[Arny Krueger]

"bob" wrote in message


Here's the first paragraph of their Conclusion section:

"The results of this test indicate that listeners more
often than not identify high-resolution audio as being
similar in quality to the unprocessed analog audio.

IOW, they mostly fail to hear a difference.

This conclusion, based on listening to the audio scene
captured and reproduced with microphones and loudspeakers
limited to 20 kHz bandwidth, indicates that high-sampling
conversion system seems to be more transparent and
provides a higher degree of fidelity to the analog
reference."

????????????????

Here's what their data says: Out of 54 trials with that
limited bandwidth, subjects chose the high-sampling-rate
system as closer to the original analog feed 31 times.

I sense a conclusion that they were randomly guessing coming on.

That's not even statistically significant at the 90%
confidence level. So by their own data, they can't reject
the possibility that their subjects could not tell the
difference between 352.8 kHz sampling and 44.1, even
under the best scenario.

So much for the hypothesis that the audio CD format is somehow deficient.

What's odd is that, when they used mikes and speakers
with a bandwidth extended to 100 kHz, the high sampling
rate did substantially worse (23/60).

Random guessing sometimes works out that way. Reams have written by ignorant
audiophiles about the meaning of worse results than random guessing. In the
end, worse than random guessing is probably best interpreted as being an
indictment of the experiment.

If people are truely producing independent results, then their results will
converge to random guessing when they can't hear a difference. When they
are guessing wrong more often than 50%, the hypothesis that they are
producing independent results can be questioned.

That result is
highly counterintuitive, and the authors twist themselves
into pretzels trying to explain it, with no success.

They don't want to admit that their results are critical of the over-all
quality of the experiment.

So they're making claims their own data don't fully
support and they can't explain. I think there's no there
there.

Agreed.