How much does sound quality matter to you?

Of course there must be any reasons for that. Surely it's 100% ultrasonics and 0% mastering ...

 

Well.....maybe I am mistaking you for someone else. It's a big forum. Could have sworn you have expressed a preference for digital playback over vinyl. So if I was wrong I was misremembering, not assuming.

 

... but what's Tens of Thousands of units compared to millions of lossy downloads and CDs?

People don't have to understand what exactly Hi-Res is to know that your ultrasonics won't save the day when overcompressed, overpriced, crappy sounding DR 5 garbage is offered on some Hi-Res site. As if Hi-Res alone would guarantee good sound ...

 

No it doesn't. You can't look at that and assert that the ultrasonic content is recorded from the original acoustic event. No one is denying that there is ultrasonic content on LPs.

 

It's not enough. I really believe the price needs to come down on the players.

I agree with you on that, I read somewhere that only 10% of the stuff on the Pono site is the 192 kHz stuff. It's gonna take some time. They've got to consider the price point.

 

I'm glad you're not denying the ultrasonic content on LPs.

 

Definitely not. Was anybody?

 

You and Robin were asserting that it was rare for ultrasonic content to be there if at all. We can see that it's there now. We have one example, but we can't assume that it's rare based on that.

 

If they want to provide meaningful, verifiable and reproducable data to their consumers, why don't they simply let a third party conduct careful listening tests, delivering statistically significant results, instead of writing essays and printing brochures? This would not only be something scientific, but would - without a doubt - be the absolute best and most effective kind of advertsing one can think of!

 

They should do that. They're kind of dropping the ball.

 

Nope. We were asserting that it was rare for any of it to be derived from the original music that was recorded. Very very different assertion on our part.

Nope. It's probably pretty common to have some sort of ultra sonic content on an LP. What would be rare is for that content to be directly transferred from actual acoustic content of the original music that was recorded.

 

Would be interesting to take some random sample of Pono 192 kHz recordings and look how many of them have ultrasonic content - and after that take the (hopefully identically mastered) 44.1 khz Pono recordings and see if the difference is audible.

 

I agree.

 

I listen to all of the options regularly.

 

People buy stuff for a while host of different reasons, not always associated with an in depth understanding of what they're buying but a perceived benefit amongst other things.

If I buy a car, I don't need to know how the internal combustion engine works or the science in tyre design, or the construction of the vehicle for safety. I might want to decide on body shape, safety, cost, miles per gallon, but those bear no relation to the real detail. Even the car companies don't seek to sell that; they focus on desirability, practicality, cost or environment. Science of car design to the consumer? Way less.

You're selling nothing new here; the desirability if the format by dint of the format alone. But that's been shown to fail before.

FWIW, I think it's great you're focusing on great sound quality, but the closed mind around the format and one issue probably doesn't help your cause. IMO.

 

All I've ever said was giving it up when the digital was as good or better than the vinyl. That and moving home five times in ten years did for the records.

 

And believe it or not, Robin actually did say that about changing his vote to “I love streaming.”

 

Yes and no.

 

Yes, I changed my vote to "I love streaming". Getting the basics right is a lot more important than focusing on esoterica of dubious value. Occam's razor always applies.

By way of example—Earthworks microphones manage to get higher frequency capture by virtue of having a very small diaphragm. However, the smaller the diaphragm, the lower the output. The lower the output, the higher the self noise. If you use an Earthworks microphone for a wide dynamic recording, like an orchestra [where in theory, extended frequency response would make an audible difference if extended frequency response made a difference], the maybe audible high frequency extension comes at the expense of very audible self noise.

In recording, there are tradeoffs. So, someone at Decca or Telarc would pick Senheissers or Neumanns or Brüel & Kjær instead, for practical reasons. A lot of audio engineering boils down to art, not science. A Schoeps Colette can sound thin and nasty with an orchestra, is absolutely perfect for a harpsichord. A Neumann U-47 is frequently the vocal microphone of choice thanks to its obvious colorations. For some reason, a Neumann 84 and a Martin Guitar is a perfect match. And so on.

