The HD-Audio Challenge II

[Confused]

Please see link below:

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6713


I have just signed up for this.  If anyone else signs up, it might be fun to compare notes?

One point to note, there will be at least a two month period to listen to the various tracks, with results collated early in 2020. So might be something interesting to fill those cold winter months?

[baconbrain]

I‘m in.

[Axel]

I‘m in.

Me too.  I was in on the first one that Mark produced. I have several of his productions/recordings and the sound quality is excellent; some of the best I’ve ever heard. He also goes a long was to dispel some of the utter crap that is talked about High Res. See his latest post: http://secure.campaigner.com/csb/Public/...ag-fdfhmv1  His book - Music and Audio: A User Guide To Better Sound - is well worth buying.
On a different note - I hope he’s OK. He lives in California and in yesterday’s email he said that the wildfire that was spreading towards his house was doused at the last minute by a plane dropping fire retardant. The Santa Anna winds were predicted to start blowing again today, so fingers crossed for his, and everybody else’s safety.

[Confused]

There did not seem to be much interest in this one, only three of us by the look of it, but maybe some other forums members had a go? (and if you didn't try the test, the original test files are still available for download - something to try whilst stuck at home?)

Anyway, the initial results have been released. As a brief summary, typically those that tried the test found little or no difference between the native 24/96 versions and the down sampled 16/44.1 versions.

I guess lovers of "hi res" will dispute the results and question the methodology, this is one issue that will never be agreed by all.

For me, I found performing the test both interesting and enlightening, and the initial results are an interesting read too. I have always been of the view that the quality of the mastering massively trumps the actual file delivery format, and my experience from this test tells me that anything above 16/44.1 is bordering on being irrelevant. Controversial I know!

Even with all that said, if I was buying a download I would still prefer to go for the higher resolution version (assuming it is not significantly more expensive). I think this is based on the idea that the format nearest to or identical to the final master format is best. Not that we often know what the original master format was anyway. But re-buying something just because it is "hi-res", rather than being a better master, has to be a complete waste of money.

Initial results here:

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6928

[Axel]

There did not seem to be much interest in this one, only three of us by the look of it, but maybe some other forums members had a go?  (and if you didn't try the test, the original test files are still available for download - something to try whilst stuck at home?)

Anyway, the initial results have been released.  As a brief summary, typically those that tried the test found little or no difference between the native 24/96 versions and the down sampled 16/44.1 versions.

I guess lovers of "hi res" will dispute the results and question the methodology, this is one issue that will never be agreed by all. 

For me, I found performing the test both interesting and enlightening, and the initial results are an interesting read too.  I have always been of the view that the quality of the mastering massively trumps the actual file delivery format, and my experience from this test tells me that anything above 16/44.1 is bordering on being irrelevant.  Controversial I know! 

Even with all that said, if I was buying a download I would still prefer to go for the higher resolution version (assuming it is not significantly more expensive).  I think this is based on the idea that the format nearest to or identical to the final master format is best.  Not that we often know what the original master format was anyway.  But re-buying something just because it is "hi-res", rather than being a better master, has to be a complete waste of money.

Initial results here:

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6928

As all of the tracks are AIX recordings, they would have been mastered by Mark Waldrep, so at least we have a level playing field there.  I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between many of the tracks and the ones where I thought could, it was so small that I wondered whether it was my brain playing tricks on me.
Is my system up to it? I think it probably is. Are my ears up to it? Probably not. I wonder how many people who submitted their results just guessed which was the high res track as either their system or ears weren’t up to the task. I wonder whether the results of the test are accurate. One things for sure: I won’t be buying any more "hi res" tracks.

[Pim]

 Are my ears up to it? Probably not. 

Hi res music has the technical capacity to produce frequencies above red book CD quality, which is about 22 kHz. That's the one and only difference between CD and Hi res. Anything above 20 kHz or so is beyond the scope of human hearing so to answer your question; nope, and neither are anyone else's.

