Stuff like this figures heavily into what I believe gets labeled "psychoacoustics." Our perception of sound doesn't always line up with the mathematical, objective measure of the frequencies we're picking up. It's that "meat suit" thing. When it comes to hi-res, my subjective experience is mostly that you get a bit of extension on the extreme high and low end (again, hardly night and day, but usually pleasing and closer to a "real world" sonic experience), but that mostly equates to getting more of a clear sense of room acoustics. Obviously, this is only true if the recording has a coherent sense of that to emphasize. "Garbage in, garbage out," applies in spades and it really makes no difference whether I'm listening to a CD or hi-res when it comes to modern "in the box" recordings using digital plugins to simulate room reverb and all that good stuff. So much of this is subjective, but it's interesting to compare notes and try to put together some kind of "treasure map" to where the good stuff is buried and how best to get to it. If my desert island collection is "merely" CD (or even MP3) quality, I don't think I'd cry myself to sleep over it, but I'd also never complain if I found a way to hear something I already enjoyed in an even more pleasing form.
you are conflating the emotional and psychological response to sound and colour with a physical response. For example, do I see "green" the way you see "green"? There is no way of knowing. But what can be measured and proven is if your eyes are sensitive to light at 500 nm and that the response is converted to an electrical signal in your brain. So why we might not know if somebody can see "green" light, we can know if they can see light at 500nm (although I would say it is a safe bet that for the vast majority of people, we see colour the same. If we (or any creature of the same species) saw things differently that would be evolutionary unstable - we are all interacting with the same environment so it makes sense for creatures of the same species to sense the world in largely the same manner (notwithstanding disease or disability). Back to sound. You said " but my point is that I wonder if those "unheard" frequencies can affect how we perceive the ones we CAN hear." The answer is no - obviously. You said you studied engineering, so this might be teaching granny to suck eggs. But... Obviously, as with light, two people might experience the same sound differently but that is a red herring with respect to your point. Because what we are interested in is not some difference in how you and I experience a middle C or a d-minor chord but IF we experience it. ALL finite sounds are superpositions of an (infinite) number of pure sinusoidal waveforms. Only three things define a sine wave - it's amplitude, phase and frequency. The amplitude is related to the power density of the wave, or with reference to sound, its volume. The base reference for humans is the decibel, or what is just about audible in perfect conditions. The phase reference is when you start measuring in time with respect to some zero-time waveform. The frequency is how quickly the wave oscillates with respect to some arbitrary period (we use the second, hence the measurement is Hertz). Any sound can be decomposed into the individual pure sinusoids. Fourier discovered this. Each sinusoid has an amplitude, phase and frequency. As we lose our hearing, we become less sensitive to certain frequencies. The apparent amplitude decreases until at some point you cannot detect it at all. That frequency becomes inaudible. It can no longer affect how you perceive the whole because the whole does not contain it. There are certain types of people - audiophiles - that like to think they can hear things that are not there. And attempt to describe this using analogy or metaphor (as you have been doing). This is not helpful. It is not how the world works. In short. We might not agree what green is, but we can agree that we can or cannot sense a light with a frequency of 500 nm (i.e are we blind or colour blind). We might not agree what a middle c sounds like, but we can agree that we can or cannot hear sound with a frequency of 262 Hz (i.e. are we deaf).
