AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - Analog/Digital Pepsi Challenge...(long-ish)

In article ,
(transducr) wrote:
Harvey Gerst wrote in message
. ..
(transducr) wrote:
i've seen rupert neve assert in print on several occasions that he
believes digital sound makes people subtly more hostile, frustrated,
negative...etc.

Well, I've been running all digital sound for several years now and
statements
like this really **** me off. All the people who think that digital sound
isn't
great should simply be taken out and shot. I'm really upset that the
current
gun laws don't cover this situation. Nobody should be allowed to use
analog
equipment anymore, which would at least silence that camp. 16/44.1 is more
than
good enough for everything; if it wasn't, it wouldn't be the standard,
would it?
All those "nattering nabobs" make me feel like quitting recording. Analog,
analog; that's all I hear, and I'm sick of it. I think I'll start carrying
a
baseball bat to silence anybody who isn't in the digital camp with me,
permanently. Screw analog, screw them, screw you, screw everybody.

So much for Rupert's theory.

HA! nice.

seriously though, maybe we could the NRA to fund the study?

*g*

Seriously, though, I suspect there are things that can be learned. I
think I have some clues to what's happening, but I'm no academic
scientist. I've always been strongly analog-biased in spite of the
obvious faults, and when I took Arny's bait and ABXed away on various
files from his site, I got some pretty unusual results.

There was a 'background noise' test. I flunked. I struggled to
perceive even the loudest level of background noise in the test file
(granted, I wasn't monitoring at very high volume). My brain tricked me,
refusing to hear the noise as noise. I had to AB very quickly to figure
out what was happening at all.

In the very same test sessions under the same conditions, I was able
to distinguish every last 'articulation' test, which was castanets
encoded with mp3 encoders and other lossy coding, up to what was it,
256K? 320K?

The weird part is, the alteration of the sounds on that lossy-coder
test is WAY less than that of the loud-background-noise test. Curious...

That's me, I'm the analog fan. I'd be curious to know if some digital
guys turned out to be very sensitive to stuff like flutter or noise, and
very insensitive to the sort of low-level inharmonic content generated
by lossy coding...

Chris Johnson