Have you ever regretted ABXing?, How has it changed your feelings about your stuff? Options

[BearcatSandor]

By "stuff" i mean equipment and music?

Have you ever ABXed something and found yourself not enjoying it as much as you did now that you know it's not all you thought it to be? Has the opposite ever happened to you?

I don't have the set up to ABX sound files yet (i'm a Linux user and both options seem to be dead). After participating in this forum for only a few days and reading of others experiences with 24-bit vs 16-bit music i'm now looking at my 24-bit collection of DVD-As, SACDs and 24-bit Studio Master downloads and thinking "..Damn it?" with a bit of confusion. I don't feel as secure with them anymore. I thought i had the 'best' sound i could get which is always a goal for folks like me.

Conversely, i might enjoy my redbook CDs more now as i won't be thinking "well they aren't 24-bit :"( " and i might not be hearing deficits that aren't really there.

I'm not sure how to feel about that.

I'm sure i'm not the only one here who's gone though this. Some of you started out as 'audiofools' too, right? How did you deal with this?

In a sense i'm kinda feeling "No, i don't want to look up ABX testing for loudspeakers. I waited 10 years for just the right pair to come to me and i really don't want to know that my $2.5k Anthony Gallo Acoustic Reference 3.1s are 'the same' as a pair of BestBuy specials." That's a bit of an exaggeration given how different speakers can be ...at least i think it is.

I'm uncertain. Honestly, i think i'm changing quickly and looking for support.

So how did you deal when the ABXing didn't work out how how you hoped it might?

Thanks

edit: Brought it back on-topic a bit.

This post has been edited by BearcatSandor: Nov 3 2010, 21:59

[greynol]

While that may be, this forum requires different criteria from those who claim they can perceive an audible difference.

NB that I am not suggesting that you are making such claims.

Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but when you're talking about peak amplitudes, is this including the ambient noise of the listening area or not? It most certainly makes a difference!

[Josh358]

While that may be, this forum requires different criteria from those who claim they can perceive an audible difference.

NB that I am not suggesting that you are making such claims.

Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but when you're talking about peak amplitudes, is this including the ambient noise of the listening area or not? It most certainly makes a difference!

I hope I'm not violating the rules of the forum. I came directly to this thread after seeing a post on another forum and these are my first posts here. In any case, no, I'm not making any personal claims. I've never heard noise from a fully digital 16 bit recording played at natural levels, either at home or in the studio, though I'm intrigued enough that when I get my system set up again (it's in the attic while my listening room is renovated) I may try a calibrated experiment. I was just referring to the Meyer-Moran results.

Surprisingly, to me, anyway, Fielder found that the noise of a quiet home listening room was below the threshold of hearing, and that the noise in an average room wasn't far enough above it to mask noise in a recording:

"The level of typical listening-room noise is assessed by two further studies. The first of these, by this author, examines 10 home listening rooms to produce an average noise curve, while the second, by Cohen and Fielder, examines 27 home listening rooms and produces minimum, maximum, and average noise spectra. Since both studies produce similar averages for home listening-room noise, Fig. 6 shows the minimum, average, and maximum noise spectrum levels from only the second study.

"Fig. 6 shows that the average noise spectrum of the home listening rooms surveyed possesses noise levels above 400 Hz that are no higher than 10 dB above the hearing threshold criterion. This, combined with the fact that the listener is able to employ directional clues, means that generally the home listening-room noise has no effect on reducing the dynamic-range requirements. Examination of the minimum noise levels for each one- third-octave frequency point shows that the most quiet home playback conditions have extremely low noise levels in the frequency bands above 2 kHz, critical to the detection of white noise. In this frequency region the lowest room noise situations are at least 10 dB below the hearing acuity curve."

http://www.zainea.com/Dynamic%20range.htm

On the other hand, according to Meyer and Moran, "The background noise level in [the room used for the ABX comparisons] is lower than that in most urban listening rooms: –19 dBA."

http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/explanation.htm

So strictly speaking, their result seems to be applicable only to the quietest listening rooms.

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

Surprisingly, to me, anyway, Fielder found that the noise of a quiet home listening room was below the threshold of hearing, and that the noise in an average room wasn't far enough above it to mask noise in a recording:

There seems to be a critical missing paragraph in the Fielder paper. It might be titled "Noise in recording Environments".

