Comment by vortico
7 years ago
So you think our senses transcend what tools have the ability to measure? Maybe that was the case in 1970, but in 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range. Saying otherwise is an appeal to what is called audio mysticism and is caused by placebo and confirmation bias, which was mentioned in the article.
> [I]n 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range
Yes, we have instrumentation better than the meat-based transducers in the human body. That doesn't mean we completely understand said meat-based transducers or how that meat-computer in our skull interprets signals from those transducers. The auditory and visual systems are still subjects of active research with many outstanding problems.
I mean, I'll be among the first to call bullshit on audiophile snake-oil like people pushing 192 kHz/24 bit music, but in your rush to discredit such things, you've gone too far in the other direction.
Actually that's a defensible position when you're mixing and mastering audio. A spectrogram won't tell you which settings sound better, but your ears will.
Maybe not relevant in the context of GP's post though. In the context of digital tools telling you two signals are identical, then I suspect they are, and if you want to prove to me your ears hear better then you're going to need a blind A/B test.
Right, this debate is not about determining whether two different audio clips A and B sound better. It's about determining whether two clips can be distinguished by our ears at all.
But I don't care about proving anything to you. I don't need you to believe me for me to enjoy my music. You can tell me you prefer coffee from Brazil to coffee from Honduras and we can talk about what characteristics you notice, not whether or not you've done a blind A/B test.
Certainly, enjoy what you want to enjoy. In response to your original statement here:
>How does it affect your life that I listen to music encoded at 24/196?
It doesn't, but Monty contributes to the Xiph project, which constantly has to deal with thousands of people saying "why doesn't Opus/Vorbis support 192 kHz??" This is his answer to that general question. There is actual money on the line for companies that use audio codec technology, and supporting useless formats that have no psychoacoustic effect is a waste of time, money, and effort.
Yes, that's what I think. I don't believe that hearing is completely understood scientifically. You're welcome to disagree.
Yeah, this is what I can't fathom. We can detect exoplanets with telescopes with 0.01 arcsecond accuracy, hear whale calls 100 miles away with an array of low frequency transducers, and model the shape of structures by forcing seismic vibration and measuring the response to 1 part in 100 million. We can image the HIV virus and detect DNA changes due to cancer. It's unlikely that we don't understand everything we need to know (or even 1000x more than we need to know regarding this debate) about cochlea, a macroscope object that undergraduates can study with a primitive microscope.
I don't mean to shift the goalposts, but neuroscience isn't completely understood, and that's what I mean by hearing and how music makes you feel.
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If it was true, the entirety of hi-fi industry would not exist. I myself built a number of amplifiers and, after a certain threshold, roughly .02% THD (total harmonic distortion) at 20khz, there is a very little correlation between the THD (what is usually measured)numbers and perceived quality of the sound. Which means, while it is true that is everything could be measured, no one measures the right thing (perhaps some weird subtle phase shifts or some almost immeasurable frequency response deficiencies)
Are you suggesting that things like healing crystals work, because the market for them exists?
You are putting words in my mouth. I am telling what I actually verified. Amplifiers with lower THD and IMD often sound worse than those with less impressive meausured parameters. Ergo, the measured parameters are not relevant. We need to find the actually important paramters and measure them.
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> the entirety of hi-fi industry would not exist.
An industry which is known to sell an enormous amount of snake oil...
You are talking about hi end. Not hi-fi. Now do you have anything of substance to say?