Conclusive "Proof" that higher resolution audio sounds different

[Orb]

Just to clarify Jkeny,
when I mention difficulty by that I mean one cannot approach it adhoc and usually requires a methodical-analytical mindset to identify,isolate and with training (whether formal or informal and ideally also understanding-awareness to some level of human behaviour with biases) for repeat passing subtle blind ABX in the context of looking for small differences such as outlined by Amir and a bit by me.
As you say and others such as Amir these type of ABX tests cannot be used to conclude beyond the fact audible differences can be accurately perceived; next part of investigation is why (it is not IM if we consider everything posted so far unless one pushes their equipment into stress and beyond spec close to clipping/distortion - which some of the tone examples will do and/or need to turn volume extremely loud breaking comparison test guidelines), and then what implications this has on listening generally/long term/tolerances-threshold/preference/etc as examples.

Edit:
Furthermore using the right source material (includes all aspects including recording-processing-etc) is critical as well and understanding the component chain and scope of said test.

Thanks
Orb

 

[jkeny]

Just to clarify Jkeny,
when I mention difficulty by that I mean one cannot approach it adhoc and usually requires a methodical-analytical mindset to identify,isolate and with training (whether formal or informal and ideally also understanding-awareness to some level of human behaviour with biases) for repeat passing subtle blind ABX in the context of looking for small differences such as outlined by Amir and a bit by me.
As you say these type of ABX tests cannot be used to conclude beyond the fact audible differences can be accurately perceived; next part of investigation is why, and then what implications this has on listening generally/long term/tolerances-threshold/preference/etc as examples.
Thanks
Orb

Thanks Orb for the clarification
I agree with all you say & add the bit I found interesting in some of these ABX tests - the fact that some attentive but relaxed listening, without straining to pick out specific differences seemed to be successful for some in accurately identifying which files were which. The removal of stress, of the necessity to perform, improved the acuity of identification.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Sorry Tim, therefore if you say 3% thd does not matter due to what others say and the fact it takes trained listeners to even hear down to this % with blind comparison (plus the quote from Keith Howard), then you really have nothing to say about "euphonic" distortion or being critical of most tube amps (because much of your dislike regarding tubes is general), this reduces your complaint to only the weakest tube SETs used beyond spec.
Does feel you are applying different rules to passing hirez; especially when as we say ABX is about identifying differences and does not correlate with long term listening (could say the same about moderate high thd) and tolerance-threshold/preference.

You keep saying such as
But as some keep saying you are seriously and wrongly taking a conclusion too far due to the challenges of doing blind ABX comparisons for subtle differences.
BTW do you also have a very cheap DAC because it takes a trained listener to be able to tell differences with most filters; seems you take a bit of what some know about ABX and ignore the rest of what they know about ABX or blind comparison listening

Anyway I will be watching those other threads like a hawk I say.. A Hawk!!!
Sorry for digressing from the real point.
Thanks
Orb

Keep watch, my friend. But keep in mind that my dislike of tube amps is about much more than THD. It's about the noise, the inefficiency, the expense. Mostly it's about the fact that all but very expensive tube amps are under powered for challenging speaker loads. I dislike tube amps because they require so much more money just to keep up with good solid state. But keep watch. Sounds like fun.

Tim

 

[Audio_Karma]

Keep watch, my friend. But keep in mind that my dislike of tube amps is about much more than THD. It's about the noise, the inefficiency, the expense. Mostly it's about the fact that all but very expensive tube amps are under powered for challenging speaker loads. I dislike tube amps because they require so much more money just to keep up with good solid state. But keep watch. Sounds like fun.

Tim

I don't like tube gear either because you can only get about 800 hours of good sound out of them before the sound starts going down the hill. That's a lot money to enjoy that tube gear! I agree..

 

[treitz3]

800 hours? I don't know where you heard that from but that is not the case. 10K hours is more like it for *most* tubes.

Tom

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I'm sorry, Tim, I have not been on WBF for a while but I see most things are still the same - you accusing me of not understanding what you are saying & making assumptions that I'm off searching for your other posts. I was looking through some latest threads that I thought I might be interested in & came across that particular post of yours in the the "Neutrality & Timbrel pallette" thread. It struck me as cogent to your position here so I quoted a part of it - here is the full paragraph quoted

Sorry john, I meant no offence.

