five tracks - the first track was the uncompressed CD-rip, and following this (in a random order that only I knew) were another copy of the uncompressed CD-rip, 96 kbps, 128 kbps, and 256 kbps CBR MP3 encoded then decoded tracks. I handed out disks to a dozen of my engineering coworkers, and asked them to take them home, put them in the cd-player on their high-end stereos and come back and tell me what the order of the tracks were.

It was comical. Half of them didn't even guess, because they admitted that it would be a random guess. Almost everyone could identify the 96kbps track, but no one could tell the difference between 128, 256, and uncompressed. One guy hooked it up to his home oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer - he noted that he could easily identify that the tracks were different, but he couldn't identify which was which except for the uncompressed one - he could see on the waveforms that it was identical to the uncompressed first track.

Now, I fully believe that it's possible for some golden-eared listeners to be able to tell 128kbps from flac - and I believe that it's possible for some to train themselves to tell the difference (though I don't know why you'd want to torture yourself for the rest of your life by doing that). But my ears in my early 30's couldn't tell the difference, and my ears now can't tell the difference, so I'm really happy playing my music through whatever electronics I happen to have around, although I am willing to pay for good speakers because those I can tell a difference.

Re:Speaking of phones ...

[gaiageek]

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.

Maybe you're referring to a format other than MP3, but as far as MP3 goes, I believe there's only constant 320 kbps, as that's the maximum (highest quality) the encoder allows. Anything variable would involve using a lower bitrate, thus making it something like a 300 kbps VBR MP3. But to your point, I doubt anyone could tell the difference between either of those and a CD.

Re:Speaking of phones ...

[UnknownSoldier]

Thanks for sharing that. That mirrors my experience as well back in ~2005 using LAME + FLAC.

Hi-hats were always the first to be noticed, followed by cymbals of Jazz, then the dynamics of classical music.

* Headphones I used at the time were the classic Sony MDR-7506 reference ones.
* Sound card at the time was a Sound Blaster Live! Platinum.

> I wonder if I should redo the test now.

Yeah, I'm thinking I probably should re-run the test as well on my Senns HD 380 Pro headphones and EMP Tek floor speakers. I still actually have the MDR-7506's so I could throw that in the mix just for shits and giggles. LOL.

Re:Speaking of phones ...

[dmt0]

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 just purchased myself a $350 sound card and sat down to listen to all my sources side by side to see if I would be able to identify the difference. I started with the expensive piece and then moved on to my HTC cell, Lenovo laptop 3.5 out, and an external Sound Blaster X-Fi. I would say you need a bit of a trained ear, but the differences are pretty audible. The HTC and the laptop sounded very similarly - they both overloaded certain bass frequencies, making them sound like garbage. Mind you that I've been listening to those devices for a long time before and never complained - the difference is only noticeable after you listen to the high-end device for some time. The Sound Blaster sounded differently - better than the laptop and the cell, but it still overloaded a bit deeper bass frequency - not as dirty, but still can't compare to the higher end device.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[Presence Eternal]

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.

Geeks got it covered. Thanks

[MightyYar]

Came here to post a sarcastic thing about pseudoscience, but my fellow geeks have it covered. Thanks, guys.

Not about quality

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[lsllll]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[Locke2005]

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 do this all the time

[Checkered Daemon]

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.

Re:I do this all the time

[Cyberax]

I have actually tried that. Humans consider sound with more amplitude to sound better. So if you're doing comparisons the first step is to match the amplitude. It's often really hard to do on the old analog hardware, because different inputs can be inconsistent or there can be a biased voltage on the analog loop.

If you do match the amplitudes you won't be able to tell the difference. People tried just that many time.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[HornWumpus]

Cheap consumer crap.

Search for 'Black Mamba' _power_cord_ to see true audiophile stupidity in all its glory.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[lsllll]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[Barsteward]

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?

So now I just have one question...

[Chris Mattern]

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.

Digital audio has been solved since the 80s

[Kohlrabi82]

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.

But no headphone jack...

[Simonics Zsolt]

This is so cool. Now please someone tell all this to the phone manufacturers who think bluetooth headphones are enough for us.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[DamnOregonian]

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.

Compression works for normal hearing

[nospam007]

If you hear a difference, your hearing is impaired and you should see a doctor.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[lsllll]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[Locke2005]

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).

Re:So refreshing....

[serviscope_minor]

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.

When it comes to sample rates at 44khZ and above, it's neither better nor worse. Just entirely equivalent.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[LynnwoodRooster]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[LynnwoodRooster]

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!

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[LynnwoodRooster]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[NormalVisual]

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.

I love it when people say, higher than CD quality.

[laxr5rs]

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.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[FrankSchwab]

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").

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[WaffleMonster]

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.

Re:So refreshing....

[BadDreamer]

That is a completely uninteresting question. What is an interesting is:

Which contains more audible information about an analog signal representing music: a 16 bit sample at 44 khz, or a 24 bit sample at 96?

The answer is, they both contain the same amount. No music produced will make use of the extra dynamic range 24 bits provide, and no human ear will be able to hear the frequencies above 22kHz, and in addition, very few speakers will attempt to reproduce it since all it will do is distort the audible sound.

No other area is so full of snake oil and bogus claims.