Neil Young Has Trademark for High-Res Audio Technology

[knickle]

Let's be clear, DSD is not anywhere close to 64x the quality of a CD as the description inaccurately suggests. It's just a different way of encode audio and has it's own set of drawbacks. It is better than CD quality though.

Studios use PCM standard which supports sampling rates between 44.1 and 192Khz @ 16 to 24 bit depth. The reason 44.1Khz is still the CD standard for is because it's good enough. Your average person use bagain boxed surround sound speakers and inexpensive earbuds plugged into potable music players. Ultra high quality recordings are not going to sound better in these systems. The masses cannot afford the studio quality sound systems to reap the benefits.

 

[frankbough]

[citation][nom]redeye[/nom]well, you are deaf... anyone who's listening closely can hear the difference between 128 MP3 and CD audio. even on the standard iPod headphones. it gets a lot harder when you compare 256 AAC to lossless.[/citation]

Indeed, and this is way way above that in terms of bandwidth requirements. The *only* way this would sell to people is through the perceived improvement in audio quality, not through any real improvement, as most people are not listening in an anechoic chamber with top quality equipment delivering a flat frequency response.

 

[Guest]

If you just divide the frequencies of DSD/CD, it's indeed 64x greater frequency, but if you factor in the bit depth (1 vs. 16), it's only potentially 4x better. The "new" studio standard, 10 years ago, was 24 bit @ 96 kHz, but consumer audio veered towards file sharing and compression, resulting in an overall degradation of mainstream sound.
I doubt that Neil Young, at his age, can distinguish an mp3 from a master track, but more is indeed better.

 

[Guest]

Nope, I will go for MP3 at 320Kb, its good enough! Not saying this would not be better, if I spent a good amount on the correct gear for it!

 

[saturnus]

[citation][nom]lalapalooza[/nom]If you just divide the frequencies of DSD/CD, it's indeed 64x greater frequency, but if you factor in the bit depth (1 vs. 16), it's only potentially 4x better. The "new" studio standard, 10 years ago, was 24 bit @ 96 kHz, but consumer audio veered towards file sharing and compression, resulting in an overall degradation of mainstream sound.I doubt that Neil Young, at his age, can distinguish an mp3 from a master track, but more is indeed better.[/citation]

I think you have misunderstood, or don't know, the difference between PWM signals (single bit, high frequency) and PCM signals (multi-bit, low frequency)

 

[mcd023]

Having listened to dsd and 24bit/192khz audio, I gotta say that I welcome an improved audio standard. CDs don't even come close to cutting it, at least on quality equipment. But the reason CDs are (well, were) popular is price and convenience over vinyl and cassettes.

 

[nebun]

mp3 @ 128 Kbps is good enough for the most of the people out there....some of us are deaf anyways, lol

 

[santeana]

I stopped reading when I got to "Cloud Based".

 

[dkcomputer]

"Human hearing limite 20khz, need to sample double the highest frequency to be able to fully recreate the signal, 40khz"

REALLY? Why not say something else dumb like "You can only see 60fps" - seen any TV's lately? Or how about "You can only see 24fps in the movies" What about The Hobbit coming out at 48fps, try to tell me you can't tell a difference. All this crap people continue spewing is just like the 'You'll never need more than 44mhz of processor speeds lets make it a standard'

I mean really, we have gone through this for the last 70 years. Stop spewing useless information, anyone in almost any real-world application can prove you wrong. Try putting on shutter glasses that blink at 60fps for each eye and tell me the room doesnt seem darker. Its so dumb. Please, read history, and keep dumb comments like that to yourself. Try listening to some aperion audio speakers playing a bluray concert disk vs a 44khz wave file of the same song.

HOW ARE PEOPLE STILL MAKING THESE COMMENTS??? LEARN ABOUT HISTORY.

 

[Elsapo]

[citation][nom]dkcomputer[/nom]HOW ARE PEOPLE STILL MAKING THESE COMMENTS??? LEARN ABOUT HISTORY.[/citation]

And you should learn about science, if you go to aperion audio's site you will see that the maximum frequency that their speakers can produce is 22KHz, and this is because the maximum audible frequency for humans is in the range of 20KHz and reduces with age.

As for your eye experiment, you do know that if the room is simply darker, all it proves is that the sample frequency of the eye is less that 60 fps, if it were higher or equal to 60fps, then the alternating phases would be visible and distinct.

 

[Solandri]

Max frequency humans can hear is about 22 kHz. Average for young people is about 18-20 kHz. In older people it drops to 12-16 kHz. Mine is at 12 kHz from damage due to working with high frequency sonars. This isn't at all like screen resolution, where you can move closer to the screen to see the pixels. Moving your ears closer to the speakers wouldn't help you hear higher frequencies. The Nyquist limit of 40-44 kHz sampling is mathematically sufficient to reproduce *any* sound you can hear. Period. End of story.

As for the room being darker with shutter glasses, that's because the glasses are blocking out half of the room's light (which is when the image for the other eye is shown). It has nothing to do with the fps. You could run them at 1 fps or 1000 fps and they'd still make the room appear half as bright.

And as for newer TVs having higher than 60 fps, that's due to a problem created by movies being shot at 24 fps while TV is shown at 60 fps. 24 doesn't divide into 60 evenly. So when showing movies some frames would be shown for two 1/60 frames, while others were shown for three 1/60 frames. This create a very slight lag on certain frames which your brain interpreted as jerky motion.

