Audio Myths Workshop

[sinzero]

As far as hearing stuff at -80 db, that's not what I'm saying. ...

cool

So what is it you're hearing in digital that's objectionable?

[nollock]

Why is it a straw man? Can you account for the conditioning that would have made people still think digital is "bad" for no reason, 25 years after it became mainstream within the recording industry?

You would do well to find any area of human existence that doesnt have a group of enthusiasts claiming that "The old ways were better."

[A.M. Gold]

cool

So what is it you're hearing in digital that's objectionable?

It varies by source material but I mostly have a problem with a lot of the high frequency content. Particularly things like cymbals or tambourines. I think they often sound harsh on digital recordings.

Things like electric guitars, bass, and vocals don't usually bother me. I find strings to sound grating and, for lack of a better way of putting it, "artificial" on digital recordings, and I don't typically like the way brass instruments sound when they are blown particularly hard. Again, it's in the highs---they sound grating and the whole instrument starts to sound artificial to me, not smooth.

[A.M. Gold]

Why is it a straw man? Can you account for the conditioning that would have made people still think digital is "bad" for no reason, 25 years after it became mainstream within the recording industry?

You would do well to find any area of human existence that doesnt have a group of enthusiasts claiming that "The old ways were better."

Well there is a difference between some of them liking tape and just flat out saying digital doesn't sound very good.

For my part, I really don't care about the "old way" of doing things. I'm only 40. I like all kinds of things about digital when it comes to ease of operation and affordability.

[deaf dunderkwac]

cool

So what is it you're hearing in digital that's objectionable?

It varies by source material but I mostly have a problem with a lot of the high frequency content. Particularly things like cymbals or tambourines. I think they often sound harsh on digital recordings.

Things like electric guitars, bass, and vocals don't usually bother me. I find strings to sound grating and, for lack of a better way of putting it, "artificial" on digital recordings, and I don't typically like the way brass instruments sound when they are blown particularly hard. Again, it's in the highs---they sound grating and the whole instrument starts to sound artificial to me, not smooth.

back awake.
these opinions are based solely on recording live material to the end format and not about multi-tracking for later postproduction)
These are really the same areas I hated about sloppy digital encoding and is where using a higher standard a-d encoders helps a lot.
D-A conversion doesn't add quite as much crap to the party.
As I mentioned- most of my experience was with digital sound for television standards which I felt sounded considerably better than cd audio yet still suffered similar artifacts on the same material. Some of the artifacts were caused by internal limiting functions of the recording equipment (i.e clippers and overloaded analog electronics)
-I still maintain converters kept improving but if I was in a position to record live acoustic symphonic instrumentation I would choose to encode using the 190-some kHz @ 24 bit encoders.

@ A.M.Gold-Have you listened to higher quality formats such as SACD
-just to muddy waters (sic)
If my purchasing audience was 99.9% old people over 45 who's sole interest is the material and not the recording I wouldn't bother.
If my end product is destined to be a download mp3 @128kBits file I wouldn't bother. Above 160kBits and I would start to consider using the higher quality encoders.
I AM lazy so using a ZoomH2-type recorder would be my first choice. (Although I would always choose to use external microphones and preamps.)

Actually with the cost of storage so low and the speed of memory busses so high I think I might always choose to record all live material @ 1xxkHz@24b. DownConversion to my ears always had less artifacts than recording at the lower quality rates to being with. -I'd like that in a portable recorder package I could carry in my shirt pocket please. With enough memory to record 8 or more tracks for at least 8 hours each thank you very much(we can never be satisfied with what's available lol)
Unfortunately I can no longer rely on my ears so I'm just having to insert my personal experiences during the years I worked at this crap.


(-isn't most of this moot if you consider most internet material is of u-tube quality )

as for analog tape it's dead- kept alive so people can experience the joys of having their precious recordings self-glue together. Dead format- move on.
please

[cosmicdawn]

I mainly make music for my dog, as he can hear up to 60.0000 hz I always render my mixes at 192 khz. This allow me to include frequencies up to 96.000 hz which may be 36 khz higher than he can hear, but I think he can sense the lower harmonics of those frequencies when they are resonating in the room.
So even if you don't buy the marketing hype from the pro audio industry you should consider doing this for the animals of the world.
Being nice to animals is something you can't argue against. And you don't want to hurt a dog, would you?

