NECROTHREAD! ARISE! <chanting to old ones that have no name... />
Seems Pono is just about here:
http://www.rollingst...ch-for-2014-20130904Neil Young's music service Pono, which will provide listeners with downloads of high-resolution songs made to sound like their initial recordings, is almost ready to roll. It's set to launch in early 2014, according to a Facebook post written by Young.
"The simplest way to describe what we've accomplished is that we've liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio," wrote Young. "So it has primal power."
I'm going to come out on Neil's side here.
I'm also going to say f*&( science. But I say that for scientific reasons.
The original article:
http://people.xiph.o...demo/neil-young.htmlThe ear hears via hair cells that sit on the resonant basilar membrane in the cochlea. Each hair cell is effectively tuned to a narrow frequency band determined by its position on the membrane. Sensitivity peaks in the middle of the band and falls off to either side in a lopsided cone shape overlapping the bands of other nearby hair cells. A sound is inaudible if there are no hair cells tuned to hear it.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why they fail.
Neil is right.
Monty is wrong.
But I am getting ahead of myself there. Consider that the tl;dr.
There is no good science done in this area. There is only partial science.
The article does an excellent job of addressing a lot of issues. It explains quite a bit. But it never asks the right questions. The discussion is far too limited, and so is the science.
The entire argument that "24/192 makes no sense" centers around sampling theory and the human ear. This is not sufficient. More recent graphs of human hearing do not really get much more accurate than the original studies from the 1920's (or whenever - I'm not going to bother looking it up as it's a side issue). Sure, there are some differences in A-weighted vs. other weightings, but even when they become more accurate, weightings are regularly misused by professionals who really should know better. But... it all goes back to reliance on weightings as accurate representations of... wait for it... what levels of sound humans can identify as being heard.
I need to repeat that.
"what levels of sound humans can identify as being heard"
That's important. It's what different scales are based on and it is the sum total of the industry approach to "sound".
When you buy a microphone or good speakers, you'll see graphs that show how they perform. Blah blah blah. All the same basic science.
Now... imagine 100 people out in the jungle spread out say 30 m from each other in a line walking forward. As they walk forward, our hero, Joe, is in the center when the hair on his arms rises up and he gets a sick feeling. The only thing he "hears" is the crunch of twigs beneath his feet and the odd calling out from people near him for the little boy. Another hero, Fred, is on the far right of the line. He has no such sensation.
We backtrack just a moment in time and over to the far left. Not so much a hero, but more of a victim, Harold looks ahead and sees a large tiger. It roars. This is where Joe's hair stands up and he gets the sickly feeling.
The tiger then proceeds to eat Harold. NOM NOM NOM NOM~! Slurp! Burp! Harold was very tasty and the tiger is very happy at such a wonderful meal.
What happened there?
The tiger's roar contained a lot of energy. Harold got the full exposure to that energy. Fred received zero exposure as he was too far away. But they're not the interesting parts of the story.
Joe was too far away to receive any audible energy from the tiger's roar. However, he did receive some of that energy, which spooked him and caused the hair on the back of his neck to rise up, and for Joe to get that sickly feeling that he couldn't quite identify. That portion of the tiger's roar that Joe "felt" was around 3 Hz as higher frequencies don't travel as far as lower frequencies. If it were 40hz, we'd simply say that a DCer fell on top of Joe.
(I could have summed that up really quickly, but the little story where Harold gets eaten was much more fun!
)
The current science as we have in the article completely dismisses these cases by limiting "sound" to "the audible spectrum". The fact of the matter is that sound has a greater effect than just that limited definition, and nobody is asking these questions.
Again, f*&( "science" for being so stupid. You don't get to try to talk about a scientific topic then limit the discussion to what you like and exclude all the inconvenient evidence that flies in your face. That's not science. That's hyper-focused bullshit. Now, it may be really good shiny awesome math and cool charts hyper-focused bullshit, but it's still bullshit.
Neil is onto something. He knows that there is something that we are missing. However, nobody is going to be able to articulate that in a scientific context until there is research into these areas.
I am not putting forward that I know all the answers. I am putting forward that the wrong questions or not enough questions are being asked, and that the discussion has been artificially limited in a horribly irresponsible way if you actually give a crap about evidence based science. Just because you can't explain or don't understand some evidence doesn't mean that you can exclude it, which is exactly what modern sound science does, as clearly illustrated in the article.
(Took me long enough to get around to reading that.)
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