I hope you don't want me to repost the entire post - that just the paragraph will do for context?

No, that paragraph is more than enough to establish that the context was a discussion of neutrality as a purely subjective term. I was suggesting, in that thread, that my subjective use of that term referred to a system or components ability to reveal differences in recordings, and assuming that meant that system or component was putting less of its own sound into the reproduction. To hear that requires familiarity with a lot of recordings on that system (and others). The context of long-term listening is required. If you think that applies here, we will have to disagree.

Yes, indicates to you as an opinion but not as an established fact & your suppositions could well be wrong unless you have further evidence to support your position - do you accept that? Again, this is just an opinion & is not supported by the evidence. It is a supposition not supported by any other evidence, AFAIA.

Absolutely. What Amir has presented here is a single test. No facts have been established. I used the word "indicated" deliberately. The statement is, however, supported by the evidence Amir has presented here. The long-term listening expectations you and orb have been talking about here are not supported by Amir's evidence, or any other evidence I'm aware of, so if you're trying to say the two are equal, well disagree again.

In fact you are guilty of exactly what you are saying here "speculation, and a good bit of it is completely at odds with the facts presented in this thread" (sorry if this is quoting you out of context More evidence points to the fact that ABX when using focussed listening is very difficult to obtain positive results but examples of "relaxed listening" are also evidence that it is possible to pass it in this manner & it requires no particular effort (so in this I disagree with my earlier statements where I agreed with Orb about the difficulty of ABX testing).

Wrong. What I've said her is supported by the evidence of Amir's test. The fact that his tests are not "proof" has nothing to do with that. What you are saying here is not supported by Amir's results. I can see how you could conclude from what has been presented in this thread that it was difficult to get positive results from this test, but I don't see any thing that justifies applying that to all ABX testing. It coud just be that the samples are difficult to differentiate. And perhaps I missed it, has someone presented the results of "relaxed listening" tests here?

The only conclusion I could draw was that you felt ABX not suitable & long term listening more suitable but please correct

I don't remember talking about ABX testing in that post at all, but it would be impossible to test the neutrality I was referring to in that thread, because it was my personal, subjective definition of that term. The only objective, testable definition neutrality has, to my knowledge, is about a system or components (lack of) effect on a signal. That one calls for measurements, not listening tests.

But back on topic: Amir has presented a very interesting result to a single test here. It hasn't proven anything (though I personally believe in his result). It had indicated that differentiating between those files required training and a very focused, disciplined process that is pretty much the opposite of listening to music for pleasure. Taking these results to mean that these differences that were hard to hear when listening for them will become more obvious when you're not (relaxed, Lin-term listening) is a pretty huge leap of faith IMO, but you're welcome to it. We've disagreed before, and no one got hurt.

Tim
Tim

 

[arnyk]

Let's hope, for Amir's sake, that's not the case. I'd hate for it to diminish his listening experience, and it doesn't seem likely that a lot of hi-res content is forthcoming, given what we've learned here.
Tim

If my experience is any guide, heightened sensitivity to this class of audible defects will mpw afflict many people who do well in these listening tests for much or all of the rest of their lives.

I'm frequently in situations where I hear flaws that those around me, even those who are younger and presumably have better hearing don't hear. It's true that my hearing has lost bandwidth at the top and over-all sensitivity with age, but for things that are loud enough and low enough for me to hear well, many flaws that others don't hear are clearly audible to me. I still remember being at someone's house and hearing a low hum, and most around me didn't notice it. Someone's wife did.

One of the things that I'm still pretty good at is hearing a sound system that is on the verge of feedback. The years I spent running live sound trained me in that area. If you can hear it before everybody else and correct it before everybody else, people think that you've mastered the art of feedback-free live sound, which is impossible in some venues. You aren't running feedback free, you're running free of feedback before the average listener notices it. The same thing applies to IM.

 

[Audio_Karma]

800 hours? I don't know where you heard that from but that is not the case. 10K hours is more like it for *most* tubes.