[deaf dunderkwac]

this has NOTHING to do with frequency response or S/N and has to do with perceived distortions.
The distortions are quite non-harmonic in nature and modulate the underlying sound, particularly on certain instruments. I could distinctly hear such distortions and I gather other people are also capable of hearing the artifacts.
As to how much said distortions bothered me is debatable (remember, I am very lazy and if other people didn't hear it then I choose not to)
- that is all

note I had no problems listening to 4.1 or greater number of audio channels- in fact the first time I was actually fooled into thinking the sound source was live and real was a 44.1@16b digital playback on a rather modest 4.1 speaker system. So most of what I'm referring to is specifically about stereo-only playback

perhaps the time smear properties of the pcm-encoding has something to do with it? I don't care that much to investigate and I no longer can.

[cosmicdawn]

this has NOTHING to do with frequency response or S/N and has to do with perceived distortions.

I wasn't responding to you dunker, I know you don't own a dog.

[The Chase]

Completely unrelated, but more of a "see also:"

I worked as a salesman in guitar center, in accessories. I would only do this to people who deserved it, but I would hand people two different guitar cables, telling them the one I got more profit from would sound clearer/crisper. Then I would give them both to test out, and most of the time they would come back in agreement.

After a while, I realized that most of the customers, be they seasoned professionals or beginners, would hear what I told them to hear. They would ask me what the difference is between the american/russian EH Big muffs, and I told them that one was warmer with a bit more low end while the other was brighter/crunchier. regardless of which way I told them (there actually is quite a difference between them, too), most of them would either say they can't tell or that I was right.

That's just how people are. If I told them to listen to a particular characteristic, they would notice it and be impressed with the product, no matter what I pitched, because they wouldn't be listening for that characteristic as much otherwise.

[cosmicdawn]

On a sidenote too: I was reminded of an old story today.
I made this remix and sent it to a dj friend. As I only sent it as an 192 kbs mp3 he asked if I could give him an mp3 with a higher bitrate. I didn't have the master within reach, so I just opened the 192 kbs mp3 in Sound Forge and resaved it at 320 kbs. Sent it to him and he was so happy:)

I'm not saying that there's no difference between an mp3 at 192 kbs and one at 320 kbs, but this describes how easy it is to fool yourself into believing what you hear without actually listening.

[GeorgeZ]

On a sidenote too: I was reminded of an old story today.
I made this remix and sent it to a dj friend. As I only sent it as an 192 kbs mp3 he asked if I could give him an mp3 with a higher bitrate. I didn't have the master within reach, so I just opened the 192 kbs mp3 in Sound Forge and resaved it at 320 kbs. Sent it to him and he was so happy:)

I'm not saying that there's no difference between an mp3 at 192 kbs and one at 320 kbs, but this describes how easy it is to fool yourself into believing what you hear without actually listening.

I can definitely see that happening ><. People tend to be gullible in that way. Some old saying... can't remember it word for word, but has something to do with if you read it somewhere it's right... he saw the file said 320kbs, so it must be true...lol. Fail.

@ chase: Man, I can relate. I worked in NZ Rockshop here in NZ for years, in digital/Hi-tech/PAs and guitars. Started realising this fact however ages before I started working in music retail. I use to work for a prominent Electronics chain in NZ as well (years and years ago... when LCD was released main stream...ye that long ago), and saw that with the comparison between, LCD and normal tube TV's worked as well (and many other products actually). Even though the "WOW New technology" LCDs back then were CRAP compared to "honed and tuned over the years" tube TVs, you could still point out "this LCD TV has a 14 millisecond response time...".And people would just agree and go, ye... you can really see the difference, the LCD is way better than the tube TV (which was utter BS of course...lol). They made the assumption that, because I was mentioning the response time, it HAS to be better than the tube TV... but I never even compared the two, or mentioned what the tube TVs response time was... go figure heh?

[deaf dunderkwac]

lol- I love that- did a bit of it here and there.

