Comment by sideshowb
7 years ago
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.