blairl wrote on Fri, 16 September 2005 06:08 |
When people claim that a converter sounds better because of the higher sampling rate, you will find a substantial number of people that disagree. Some people will dismiss altogether the notion that we need higher sampling rates to capture information that lies beyond our ability to hear or "perceive" and instead focus on the science of the ear in developing converters. In short, some people with considerable knowledge and experience find that higher sampling rates are completely unnecessary.
There is a line of thinking that says 96k sounds better than 48k and therefore 96k is better. Another camp says that 96k sounds better than 48k, not because of it's ability to capture super harmonic information, but because the filter design is easier to work with. They claim that a correctly designed filter on a 48k system can sound just as good.
Have you read Paul Frindle's or Dan Lavry's thoughts on this topic? Before you dismiss their findings you might want to read what they have to say and then ask why many people claim that their 48k converters sound better than other manufacturer's 192k converters. You might start to wonder if they are on to something.
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I've read them both, respect them both, use the Oxford EQ all the time, etc., etc.
As for the science of the ear, I think we need to incorporate the science of perception. We haven't even really nailed down HRTFs. How can we lay down the law about external variables, when we're still dancing around that area?
I like Prism converters, but I'd love to see a really well-designed test of
different converters using a properly selected human sample with the appropriate statistical analysis. Without some attempt at valid perceptual testing (and I don't mean the old A/B test), it's immaterial who thinks what. One would like to think that
certain external variables translate to internal perceptual ones, but without a good experimental design, it's impossible to state that with a reasonable certainty. Math and theory are nice, but give me empirical population data. THEN we can say what does and does not matter.
As a very early student in experimental psychology, I was fortunate to study under a professor who turned around the study of children's language from Chomsky's "generative grammar" to focusing instead on novel linguistic creations by children. He was able to set up test settings with some parameters determined by studying their natural verbal utterances and using them, rather than using only terms that adults decided were the proper ones to test. In other words, using something that had long been in development in linguistic studies ("grammar") turned out not to be the definitive force that others had assumed it was and the actual development of children's language, in respect to novel creation, was operating in surprisingly different ways.
In the same way, we have not really generated a set of descriptive tools that are derived from utterances of a native population that has experienced different converters, even a subset of "trained lay listeners". Just saying something is "better" is a limited and lame way to describe the variety of human aural experience.
I'm fully aware of the discussions about filters, sigma/delta design, etc. etc., but
unless you can move it over to the population that will experience the output, and I don't mean audio engineer/males aged 25 and above, then all that discussion, while amusing, interesting, etc. has very little relevance to a decision about what kind of converter will provide the end user with the most enjoyment. No one has proposed that kind of study, although it's quite common in experimental psychology to design such tests.
On the other hand, if higher frequency sampling rates make it easier to design good-sounding converters that would otherwise be more expensive in a lower frequency sampling version due to the expense of creating better filters, then ipso facto, higher frequency rate converters will sound better and sell better. Otherwise, we're talking about angels on the head of a pin.
What no one has explained to me is the reason a triangle in an orchestral piece recorded by Michael Bishop jumped out of the mix as being the only time in my life (up to that point) I had ever heard a recorded triangle that didn't make me want to grit my teeth. I knew I had to find that clarity in the transient and decay of metallic instruments, so that's the reason I switched to working with converters capable of working at the highest frequency I could afford. I'm hoping to purchase the Prism ADA-8XR that I checked out a few weeks ago as soon as they can confirm it works more or less flawlessly with Tiger. I already have an ADA-8, but I want to capture multichannel audio SFX at 192kHz...just in case y'all are wrong;-). I know one thing--it isn't going to sound *bad*.