Of a semi-related (but not really) note I had the occasion of recording string quartet (I forget their names). I had previous experience recording the same instrumentalists but on this occasion they were using vintage Stradivarius instruments specially borrowed from some museum.
Being lazy (as usual) I opted to use the house mics (KM84) in loo of hanging my own Shoeps omni's (I hate crawling around on filthy catwalks to be honest)
As the band started rehearsal I immediately heard massive amounts of distortion in my monitors. Thinking perhaps the KM84's had somehow gone bad I ran out into the hall... and was faced by the same horrendous distortions emanating from the instruments.

[tony tony chopper]

I hope you're all aware you're debating with just one guy. And you're not gonna convince him, either you have a rational thought or you don't.
If he had seen something in the sky, he would keep insisting that it's alien life, and will not try to know what it really was, but instead will keep trying convincing others that it was an alien lifeform, because lots of other people have seen aliens and they just can't all lie.

[Nokenoku]

But it was exactly the technical questions and counterarguments that intrigued me in that thread, ...

Was at least one of them valid?

I got into that debate because I don't think consumer grade digital audio is that spectacular, and definitely not "flawless". That necessarily includes CD players, low end sound cards, integrated lap-top audio, and mp3 players/iPhones.

Arrgh .. watch the god-damn movie finally. There are tests inside and you can even download the tesfiles as uncompressed wav-files to test yourself.

Besides that, I don't remember, that he ever said, that any consumer-DA/AD-converter would be good enough, just that normally there's no perceivable difference between a Soundblaster and high-end stuff.

You can btw easily test how much your own soundcard converters color the signal by just connecting the line-out with the line-in and record something through it and then compare the original with the recorded one.
If you can hear differences (in a BLIND TEST [correct the levels before]), the DA-converter or the AD-converter or both color the signal too much. If you can't hear any differences your soundcard is transparent.

I'm saying that's not right. I have audio to illustrate why I think it's not right (and I wish more people would do that on here... So many of these arguements are terribly pointless without anything to back them up.)

...

http://www.devonbrent.com/PracticalArtO ... eSound.wav

Ok ...
What exactly do you think, this would illustrate?
Without any further information this file is totally worthless to this discussion. It is particulary worthless, because after all it is a digital 16bit/44,1kHz file ...

As far as hearing stuff at -80 db, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I think they are chasing their tails in looking at measurements like that. Whatever is making digital sound problematic must be because of something else, or because of some complex combination of factors.

Look. You take the signal of the original file and subtract signal of an altered one from it. You'll get the difference.
The altered audio is the same, as if you'd take the original audio and mix in the difference (phase inverted). And as we know, that you can't hear signals, which are 80dB below another signal, this test works always in this direction.

It sadly doesn't always work in the other direction. Means:
If you'll get a clear difference between both signals, there still don't has to be any perceivable difference, since it can still be unperceivable phase issues.

I hope you're all aware you're debating with just one guy. And you're not gonna convince him, either you have a rational thought or you don't.

Yes you're probably right.
At least he still brought not a single valid argument for his claims to the table (only "arguments" were "People say so." and "I think I'd hear it too .. didn't do a valid blindtest though."). Still he's totally convinced by his opinion ... an opinion, which is based on causeless claims from other people.

I really can't understand, how someone can be so convinced about an opinion with such weak basis. I can totally understand, if you have an opinion with a weak basis, but I can't understand, how you can be so convinced by it and try to convince other people on it, without having a single real indication for its truth.

[A.M. Gold]

Are you talking about me?

I'm speaking from experience. How is that based on ideas with no basis?

Have you noticed that at least one other person in this thread is agreeing with me (see several his posts on this page).

I'm willing to do a blind test but I'm not in a position right now to set it up. If and when I get around to it I'll do it but I'll need live musicians because I'm only willing to compare digital sound to a live analog feed. That's the main thing I want to compare and I'm not that concerned with anything else. I'm alone in my home studio so I would need to get other people involved to do a test.

BTW, the AE's at the Womb aren't guys at Guitar Center, and their opionons on how things sound is far from worthless. Bob Olhsson helped Lucas set up the system at Skywalker Ranch. These are really not people speaking off the cuff with no valid basis for their observations. You're out of your element if you're making accusations like that.