To solve this, they made the TVs display 120 fps. Then regular 60 fps TV could be displayed with 2 1/120 frames per 1/60 frame, and 24 fps movies could be displayed with 5 1/120 frames per 1/24 frame. No herky jerky motion. The 240 fps TVs are for 3D shutter glasses with the same 120 fps rate.

 

[twelch82]

What exactly did he patent here?

 

[Guest]

twelch82:
>> What exactly did he patent here?

nothing... he registered a trademark, "SQS", which the article says is probably "studio quality sound"...

boring sounding trademark in any case... I propose "FuReQ", which stands for "Full Recorded Quality"... anyone, feel free to use it without licensing requirements... get your FuReQ on ;-)

 

[jurassic512]

I still laugh at these tech companies having recording artists like Dre and Young help them design something they should already know how to do.

Next you'll see companies like Creative telling musicians how to sing and write lyrics.

 

[saturnus]

[citation][nom]Solandri[/nom]Max frequency humans can hear is about 22 kHz. Average for young people is about 18-20 kHz. In older people it drops to 12-16 kHz. Mine is at 12 kHz from damage due to working with high frequency sonars. This isn't at all like screen resolution, where you can move closer to the screen to see the pixels. Moving your ears closer to the speakers wouldn't help you hear higher frequencies. The Nyquist limit of 40-44 kHz sampling is mathematically sufficient to reproduce *any* sound you can hear. Period. [/citation]

If it only were so that life applied to theoretical formulas life would be so much simpler. However, it is not so.

Nyquist only account for a small aspect of human hearing being the frequency range we can hear. As you note that deteriorates with age, and is large irrelevant for sound reproduction anyways as some of the best and most natural sounding speaker ever made, full-range Fostexs and Lowthers, aren't even capable of reproducing above about 16KHz.

What is important is timing and rise time. Human can hear differences in timing in the range of about 10-12ms which corresponds to about 96KHz minimum needed sampling frequency. And human can detect rise times in the 4-5ms range which corresponds to about 220KHz minimum needed sampling frequency.

However, even at these high sampling frequencies you are still limited to unnatural steps in timing which is the reason why digitally created music never sounds truly natural in the sense it lacks the feel of live musicians imperfections but instead sounds mechanical, like it's robots playing the music.

That is the reason DSD and other PWM/PDM formats where created. With a much higher sampling frequncy at minimum 2.8MHz you get a 16 times higher granulation of the signal stream which makes it very close to true analogue sound and thereby get the desired depth in timing and rise time.

That the signal is only 1 bit is irrelevant as the human can only detect rise or fall in rise time which is exactly what the 1 bit signal means. As long as the bits are 1s the signal is rising in amplitude and as long as the signal are 0s the signal is falling in amplitude.

 

[zaznet]

[citation][nom]saturnus[/nom]It doesn't take a genius to figure out the required bandwidth for 1-bit 2.8MHz streaming would be a very reasonable 2.8Mbs by todays, and particularly coming years, networks.[/citation]

How quickly will streaming this music cause Comcast to cap my bandwidth?

 

[bobbytsia]

http/www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000230.shtml

http/www.cs.tut.fi/sgn/arg/rosti/1-bit/

there is little difference in sound reproduction between PCM and delta-sigma except you can move the noise to a higher freq band (non-audible)with delta-sigma converters.

few can tell the difference between 90, 100 and 105 DB snr / thd / sfdr

its funny but CD player have used this tech for sound reproduction to improve the above spec for the last 10-15 years and it's just being introduced in encoding standards. nothing has really changed. this is just marketing. the average 1 dollar codec in a PC already uses these techniques.

 

[dreadlokz]

to hell with patents trademarks and copyrights! Thats why I LOVE internet =D Can't wait to get my mp3 collection in this supercool format =D

 

[eddieroolz]

I'd stick to my FLAC and a mix of mp3 for tunes I don't care as much, on a AKG Q701. It's worked superbly for me so far.

 

[kentlowt]

[citation][nom]Solandri[/nom]Max frequency humans can hear is about 22 kHz. Average for young people is about 18-20 kHz. In older people it drops to 12-16 kHz. Mine is at 12 kHz from damage due to working with high frequency sonars. This isn't at all like screen resolution, where you can move closer to the screen to see the pixels. Moving your ears closer to the speakers wouldn't help you hear higher frequencies. The Nyquist limit of 40-44 kHz sampling is mathematically sufficient to reproduce *any* sound you can hear. Period. End of story.As for the room being darker with shutter glasses, that's because the glasses are blocking out half of the room's light (which is when the image for the other eye is shown). It has nothing to do with the fps. You could run them at 1 fps or 1000 fps and they'd still make the room appear half as bright.And as for newer TVs having higher than 60 fps, that's due to a problem created by movies being shot at 24 fps while TV is shown at 60 fps. 24 doesn't divide into 60 evenly. So when showing movies some frames would be shown for two 1/60 frames, while others were shown for three 1/60 frames. This create a very slight lag on certain frames which your brain interpreted as jerky motion.To solve this, they made the TVs display 120 fps. Then regular 60 fps TV could be displayed with 2 1/120 frames per 1/60 frame, and 24 fps movies could be displayed with 5 1/120 frames per 1/24 frame. No herky jerky motion. The 240 fps TVs are for 3D shutter glasses with the same 120 fps rate.[/citation]
Everyone seems to focus on the sampling rate which is only half... maybe even less than half of the story. Dynamic range IMHO is where more focus needs to be. Of course today's squashed to hell music will not benefit from more Dynamic range... and it is true that probably half the people out there could not hear the difference anyways but, does that mean we waller in mediocrity or push for excellence?