Old yet still interesting James Boyk piece: the upper octave extension of instruments
- Thread starter MylesBAstor
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Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I've seen that before.
FWIW my X-2s use an ultra tweeter for the reasons given in that paper but truth be known they spec at 20 Hz-20Khz
Very interesting! Of course, Red Book CD advocates might as well ignore it because their medium of choice stores no info above ~21 kHz or so... 
I've always felt that the upper octave extension of the Maggie tweeter was responsible for a part of the speaker's magic.
Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Here's the specs for the Maggie 20.1s:
http://magnepan.com/model_MG_201
That ribbon really gets bats excited
Steve williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
Very interesting! Of course, Red Book CD advocates might as well ignore it because their medium of choice stores no info above ~21 kHz or so...
True that ... Now ... what would we make of HRx which would store up to 88 KHz flat , would that suggest that Hrx could reproduce cymbals better than any current analog? And Trumpets too? And Violin too? Finally HRx would be likely better for the entire Orchestra since it would have cut the mustard for the most frequency extended instruments ?
I am sincerely amused to see myself defending digital, so staunchly, I have been for most of my Audiophile life an analog purist.. Beginning approximately 6 years ago, I found myself listening to more and more digital.. My then digital reference (Burmester Transport and DAC) were that kind of good .. lately I have auditioned HRx and other top flight digital systems and in truth , they are as good and often better than their analog cousins .. I surmise for example that in the case of the Mercury Living Presence, even the CDs and the SACDs are in term of verisimilitude equal , often superior to the Vinyl... I have never heard a Mercury master Tape so I would not comment on these... I would however like to listen to an HRx of a Mercury master Tape ...
He is a big believer in live-versus-recorded listening "tests", the topic of my next blog article. He will not like it, I predict
He is a big believer in live-versus-recorded listening "tests", the topic of my next blog article. He will not like it, I predict
To state nothing of the fact that he references (relies upon?) the infamous Oohashi study.
Perhaps you can enlighten us how a reference, negates Boyk's data? Perhaps we should just bandwidth limit equipment like was done in the past. Perhaps Spectral or Magnepan should cut off their frequency response at 20 kHz.
Boyk also, if you read the paper carefully, added a cautionary note about the quoted study. It's obviously a bone of contention; perhaps you can offer up some more recent studies showing humans can't perceive past 20 KHz?
And just because you say we can't hear out there doesn't mean we can't perceive what's going on out there. What about undertones?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertone_series
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He is a big believer in live-versus-recorded listening "tests", the topic of my next blog article. He will not like it, I predict
I'd doubt that's the only area, or only person. Keith Johnson comes to mind almost immediately.
This is from Robert Harley's interview with Keith in Fi magazine, 1998:
Keith, how does your involvement in recording and designing recording equipment affect how you approach designing consumer playback equipment?
Keith Johnson: Listening to the microphone feed with a live orchestra on the other end is an invaluable experience. You hear certain problems - a granularity, or smearing of information, or lack of detail, or a number of other things that can go wrong. By listening to the live feed and knowing what goes on inside the electronics, you can go back to the bench and figure out what caused the problems. Usually, I have to build my own test equipment. Not only do I build microphones and the rest of the recording chain, I end up building test equipment as well.
One starts recording to have the thrill of making a permanent archive of a musical experience. There are many, many obstacles along the way. You hear things that don't quite sound right, that need to be improved - or in some cases done from scratch - to achieve the goal of making something that matches the experience of a live music event. It takes a long time, but it's a wonderful experience. It's the same with designing playback equipment. There is definitely some aspect of black art. But I wish I knew what makes timebased jitter, or thermal tails, or many other things so audible and yet so difficult to measure as an end result.
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Perhaps you should do a little bit of homework and learn what the scientific community thinks about the reliability of this study?
Yeah Myles, why didn't you do your homework so Ron could pick something else apart that you write. If you write anything that isn't a blog about how great digital is, Ron will be on it like a hungry dog on a bone. All of us that love the sound of analog should just give up and become digital converts because Ron knows all of the studies, theories, articles, and blogs written by people that know how to measure things that clearly shows digital is superior to analog and we are all just idiots for not seeing the wisdom that he is in possesion of. We need to get with the digital program and sell off our analog hardware and software to other analog fools and join the digitally enlightened like Ron. I can see Ron stirring his vat of digital koolaid and he is just waiting for us to take a drink so that we can become true believers in the wisdom that is currently escaping us. We are such fools not seeing the digital light.
Briefly, the Boyk documented the allready well-known existence of ultrasonic harmonics from musical instruments.
The Oohashi study essentially has been debunked. Before anyone hangs their hat on the findings from a study, it has to be repeated and confirmed. Maybe even try to improve the experiment, try several different kinds of ultrasonic stimulii, and report the findings. That is the scientific method.
The Oohashi study is how old now? No one has ever been able to repeat that study and come up with the same results.
The negative results from attempts to repeat the study by another group (at NHK, Nishiguchi et al ) have been discussed.
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12375
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=13185
The Oohashi study essentially has been debunked. Before anyone hangs their hat on the findings from a study, it has to be repeated and confirmed. Maybe even try to improve the experiment, try several different kinds of ultrasonic stimulii, and report the findings. That is the scientific method.
The Oohashi study is how old now? No one has ever been able to repeat that study and come up with the same results.
The negative results from attempts to repeat the study by another group (at NHK, Nishiguchi et al ) have been discussed.
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=12375
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=13185
Yes I read that reference and the paper was more about setting up the system to look at the issue of hearing response than a definitive statement. In fact, the authors stated that finding in their study. And it was done on a rather small cohort of individuals. But more importantly it was set up to look at filtering out higher frequencies that might have affected the original experiment (that's a possibilty as stated by Joachim Gerhard, designer of Audio Physics and now his own speaker line Sonics, on diy.com recently in his post):
My hearing goes to 16kHz on sine waves, still i can apreciate a tweeter that goes to 30kHz -3dB. I my measurements i found that "fast" tweeters perform better in the time domain. For example the "waterfall" looks cleaner even in band. Resonance higher up seem to "fold down" into the audible range. I also now about research done in Japan with older people that got exposed to high resolution audio with high sampling rate. When the response in the treble was truncated they heard a difference and the brain wave detector sampled a difference. One explanation is that higher frequency signals modulate down into the audible range, for example a 22kHz and 23kHz signal played simultanuisly over a nonlinear transduces like a loadspeaker makes an audible 1kHz intermodulation product 23kHz - 22KHz = 1kHz
And as I was taught, one experiment is no experiment.
That said, the reason I posted the paper had nothing to do with human hearing response but with the FR of instruments. The other issue was secondary to my interest.
Yes I read the first study and the authors stated it was a report on setting up a system to test human hearing response (the second isn't available and an abstract tells me nothing about the methodology and final conclusions). In part, they were trying to isolate some artifacts they felt might have affected the earlier study. In fact, they stated that these weren't definite experiments. Now I haven't seen anything else--but in science, negative results are not usually published so that really doesn't mean much.
OTOH, the reason for my posting the Boyk paper really had nothing to do with human hearing as you've latched onto but more with how far the harmonic overtones of some instruments extend.
I find your lack of faith disturbing. But welcome to the Dark Side, Luke. I am your father.
True. The question remains whether or not we can perceive them, and therefore need to capture and reproduce them. If not, then it's only for the benefit of cats, bats, and a few batty audiophiles.
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