And, again, you fail to grasp the fact that the resolution is a function of the word-length AND oversampling factor. It is less efficient to store a shorter word-length oversampled signal, which is why oversampled ADCs decimate to the required sampling frequency. The resolution of an oversampled ADC is not simply set by the word-length alone.
I also had a hard time distinguishing high bitrate mp3 from wav files. In my defense, the NPR test used music that I don't like but that should be irrelevant.
I am not sure you are using the term "resolution" correctly. With all due respect to you as an expert in digital audio. It is all quite simple. One thing determines the noise floor and dynamic range. BIT DEPTH Another determines the highest Frequency......SAMPLE RATE You are overcomplicating the entire thing, trying to come up with some "New" measurement that simply does not even exist, and taking all kinda time to try to tell everyone else they are all wrong......Digital is fairly simple as far as how to quantify what it can "Do" Can you tell me exactly what you believe resolution is?? What determines it, as far as a measurement would go? And I am asking to determine your knowledge, not to get a 5 paragraph lecture on digital. (Please )
I am indeed using the term resolution correctly. Again, like @vwestlife, you are only considering the calculation of resolution in a non-oversampling system. I am not over-complicating anything. Oversampling has been a part of digital audio from its earliest days. Are you forgetting that the first Philips CD players used 14-bit converters with 4x oversampling to achieve 16-bit performance? Resolution is a measure of the smallest signal that can be unambiguously resolved in the presence of noise. Now, tell me, what is the resolution of a 256x oversampled 20-bit ADC?
I was five years old when I first witnessed a television set. I remember my mom, along with a dorm parent, guiding me into the boys' dormitory at the Kansas State School For The Blind. I heard this startling and intriguing whistling sound! As my mom and the dorm parent discussed things, I wandered curiously in search of the sound source and could scarcely believe what I found! Of course, the sound was emanating from a large television set! For a moment, I was absolutely stunned and mesmerized that a moving picture was being displayed out of this box! It was showing Golmer Pyle U.S.M.C. by the way. I imagined and wondered how that was possible and just a few years later, I got the opportunity to disassemble and examine a television with assistance from my science teacher at the school. That whistle I heard was made by the television's horizontal deflection circuit, which oscillated at about 15 kHz. Interestingly, the whistling sound heard after the song "A Day In The Life" on European editions of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", oscillates at about 15 kHz as well. Around age 20, I could no longer hear that whistle sound. Most audiologists agree that few adults can hear above 18 kHz.
Wellll...I say it depends on the source. If the file or content is original at the higher bit rate and you copy it at the lower; you may very well hear a difference. Then too if you are making a copy of a Bill Hailey and the Comets original LP; nope no difference. You can not improve on or create what is not there in the source.
True! I consider myself extremely lucky because at 48 years of age, I can still clearly hear 18 kHz with both years after a life of loud headphone listening. But no higher than that.
Yes, you are lucky indeed! You are likely kinder to your ears than many. I was young and stupid listening at too high of volumes. By the way, some claim that listening through headphones damages hearing. I don't believe it. The problem is that many headphone users tend to turn the volume up to dangerous levels.
Believe me... I listen to really high levels. Graham Slee was shocked when I told him at what position I usually put the volume pot of his wonderful Solo ULDE amp (1 o' clock for CDs, and up to 4 o' clock for vinyl), and he said "only my dumb 15yo nephew listens to music that loud!". It probably also depends on genetics, illnesses, etc... not only age.
This thread has perplexed me…then I ran into this website and thought it was quite succinct for some of us less experienced people. It focuses on sampling rates but made an impression with me. 44.1KHz, 48KHz, 88.2KHz, 96KHz can you hear a difference? | Heron Island Studio
'mastering engineer Bob Katz explains, is in the way currently designed digital to audio converters (DACs) work. When converting from digital to analog for playback, it is very difficult and expensive to produce an undistorted signal with lower sample rates like 44.1 or 48 KHz. There are at present no commercially available systems that can reproduce these sample rates without distortion. However, once you are at a high sample rate like 88.2 or 96 KHz a good converter can produce a completely undistorted analog signal with ease. So the difference people are hearing, is not the high frequency content, but the fact that lower sample rates cause the converters to distort the analog signal. For the tech minded, this is due to ripples in the bandpass filter cased by restricted high pass bandwidth in lower sample rates.'
This is just absolutely untrue. You can easily measure the distortion in both sample rates and the 88/96 offer no benefit over 44. You are just reading marketing speak from a studio.
I have zero faith in the ability of current measuring technology to identify distortion in the analogue output of DAC's.
analog to digital conversion for the purpose of audio recording and playback is a form of measurement technology.
Well, technically there is a bit of distortion (phase shift in a Bode diagram) at frequencies near the Nyquist frequency, caused by the steep filter of the DAC. The effect, in a well made DAC, is however quite negligible in the audibile range (up to 18 Khz).
Yes. If CDs aren't distorted in some way then the CD and high-res from the same source would sound the same. And they don't (in some cases).