That's a very helpful explanation. So no Voice Over with the Apple TV without resampling. Oh well, at least now we know. I might go ahead and buy the new Apple TV anyway. My wife would probably use some of the apps, so I can pretend it's not really for me. (smiles)
John -----Original Message----- From: Pc-audio [mailto:pc-audio-boun...@pc-audio.org] On Behalf Of Dane Trethowan Sent: 06 February 2016 17:54 To: PC Audio Discussion List Subject: Re: Now I know why music on the Apple TV 3rd Gen doesn't sound sogood... Hi! I wrote to an audio engineer friend of mine forwarding him the original email from this list written by john and his explanation is an interesting one, certainly the practise is more common it seems than I thought: <snip> > Unfortunately, this is *very* common practice. Horrible as it is for decent > audio, forcing everything to one output sampling rate and bit-depth is > unavoidable for the vast majority of consumer hardware, otherwise which > wouldn't be able to support playing multiple simultaneous output streams of > differing formats. The SoundBlaster Live and above do exactly this in > hardware, which is why SB cards always sounded bloody horrible at anything > other than 48KHz. XP and above do it in software; OSX and IOS do the same, > as (I imagine) does Android; Linux and BSD do it if you use a Sound Server. > It's an absolutely attrocious way to handle audio, but necessary if you want > the sound device to be able to do more than one thing at a time. Fortunately, > Linux at least can be made to pass the stream directly to the hardware, but > of course the device loses the ability then for multiple streams for that > particular sound device. So, e.g., no speech output wilst playing music. If > you want the best possible precision and still want multiple streams, the > simplest solution is to install a professional Sound Server such as Jack > Audio Connection Kit (Linux, Win, and (I believe) OSX), which, although it > has to resample, has very high-precision resampling algorithms, and does a > very good job. Of course, it's more CPU-intensive. > On 5 Feb 2016, at 8:36 AM, Brent Harding <br...@hostany.net> wrote: > <snip> So there we are, take it or leave it <smile> > I heard the 48k sampling rate is more common in video than it is for music or > anything else. Maybe it's what a TV would expect to see if HDMI is used. > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dane Trethowan" > <grtd...@internode.on.net> > To: "PC Audio Discussion List" <pc-audio@pc-audio.org> > Sent: Thursday, February 04, 2016 3:06 PM > Subject: Re: Now I know why music on the Apple TV 3rd Gen doesn't sound > sogood... > > > Well to be perfectly honest that s Apple for you and where would you find any > serious audio reviews about anything Apple? > > Okay, I did find plenty of reviews and information regarding the audio for my > 2012 Mac Mini machine but Apple just won t release too much information about > anything else it seems when it comes to audio. > > I m glad you mentioned that about the Apple TV and now I m having second > thoughts about that purchase for myself too. > > >> On 5 Feb 2016, at 5:38 AM, John Gurd <j.g...@ntlworld.com> wrote: >> >> I got an Apple TV 3rd Gen a year or so ago to use with MusicMatch and >> my HiFi. I was really disappointed to discover that it really didn't >> sound that great even with a HDMI connection. I recently read that >> for some reason it resamples music from 44.1KHZ to 48KHZ. This is the >> equivalent to transcoding on the fly which is inevitably going to sound >> terrible. >> >> >> >> The thing is, I really love the new Apple music service and I am >> tempted to buy the Apple TV 4th Gen in order to use the service with >> my living room system. But once bitten, twice shy. I haven't been >> able to find out if it handles music in the same way. I haven't even >> been able to find any serious reviews of its audio quality. >> >> >> >> John >> >> >> > > ********** > Those of a positive and enquiring frame of mind will leave the rest of the > halfwits in this world behind. > > > > > ********** Those of a positive and enquiring frame of mind will leave the rest of the halfwits in this world behind.
