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Once again, magically expensive items are only different in your mind
40hz:
"existing audio formats are unable to adequately present a full range of tones"
-Deozaan (April 08, 2014, 02:33 AM)
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The human ear isn't capable of discriminating between (or actually hearing) many of them either. ;)
While I applaud any attempt to improve the art and technology of music recording and playback, I think Neil might be suffering from some of the inevitable hearing loss 99% of humanity will start to experience at his age, and is now hoping against hope to find away to get around it.
They've done side-by-side studies of various MP3 configurations using a broad range of (i.e. "sound pro," "audio enthusiast," "civilian") test listeners. The studies seem to show that most can't reliably differentiate much between anything.
Most could differentiate between a "good" (i.e. properly EQ-ed and mastered) recording and a bad one. But that's where the art of recording comes in. The technology itself isn't the issue so much as how it's used. How like so many other things in life, right?
One interesting aside. The FLAC format did seem to be slightly preferred by a very small number of listeners who said it sounded more "natural." So there might be some psycho-acoustical thing going down with FLAC that hasn't been clearly identified. One which some people might be hearing.*
Still, recorded music is all about serving the masses. So a factor that 1/10th of 1/10th of 1% of the listeners might hear isn't going to be something the music industry is going to devote many resources getting to the bottom of.
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Semi off-topic half-rant:
The full-time prima donna hipster audiophile invariably insists on "vinyl." Which is funny... because the sound of vinyl recordings isn't remotely close to "natural" or "live" if you look at the dynamic map or frequency spectrum. And most recordings destined for disk were heavily compressed during mastering to accommodate the physics of the disk cutting equipment.
And the entire style of sound mastering techniques has changed radically since the era of LPs. Digital has a larger dynamic range which has led to the trend of recording everything as loud as possible. And also using extreme amounts of EQ on most tracks. These things weren't possible with LP recordings. And they have a huge impact on the sound you hear.
There's also the fact that many people who are now mastering music (often their own) simply don't have the expertise (or taste) of the old guard producers and recording engineers of yore. Those guys (unfortunately no ladies back then) were artists who knew hundreds of ways to drag the absolute best out of equipment that would seem positively primitive by today's standards.
Today, it's different. This is the era of the "common man" and the "artist-producer-songwriter" in music. Any idiot that composes rambling blank verse, and owns a guitar, is now a "singer-songwriter" - although most very modestly tend to refer to themselves (and prefer to have others call them) "artists."
These same singer-songwriters have an unfortunate tendency to also want to master their own music so they can add "artist-producer" to their ever growing (many also write, paint, and choreograph too!) list of merit badges. We live in the Age of The Amateur.
And it shows... :-\
How things seem to work today
So far from being "better" sounding (in an absolute sense) vinyl records merely sound different from CDs. Different technologies + a different mastering style + different personnel = very different sounding music.
People who grew up with LPs (like me) tend to prefer LPs. People brought up on CDs tend to prefer the sound characteristics of that technology.
TaoPhoenix:
...
My father would fix up old things rather than pay for new, even if the time spent was more valuable. I didn't have a brand-name pair of shoes until I had moved out on my own. Every dollar spent was weighed against how long the purchased item would last. I believe this instilled me with a strange sense of worth, in which I do believe in paying for quality, but only to a definite, red-line point. The line in the sand becomes deep and wide when you cross over from "quality" to "luxury" and I will not cross it.
...
However, things like this are obvious, and the law of diminishing returns becomes more evident the more salesmen it takes to convince you to part with your hard-earned cash. I don't like salesmen. They make me itch.
That said, there have been times where I paid for quality
...
I ... focused on the 2hp motor, the legendary durability, and the 7-year warranty. THAT is what I paid for, but we got more in return. We would have worn out 3 or more consumer-level blenders by now, and the results would have been mediocre in comparison. This is a tangible, demonstrable fact, not a 'perception of value'.
-Edvard (April 08, 2014, 12:34 AM)
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I'm fortunate enough that things like a $40 mistake won't sink me. So I needed a new pair of shoes this winter, and one of the street vendors sold what I knew full well were knockoff shoes *right next door to where I was working* this winter. I had no delusions - I just wanted February's Snow problem to go away and become August's problem! I believe sometimes you truly are stuck a bit having to settle for a mix of both short term cheap but crappy vs those times you go for long term quality. In that other thread, without being sizzled by sales, I *did* spend on quality for my project comp and my first 24" monitor (that finally hit end-of-life this year.)
However, I "chose poorly" and they are already coming apart! So even in the world of "crappy" sometimes there's differences between Grade F and Grade D!
:o
40hz:
A friend who's father ran a farm said "big stuff" purchased for a farm is bought with one of two criteria in mind: (a) costly but built to last - or - (b) inexpensive but easy and cheap to fix.
I found that to be a good guide when making a major purchase decision. 8)
xtabber:
Slashdot reports a study which shows that even elite musicians can't tell the difference between what-are-believed-to-be legendary hyper-expensive instruments and modern instruments:
-mouser (April 07, 2014, 06:22 PM)
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That's nonsense.
The only thing this study shows is that a certain sample of violinists liked some modern instruments better than some older ones. It doesn't mean they can't tell the difference, or that new instruments are better or the same as old ones, or vice versa. Nor does it mean that every study along these lines would show the same thing.
Before jumping to conclusions, it should be noted that the person responsible for the experiment, and the publicity surrounding it, happens to be a violin maker who stands to profit from the notion that his instruments may be just as good as any made by Stradivarius or Guarneri del Gesu.
TaoPhoenix:
Slashdot reports a study which shows that even elite musicians can't tell the difference between what-are-believed-to-be legendary hyper-expensive instruments and modern instruments:
-mouser (April 07, 2014, 06:22 PM)
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That's nonsense.
The only thing this study shows is that a certain sample of violinists liked some modern instruments better than some older ones. It doesn't mean they can't tell the difference, or that new instruments are better or the same as old ones, or vice versa. Nor does it mean that every study along these lines would show the same thing.
Before jumping to conclusions, it should be noted that the person responsible for the experiment, and the publicity surrounding it, happens to be a violin maker who stands to profit from the notion that his instruments may be just as good as any made by Stradivarius or Guarneri del Gesu.
-xtabber (April 08, 2014, 04:15 PM)
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Well, I agree this study is quite limited and the flaws were pointed out in the review article. The key sentence in the whole thing is "when it came to telling old violins from new, the soloists did no better than if they had simply guessed".
So everyone agrees they could tell "#1 is not the same as #5", they just had trouble telling which of #1 and #5 was the old one and which was the new one. It's a very limited result and exactly the kind that gets mis-handled in the media! I would have done the headline as "they thought the new ones were just as good as the old ones and once in a while even better." (The other key item in the blog above was that there were suspicions that one of the Statavarius ones was not in absolute champion level tip top shape and for whatever reasons a lot of the musicians didn't like it.)
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