Tom

Tom, tubes will last that long, I agree with you BUT what I'm talking about here is that your only going to get about 800 hours of *GOOD SOUND* out of those 10K hours...

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

One of the things that I'm still pretty good at is hearing a sound system that is on the verge of feedback. The years I spent running live sound trained me in that area. If you can hear it before everybody else and correct it before everybody else, people think that you've mastered the art of feedback-free live sound, which is impossible in some venues. You aren't running feedback free, you're running free of feedback before the average listener notices it. The same thing applies to IM.

A very valuable skill in a sound an, back in the day. I regret to inform you you've been replaced by a chip.

Tim

 

[arnyk]

800 hours? I don't know where you heard that from but that is not the case. 10K hours is more like it for *most* tubes.

Tom

10K hours is end of life for a very high quality tube in a circuit that tolerates loss of tube performance well.

This begs the question of what constitutes end of life.

Tubes that don't fail catastrophically generally suffer from increasing lost cathode emission over time. A certain small amount of gain and current-carrying ability is lost during every hour of use, and it just builds up over time.

The design of the circuit is signficant. If a circuit maintains a certain performance level even with weak tubes, then we perceive that the tubes last longer. Some real world examples:

If you had a misspent youth oogling the equipment, procedures and test results at Mac clinics in the days of tubes you got a practical lesson in all of this. It was common for lesser equipment such as Dynaco amps, to perform well with a fresh set of tubes. but after a year or two of typical use the distortion went up significantly and the available power went down significantly. MacIntosh amps did not perform that way. They would typically meet spec for power and distortion for a goodly number of years. If you analyzed the circuit diagrams of the respective amps, the reason was clear. MacIntosh amps had more and sometimes beefier tubes at a given power rating. Their specially wound output transformers allowed more inverse feedback at a useful level of stability. Another way of saying it was that their specs were more conservative. But, its different sides of the same coin.

Similar things happened when I watched a Fisher tuner clinic. I brought in a Fisher FM200 stereo tuner and it still met spec with two shorted tubes in the IF strip. The IF strip started out with more stages, and even if one or two of them were slipping, the equipment still met spec.

SS changed all of this because the active parts don't go downhill nearly as rapidly, given that catastrophic failure was avoided. Avoiding catastropic failure was not a given thing in the early days of SS, but that problem got solved. In modern SS gear its usually the electrolytic caps that get you.

When I was in the Army I maintained RADAR sets that had tubes rated at 10,000 hours. It was a lesson in the many meanings of MTBF. The RADAR also had well over 400 tubes. First cut at a reliability estimate suggests a failure every 24 hours or so. That was pretty well the observed failure rate. The caveat was that the typical failure was not a catastrophic failure of the radar , but rather the whole thing drifted off peak performance and after a day or so without careful alignment, it couldn't acquire and track targets anywhere near spec. If you wanted to sleep though the night, you peaked it up right after supper. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

 

[arnyk]

A very valuable skill in a sound an, back in the day. I regret to inform you you've been replaced by a chip.

Tim

Except a well-trained human can beat the chip every time. The problem is training the chip to know the difference between mild feedback and music that itself may be based on equipment engaged in acoustic feedback. The real problem is teaching the chip how to read music.

 

[jkeny]

Tim,
Back up the wagon a bit, there.
You were the one who started the conversation about ordinary (long-term) listening by saying that this test was of such difficulty that you doubted it had any significance for ordinary listening. You are now trying to say I made the leap in my assumptions based on the evidence here, when, in fact, it was you who made the false conclusions that I & Orb have been trying to correct ever since.

You also refer to Amir's single test. I'm not sure you have been reading the thread but there are many reports of positive ABX results, not just Amir's - I'm not convince dthat you really are looking at the evidence?

You say you can't remember mentioning ABX in your post & yet the quoted post text refers to ABX??

this is NOT something that can be revealed in and AB/X test.

You define neutrality as the equipment not adding anything to the sound & yet you state that this is subjective & not amenable to ABX testing?? Is adding something to the sound not an objective test that ABX is designed for? I'm really not following your logic. Can you clarify, please?

