firedog;463208 Wrote: > Filter out bias - sure, I'm in favor. Good, then we can agree on the fact that tests that do not filter out bias are worthless.
> But as most of the supposed "scientific double blind tests" are done, > that is all they do. They don't actually test what people (at least some > people) can hear on a quality setup. You're ignoring that these tests actually do produce meaningful results, being extensively used by the more serious/honest companies in developing their equipment, or in the development of audiocodecs. Also, you are assuming that a better setup will expose more flaws. This is not always true. Specifically in lossy audio compression the calculation of masked components is based on the assumption of a linear playback chain. Thus worse, less linear chains end up revealing more quantization noise. I experienced this a couple of times. > But again, most of the tests commonly referred to as "proving" what > people can't hear have obvious problems with the methodology - either in > listeners chosen or in equipment. Well ofc you need to look at the test in detail, you can't generalize. Also, there are obviously snake oil products on the market, or ones, where the differences is measurable, but not audible. It shouldn't be surprising when the tests confirm exactly that. > Beyond that, there is the obvious problem of setting up a test that > actually mirrors how people perceive music. And I'm not at all sure that > quick A/B tests of two files are the way to do it. In fact, I could make > an argument that that's the worst way to do it. Since we agreed on the necessity to filter bias, I hope you mean a blind form of A/B. Blind tests don't have to be quick. In fact, if you are serious about testing, you could easily make them long term. Blind tests are not as hard to do as many audiophiles make them out to be. > A from above)something with enough quality to reproduce the supposed > differences between the files being tested. Mid-fi systems won't do it.While > this tends to be true, I strongly oppose to this as being the law (btw, how do you define mid- and hi-end?). Typically a 200$ headphone + decent amp will reveal much more flaws coming from lossy compression then any five figure setup. > I was referring specifically to one poster, and from his posts it could > be inferred that he'd never actually spent much time listening to hi-res > files, yet "knew" that they couldn't sound better than 16/44.1 to human > ears. You or somebody mentioned the problems with using the steep filters required to do the necessary filtering above 20Khz. Whiles this is correct, it ignores that by now almost all players/DACs use oversampling, which moves the cutoff much higher while allowing filters with reduced steepness. If there is obvious differences between the same recording at 44.1 and 96Khz there is a problem somewhere else in the chain, not the recording resolution itself. -- Raptus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Raptus's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1852 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=67679 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
