Patrick Dixon;343624 Wrote: > Well those were your conclusions but not necessarily *the* conclusions.
They were everyone's conclusions but yours, Patrick. > It should be clear even to you by now, that the lsb of a 24bit PCM > signal is 144dB down on a full scale signal, but not on the actual > recording (which should have some headroom even at its loudest points), > or its (digitally) volume reduced version. It should also be clear that > one type of 'noise' does not automatically mask another type of 'noise' > at a lower level (if it did, you'd only hear the loudest instrument in > any piece of music). The audibility of noise depends on the character > of the noise as well as the absolute and relative levels. 144dB down from full scale is far, far, far below audibility on any conceivable home stereo system even with the volume at max. In fact at normal-high settings it is near or below the level of the noise produced by the Brownian motion of air molecules. This is obvious, because 0 dB SPL is by standard convention the threshold of human hearing. Hence, to make a -144dB signal audible, one would need full-scale to be 144dB SPL or more. 144dB SPL is much much louder than any stereo can produce - it is as loud as an automatic rifle being fired next to your ear, or a full-sized jet engine a few meters away. That is what is necessary to make a signal at -144 dB just barely audible -when nothing else is playing-. When music is playing it will be 130 dB or more above that, which at the requisite volume would blow out your hearing rapidly and permanently. And yet you believe in that situation even if it were possible to achieve such absurd volume levels (it isn't), that tiny -144dB whisper would be possible to hear through the pain of permanent hearing damage inflicted by incredibly loud music? -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=52971 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