But it is not. It is purely objective. Whether you like what you hear or not is subjective. The audiophile conflates the two to pretend that what they subjectively prefer is objectively true (i.e. vinyl is "better" than digital, when what is meant is vinyl is preferred to digital)
I think we're talking past each other on this. I'm not questioning whether a person with hearing loss can or cannot hear a given frequency. What I'm questioning is interactions between frequencies emitted by a speaker/headphones in the air prior to any sound reaching a listener's ear. We know standing waves, room resonance, etc. in a listening space can color playback perception - for better or worse. What I'm throwing out is an "is it possible" line of inquiry about hi-res producing frequencies which a listener may not be able to perceive directly but which interact with the "heard" frequencies in much the same way dampening or phase cancellation would - albeit on a much more subtle level. We know sound waves interact with each other in a measurable sense in an acoustic space and physically alter each other in ways that we can perceive (i.e. phase cancellation). We're not talking about scientifically precise acoustic chambers here. This is listening rooms, headphones, computer desks, and so on down the line. The question isn't "can we hear frequencies we measurably can't hear?" The question is "are frequencies we can't hear somehow affecting those we can in a way that influences the listening experience?" The only way to test that hypothesis would be to have multiple listening environments where you could control for every possible permutation of room interaction with the sound source. It's kind of a masturbatory mental exercise because I don't think it'd be as simple as "we played several mathematically perfect sine waves to see what happened when they interacted" because that wouldn't come close to what happens in music with all of its transients and sonic weirdness. How would you pick the "test piece" if you wanted to test music in that regard? Hell if I know. I suspect this is strictly an interesting thought experiment to turn over and not really of any practical merit or use. Sometimes, that's the fun stuff to consider. What if the sky were mauve? All in, it's just an interesting line of thought. I don't really care if it's the case or not. I'm just reaching for a possible explanation for why I perceive some minor differences listening to the same recording at CD quality or hi-res. I can't see it as strictly placebo, even if I'm fully willing to accept that quite a bit of the sonic information being tacked on in hi-res is lost on me. Was there anything good in there? If so, could you pass on a transcript? I need it for science.
because the wave form is different? That's the only reason. Even so, I'd bet the house that you would fail the pepsi challenge on this on a blind test though. Your rather elaborate and hand-wavey descriptions of what is going on suggest that you have an investment in thinking it sounds "different" (you can't see it as strictly placebo) If you think that unheard frequencies can change what you can hear - think about the logical conclusion - the room you are in is chock full of waves in the air propagating at frequencies that you cannot hear from almost 0 Hz right up to GHz. They are not affecting how you perceive sound because they are not part of the superposition of waves that your brain is processing. No two rooms are the same, no two times are the same, so the sound you think you can perceive should be different every time! With the logical extension that these inaudible sounds could actually degrade rather than improve the quality of the hi res recording that you think is better?
That's not right. We don't need to know what happens when sine waves, or any other sounds interact. We KNOW what happens. They sum. Nothing more, nothing less. All sounds are the summation of pure sine waves. Our ears are very good at performing - for all intents - a Fourier transform of sound into pure sine waves which are then transmitted as a discrete (i.e. digital) electrical signals to the brain, which is then reverses and then re-does the transform. This allows you to pick out a single voice in a crowded street. Birdsong above roadworks. It does not allow you, however, to determine if the sound has been affected by frequencies you cannot hear!
Yes, it will not be released because of a business conflict with one of the Sales brothers. No news on box 6.
I think there are two elements to this. One is at the scientific level, and since our poor old brains can only process certain frequencies, it's likely not correct to suggest things we can't perceive (hear) are affecting our enjoyment. The second isn't exactly placebo, but it's similar. That is, our own personal judgement on what we like, don't like, or hear. Runicen seems convinced he can hear a difference, and while I think you've addressed that adequately, you'll not convince him that the samples are identical. He hears a difference. But hearing isn't waveforms going into the ears, it's how we interpret those waves. He is interpreting differences, you'd argue there are none. BOTH could be correct. I'm reminded of people who believe super-expensive cables sound better. I've not heard it myself, but that won't stop others insisting it's so. I'm fine with that. On another note, I primarily use a Sony X800 player for music. A complete anathema for audiophiles, it's primarily a 4k Blu-Ray player (I simply must have Surround in my setup). Now, (very) far from high-end, but I had a Marantz CD6004 in the cupboard, and I decided to hook it up to my system to compare stereo playback. Honestly, for all intents and purposes, they sound the very same. I guess if I got super-critical, and gave it a good hard go, I could sense miniscule differences, but personally I'm not that guy. Still,I'd of thought some difference would have been noticeable..... Such is life.
As opposed to the "circular discussion that has been going on for two years with no news in forever", you mean?
