AES conference London: High Resolution perception, paper about listening test Options

[Kees de Visser]

Unfortunately I wasn't able to visit the june 2007 AES Conference in London about High Resolution Audio.
The paper/presentation about a high-res audio listening test seems interesting. I'm wondering if anyone on HA happens to have been there and can share some information.

preview of the paper session:

Monday, June 25 11:00 – 12:30
Paper Session 2 — Perception

2-1 Which of the Two Digital Audio Systems Meets Best with the Analog System?— Wieslaw Woszczyk,1 Jan Engel,2 John Usher,1 Ronald Aarts,3 Derk Reefman3
1McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2Centre for Quantitative Methods CQM BV
3Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

In this listening test, two digital audio systems (B and C), and one analog system (A) were tested by 10 test persons who listened to a surround sound scene “live” (without recording). The main question to be answered was: “Which of the two digital systems meets best with the analog system?” Both digital versions had 24-bit dynamic resolution but differed in sampling rate with which the analog signal was sampled. One version © was sampled with a CD rate of 44.1 kHz, the other (B) 8 times faster. There were also two test conditions, where in one condition there was a bandwidth cut off at 20 kHz instead of the 100 kHz that was possible with special 100 kHz microphones and added super-tweeters. For each subject, the experiment was replicated six times, in each of the two conditions. The outcome of each experiment was a 0 or 1, where the 1 means that the, technically best, digital system B has been chosen as meeting the analog quality. The paper describes the test and the outcome.

Without having read the paper, it's not clear to me whether the test was double-blind or not. Apparently it was not possible to replay sources, since the audio source was "live". How reliable would a test like this be ?

[krabapple]

In any case it appears to be a test to see which of two digital systems sounds most like an analog one, which is considered 'technically best'. I'd be curious to see the reasoning behind such a claim. Are papers being presented, peer-reviewed?

This post has been edited by krabapple: Jul 5 2007, 16:41

[krabapple]

In any case it appears to be a test to see which of two digital systems sounds most like an analog one, which is considered 'technically best'. I'd be curious to see the reasoning behind such a claim. Are papers being presented, peer-reviewed?

So far though I haven't been able to find any details of the presentation. From the abstract , if nothing else it looks to me like M&M's sample pool was much deeper....

FWIW, John Atkinson is touting this presentation as evidence against the claims of Meyer and Moran's paper, in the current Stereophile (not online yet)

Here's what he wrote about it in September:

http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/907awsi/

I will end this month's essay by quoting, from a paper given at the conference, the results of experiments on the audibility of high sampling rates: "To achieve a higher degree of fidelity to the live analog reference, we need to convert audio using a high sampling rate even when we do not use microphones and loudspeakers having bandwidth extended far beyond 20kHz. Listeners judge high sampling conversion as sounding more like the analog reference when listening to standard audio bandwidth." (footnote 2)

So that's that, then.

And a month alter he reports a blind test he participated in with various sample rates and mp3 bitrates

http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/1007awsi/

I suspect he's full of shit, frankly, at least as far as getting the whole story, is concerned.

This post has been edited by krabapple: Dec 10 2007, 08:51

[Kees de Visser]

So far though I haven't been able to find any details of the presentation. From the abstract , if nothing else it looks to me like M&M's sample pool was much deeper....

Finally the paper is online as pdf here. I've had a copy for quite some time but discussion is difficult until a paper becomes publicly available.
Enjoy. It's one of those tests the high-resolution proponents have been waiting for.

Kees de Visser

This post has been edited by Kees de Visser: Dec 10 2007, 11:04