 

[arnyk]

It should be easy enough to test. Find some audiophiles with hi-res files they're very familiar with from long-term listening. Downsample the files to 16/44.1. Then test the hi-res files against the down sampled ones. Don't rush them or put them in a strained situation. Let them listen as long as they want, go back and forth as much as they like. Take as many breaks as they like. See if they can beat the flip of a coin.

I don't imagine anyone is going to be doing that test.

????

The above just happened right under your nose, only someone brought in some extra-crispy test files.

 

[arnyk]

Sorry Tim, therefore if you say 3% thd does not matter due to what others say and the fact it takes trained listeners to even hear down to this % with blind comparison (plus the quote from Keith Howard), then you really have nothing to say about "euphonic" distortion or being critical of most tube amps (because much of your dislike regarding tubes is general), this reduces your complaint to only the weakest tube SETs used beyond spec.

I have some test files where 0.1% THD can be clearly heard.

 

[arnyk]

So does this mean that as THD moves below 3% THD it gets better sounding in long term listening but yet below 3% THD can't be audibly differentiated in A/B blind listening as per Orb's example? Or is it the headroom that is the curveball you've just thrown in there?

With the right program material hearing 0.1% THD in a quick ABX test is a slam dunk.

I'm ROTFLMAO watching people continue to damn ABX and listening to short samples after watching it apparently prove the audibility of 44/16 downsampling, which by most accounts has never been done before.

The means by which enhanced audibility was obtained? Isolating the right short sample from a selection that was already pretty tough for some equipment to handle. Absolutely textbook, only not many people read and understood the textbook, it seems. I've been pointing this out for decades.

Either people are hearing this difference, or they are being too tolerant during the IM test or there's something completely new and different going on here.

 

[arnyk]

.

Well, first of all Orb, there are plenty of people in this hobby who think THD is not important.

That's because the relevance of THD is very situation-dependent. Not so much the operational situation, but rather the marketing literature context in which most people see it the most.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

????

The above just happened right under your nose, only someone brought in some extra-crispy test files.

Someone has reported here on the results of long-term listening in differentiating RB from hi-res? I did miss that. Where is it?

Tim

 

[arnyk]

+1

The idea with special attention to a tiny segment allows one to barely distinguish a difference seems like a big leap (maybe a huge leap) to the idea it validates the idea longer term casual listening can uncover differences not heard otherwise. Plenty of other knowledge about senses along with past history of testing would seem to lean heavily in the opposite direction.

I've been saying for decades that reliable audibility is often based on isolating a critical segment of music that makes the difference most audible. We observed this in the late 1970s when we invented ABX.

For example fact was posted on the home page of my old PCABX.COM web site back in Y2K. You can see it in the backup of that site that remains in the archive at www.wayback.com.

Yes, mining critical segments out of the general run of program material often starts out with casual listening. But the process can't end there. Perceptual coder developers and evaluators have known this for a couple of decades or more. It's just that not many audiopiles have a resident coder developer at their disposal.

 

[jkeny]

With the right program material hearing 0.1% THD in a quick ABX test is a slam dunk.

Right, then the other ABX test could be flawed or the devil is in the details of what's being tested?

I'm ROTFLMAO watching people continue to damn ABX and listening to short samples after watching it apparently prove the audibility of 44/16 downsampling, which by most accounts has never been done before.

The means by which enhanced audibility was obtained? Isolating the right short sample from a selection that was already pretty tough for some equipment to handle. Absolutely textbook, only not many people read and understood the textbook, it seems. I've been pointing this out for decades.

Either people are hearing this difference, or they are being too tolerant during the IM test or there's something completely new and different going on here.

At least you are open to some different possibilities that the evidence suggests. But there are more possibilities than you have listed. I too am interested in how all this pans out & what the conclusions are - if conclusions are reached.

Are you talking about me damning ABX or Tim (Phelonious) damning it as being of no consequence for ordinary listening?
My opinion is that ABX has it's place as do measurements as does long-term listening - they are each of particular sensitivity in revealing articular aspects of the playback chain

 

[arnyk]

Someone has reported here on the results of long-term listening in differentiating RB from hi-res? I did miss that. Where is it?

Tim

Didn't the people who successfully ABXed the keys-jangling files have to listen to them for a long term until they started hearing the difference?