I can't speak to how much is a "just me" reaction to what I hear and what is actually going on. That's been my stance from the beginning. I've also pointed out that CD quality is more than fine, so I'm not losing money either way the chips fall for any given listener. Something germane to the discussion is that the difference isn't there universally. This happened when I made the leap from MP3 to FLAC. In that case, I expected no difference. My logic was "I'm already ripping everything at the max possible quality, so what can FLAC add?" My first A/B comparison was Tangerine Dream's Phaedra, which literally seemed to start later on the MP3 rip because frequencies of the initial synth drone were cut off by the MP3 encoding. I had no idea before listening to the uncompressed version and actually hearing music that I didn't know was there. Compare that to a Devin Townsend record which is almost 100% ProTools creation and there was a little bit of extension to the low end, but not much to write home over. That was a pretty dramatic difference. Hi-res is much more a "luxury" addition to any given thing unless the mastering is different from the available CD quality version. On topic, the hi-res versions of the Bowie boxes released to this point didn't really add anything to the listening experience for me. That said, I'm perfectly happy for anyone who enjoyed those versions over the CD or vinyl releases. The enjoyment is the key point. I can waffle about what I think is happening, pro or con, when someone (even me) perceives a benefit to hi-res playback, but the enjoyment is the thing. I just think spit-balling about the how's and why's is entertaining.
The most important thing, and the one I'd stick with, is that you can tell a difference. Maybe you can't justify it, maybe there isn't a difference when measured scientifically, maybe you're imagining it, but it doesn't make it less real to you. So go with what brings you the most pleasure. This isn't life and death stuff, this is music appreciation. If you hear a difference, and it brings you more pleasure, then go that route.
I won't convince him; but it would be possible to - a simple blind test for example. nope, that is not his argument - which he stated clearly. Which is - to paraphrase - that things you cannot hear change what you can hear. This is palpable nonsense.
Thank you! I enjoy discussing the scientific parts of it, but I'm hard pressed to defend most of my musical likes on a taste level, let alone justify/explain my preference for mastering or bit-depth! Speaking of, is this a bad time to reiterate the fact that the Loving the Alien box was my introduction to a lot of this material and that I actually rather liked Tonight and Never Let Me Down? Nothing's gonna help the Glass Spider live album though... I can appreciate the... erm... "vision," but the execution leaves a little something to be desired. No, that was never my argument. My SUGGESTION was that it would be a possible explanation, which I admitted from the beginning came from a position of relative ignorance and almost pure subjectivity. There was never a declaration of "I know this to be true and damn the naysayers!" I pointed that out repeatedly. YOU are the one who carried on like it was a doctoral thesis to be torn down, engaged in speaking down to me, and generally made the entire thing far more serious (and unpleasant) than the initial light-hearted remark. I'm not sure how many times I have to say this out loud before I just assume reading comprehension isn't strong with you - however great your knowledge of waveforms might be. If you want to carry this discussion onward, you can do it solo. I'll even say I concede your point, whatever it was. I'm out.
Given I have long owned this material, the main value of these boxes has been to provide a reason to revisit the music. I too have gotten some (unexpected) enjoyment from revisiting the Tonight album. If you don't get overly analytical about it, it's a fun listen. I'll use the next box in the same way.
Bowie in general is kind of his own one-stop shop. If you want to rock out, you've got the Ziggy era and thereabouts. If you want something more contemplative and introspective, the Berlin years will do you just fine. I'm not sure how to classify Diamond Dogs and Young Americans, but those have their own moods to them. Likewise, Bowie's "pop" turn suits certain moods perfectly. Tonight is a tight little pop album. Granted, if you wanted "Heroes," Vol. 2, it makes sense why that wouldn't fit the bill, but I think we'd have a whole different raft of reasons to complain if Bowie was in the habit of re-treading old artistic successes (arguably, the Glass Spider was an attempt at revisiting the Diamond Dogs tour spectacle idea...). True, some of this stuff doesn't merit as frequent a look back depending on the listener, but it's kind of impressive how wide a net the man cast. I've followed a lot of musicians who covered a ton of musical ground, but I think Bowie might be the most wide-ranging of the lot.