[David A]

 Are my ears up to it? Probably not. 

Hi res music has the technical capacity to produce frequencies above red book CD quality, which is about 22 kHz. That's the one and only difference between CD and Hi res. Anything above 20 kHz or so is beyond the scope of human hearing so to answer your question; nope, and neither are anyone else's.

Frequencies above 22.1 kHz are not the only difference between high res music and the red book standard. There's a higher bit rate as well, which translates into more discrete steps between peak volume at 0 dB and whatever the bottom of the dynamic range is set to.  

There's another possible difference and that is that the high res file is often the result of a separate mastering process, it isn't simply an upscaling of the CD quality data, and there is some evidence that they are sometimes mastered differently, with more attention being paid to producing a better quality master for the high res file on the assumption that anyone paying the extra for the high res file is interested in a better quality result.

I've just been rereading Floyd Toole's "Sound Reproduction" and he gives a passing mention to high res music vs CD quality. He makes the point that most people can't hear above 15 kHz (loss of high frequency hearing starts very early and many in their early 20's are no longer capable of hearing 20 kHz) and he completely dismisses the idea that anyone can hear the higher frequencies that may be present in a high res recording but he does say that there is evidence that people can distinguish between high res files and CD quality and suggest that it is probably due to differences in mastering. It's hard to argue that mastering differences aren't audible when there's a mountain of evidence that people routinely notice differences between remastered versions of the same recording in both CD format and on LP, and in both cases there's no difference in resolution. Mastering differences can and do make audible differences that have nothing to do with frequency bandwidth.

Basically, if the high resolution version is the result of a separate mastering process to the CD quality with greater care and attention being given to things like dynamic range and compression, then there could quite easily be audible differences between the versions. If, on the other hand, both versions come from the same master and especially if one version is simply a rescaling of the other, it's unlikely that there could be an audible difference. On my reading of the details of this test, the CD quality version was a simple rescale of the 96 kHz version, not the result of a separate mastering process in the studio, therefore there shouldn't be an audible difference and the results of this test say nothing about whether high res versions offer better sound quality than CD quality versions of the same music. If you want to test for that then you would need to compare the high res version with the CD quality release because that's the only way of hearing the result of any differences in mastering should the 2 versions have been mastered separately.

[Jean-Marie]

[...] my experience from this test tells me that anything above 16/44.1 is bordering on being irrelevant.  Controversial I know! 

[...]

This is my experience and conviction also, to the point that any high res tune that I got (because of the mastering) got immediately downsampled to 16/44.1 and that's the only thing I'm keeping on my hard drive...

Even more controversial

Jean-Marie

[ogs]

I recently had a very brief exchange with Morten Lindberg of 2l about 44.1 in 16 vs 24 bit (in Norwegian. The below is a short summary in English).
Lindberg said that for bandwidth alone 44.1 is OK, but that there is more to it than just bandwidth. If you look at the time domain, one needs higher sample rates than 44.1 to reproduce an impulse response without pre and post ringing. With high quality dither, 16bit may be sufficient, but he also said that 24bit is widely accepted as standard for studio use. As distribution is so easy via downloads, why not use 24bit for the end product too. Lindberg was more concerned with the fact that workstations often do floating point processing and conversion from float to fixed point introduces 'nasty' errors (without describing how these errors manifest themselves).

[bernardl]

 Are my ears up to it? Probably not. 

Hi res music has the technical capacity to produce frequencies above red book CD quality, which is about 22 kHz. That's the one and only difference between CD and Hi res. Anything above 20 kHz or so is beyond the scope of human hearing so to answer your question; nope, and neither are anyone else's.

i have read this claim many times and it seems reasonable.

However I, and quite a few people I have spoken to, can definitely hear ultrasonic catstoppers that, as far as i could check are typically specced at 23 khz.

i am not sure what to make out of this.

Cheers,
Bernard