The paper as presented usecontains an unstated assumption that appears to me to be something like: "The dynamic range requirement for musical playback is irrelevant to noise in the space where the music is recorded."

IME, the space in which the recording is made is actually the weakest link. Large spaces are very expensive to make really quiet, and then you go and spoil the whole thing by putting performers into it. If you add an audience, then its close micing or lotsa noise, mostly both.

I see the Fielder paper as being a justification for HDCD, which we now know failed in the marketplace. IME the reason why is that due to the relatively high levels of noise in spaces used for recording, HDCD like SACD and DVD-A is a solution looking for a problem. It appears that SACD and DVD-A have also failed or are in the later stages of failing in the marketplace.

[Josh358]

There seems to be a critical missing paragraph in the Fielder paper. It might be titled "Noise in recording Environments".

The paper as presented usecontains an unstated assumption that appears to me to be something like: "The dynamic range requirement for musical playback is irrelevant to noise in the space where the music is recorded."

IME, the space in which the recording is made is actually the weakest link. Large spaces are very expensive to make really quiet, and then you go and spoil the whole thing by putting performers into it. If you add an audience, then its close micing or lotsa noise, mostly both.

I see the Fielder paper as being a justification for HDCD, which we now know failed in the marketplace. IME the reason why is that due to the relatively high levels of noise in spaces used for recording, HDCD like SACD and DVD-A is a solution looking for a problem. It appears that SACD and DVD-A have also failed or are in the later stages of failing in the marketplace.

Look again, it is there: Section 4.1, Noise in the Recording Environment.

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

There seems to be a critical missing paragraph in the Fielder paper. It might be titled "Noise in recording Environments".

The paper as presented usecontains an unstated assumption that appears to me to be something like: "The dynamic range requirement for musical playback is irrelevant to noise in the space where the music is recorded."

IME, the space in which the recording is made is actually the weakest link. Large spaces are very expensive to make really quiet, and then you go and spoil the whole thing by putting performers into it. If you add an audience, then its close micing or lotsa noise, mostly both.

I see the Fielder paper as being a justification for HDCD, which we now know failed in the marketplace. IME the reason why is that due to the relatively high levels of noise in spaces used for recording, HDCD like SACD and DVD-A is a solution looking for a problem. It appears that SACD and DVD-A have also failed or are in the later stages of failing in the marketplace.

Look again, it is there: Section 4.1, Noise in the Recording Environment.

No, data about totally empty rooms is *not* relevant, at least until we start generally making recordings in totally empty rooms. I think there's only one piece of music that could be recorded this way. It was written by John Cage, if memory serves. ;-)

There are also quieter rooms than those. I think one of them is in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. If data is going to be relevant it has to have a useful level of generality.

[Josh358]

No, data about totally empty rooms is *not* relevant, at least until we start generally making recordings in totally empty rooms. I think there's only one piece of music that could be recorded this way. It was written by John Cage, if memory serves. ;-)

There are also quieter rooms than those. I think one of them is in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. If data is going to be relevant it has to have a useful level of generality.

Do you have any reason to believe that the sounds made by the musicians are universally sufficient to mask the dither noise? After all, two of the Meyer-Moran subjects were able to detect the 16 bit noise floor with the peak level set to 115 DB. This despite the listeners' self noise (how's that for a new term?) and the possible presence of others in the room (I don't know enough about the experimental details to know if others were present).

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

No, data about totally empty rooms is *not* relevant, at least until we start generally making recordings in totally empty rooms. I think there's only one piece of music that could be recorded this way. It was written by John Cage, if memory serves. ;-)

There are also quieter rooms than those. I think one of them is in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. If data is going to be relevant it has to have a useful level of generality.

Do you have any reason to believe that the sounds made by the musicians are universally sufficient to mask the dither noise?

Die to the high levels of generality indicted above ("universally sufficient") the asnwer to the qustion has to be "no".

After all, two of the Meyer-Moran subjects were able to detect the 16 bit noise floor with the peak level set to 115 DB.

As I read it, the paper describes the 16 bit noise floor as that produced by "conventionally dithered digital audio equipment". I take that to mean spectrally *unshaped* dither. Since the 16 bit (or any other) noise floor can and often is shaped to a very large degree with significant subjectively-perceived benefits, the choice of conditions for characterizing 16 bit encoding used in the paper seems to be unfortunate and perhaps even prejudicial.