A perfectly accurate recording of something that does not sound good in the first place will not sound good. Good sound isn't about accuracy—it's about musicality.

 

We can assume it's rare by looking at the frequency response of the microphones, mixing boards and recording devices in the chain for a given recording. If it didn't happen at the microphone stage and appears later on in the recording chain one would logical conclude that the appearance of ultrasonics at the end of the chain is spurious, a distortion.

I am aware that it is possible to encode ultrasonic information on an LP. The JVC system for a type of FM quad had a carrier around 40khz. But of course, it was assumed that no one could hear the carrier tone. I recall when those Quad discs appeared, no one complained about the carrier tone either.

 

This has been done, using SACD as the hi-res source which was then down-sampled to 16/44 for comparison. See post #162 for a link to the paper.

 

http://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=70893.0

 

Yes, but do they provide any details about the actual ultrasonic content of the Hi-Res material they used?

Taking a closer look at randomly chosen, readily available Hi-Res recordings could reveal how many of them

- are just upsampled Lower-Res recordings,
- doesn't contain a considerable amount of ultrasonics
- contain ultrasonics, that are noise only
- contain ultrasonics, that are actual audio information

If the last of these four groups is very small, this would prove the claim that people raving about Hi-Res/Pono aren't doing this because of ultrasonics.

Robin, is it even possible to reliably tell apart group 3 and group 4 recordings?

 

It's going to depend on both the resolution level of the playback gear [and the room that gear lives in] and the hearing acuity of the auditioneer. Hardly anybody has the gear that can resolve that fine. Note that 24 bits might be the math of the encoding scheme, but remember that the self-noise of the analog stages of such recorders can't actually deliver 24 bits, they're really lucky to reach 21 bits.

And again, if you believe in abx testing, the paper by Brad Meyer and David Morgan I reposted above indicates that in a double blind test where the hi-res output is downsampled to rebook standard, the results were random. Mind you, different circumstances, different tests might get different results. But I doubt it. The microphones are the dominant determiner as regards overall sound quality. A pair of Neumann M49s fed to a cassette will get you a better sound than a pair of Shure 58s sending their signal to a Metric Halo LIO-8.

 

OK Socrates try to follow this. Read very very carefully and note the bold text.
Here is what I said that you seem to be having some difficulty with.

"We were asserting that it was rare for any of it (ultrasonic content) to be derived from the original music that was recorded. Very very different assertion on our part."
"It's probably pretty common to have some sort of ultra sonic content on an LP. What would be rare is for that content (The ultrasonic content on an LP) to be directly transferred from actual acoustic content of the original music that was recorded.

So we are talking about three things here.
1. The ultrasonic content of the original music as played in the original space
2. The ultrasonic content of the recording and processing of that music
3. The ultrasonic content of the vinyl LP

I'm going to give you a guide here.

It's probably pretty common to have some sort of ultra sonic content on an LP #3. What would be rare is for that content to be directly transferred from actual acoustic content of the original music that was recorded.#1

“Robin L.” said:
But for most recordings #2, there's almost nothing going on above 20khz anyway.
“Robin L.” said:
Again, ultrasonics were never really a part of the package #2. And clearly we've done fine without them.
“Robin L.” said:
Well, the answer is obvious: there really isn't much useful information above 15Khz in analog era recordings#2.
“Robin L.” said:
All I know is analog record/play gear wasn't designed to reproduce ultrasonics (of #1) and doesn't do a good job of reproducing ultrasonics.(of #1)
“Robin L.” said:
What you are posting about ultrasonic sound hardly ever applies to commercial recordings.#2
“Robin L.” said:
You will have a hard time finding those (those being the ones that were present during the original musical event that was being recorded #1)overtone on LPs #3


So to reiterate. "We were asserting that it was rare for any of it (ultrasonic content) to be derived from the original music that was recorded. #1 Very very different assertion on our part."


So hopefully that will clear things up for you. Neither of us were saying that there was no ultrasonic content on LPs. We were saying that there is little or no ultrasonic content on LPs that came from the recording of the original music. Big difference.