- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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There is a (very severe) example on Wikipedia.
If you try to encode a signal that is above the Nyquist frequency, you get all kinds of junk below that frequency instead. That's aliasing. It can happen when your equipment is not able to deal with the super-high frequencies. Some tweeters will have all kinds of audible effects if you feed them higher frequencies than they were designed for, because you're exciting their resonant modes.
Similarly, harmonics are the frequencies that make sounds differ from pure sine waves when layered on top of the base frequency. Ultrasonic frequencies can have harmonic frequencies in the audible frequency range. So while ultrasonic noise is inaudible, it can have audible effects that get in the way of the actual signal.
Dithering is a good thing, since it can mask quantization noise. Again, Wikipedia has an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:16bit_sine.ogg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:6bit_sine_truncated.ogg
The second sample was reduced from 16-bit to 6-bit with no dithering of any kind. You can easily hear the noise when compared to the original. What dithering does is "smooth out" the signal to reduce that noise, which comes from mapping a number of discrete values down to a smaller number of possible discrete values, thus decreasing the accuracy of the signal.
The brilliant thing is that dithering actually reduces audible noise by adding noise to the original signal, before it is reduced in bitrate. It replaces the offensive-sounding noise with noise that is less objectionable, while allowing the signal to be reduced in bitrate more accurately. Noise-shaped dither is even cooler, since it moves the noise into the higher frequencies where human hearing is less sensitive.
That way, you can in fact get a noise floor that is effectively lower than what the format is capable of if you simply calculated it directly. 16-bit audio is good for ~96 dB of dynamic range, strictly by the numbers. With good noise-shaped dither, upwards of 110-115 dB is possible, and you can actually make out sound below the noise floor.
It's properly amazing stuff.
Any release that is mastered as 24-bit audio (99,999%) will be dithered when converted to 16-bit, mostly just to be on the safe side. The quantization noise floor is usually way way below the actual noise floor of the recording, due to the inherent noise from microphones and so on. It's only when you get into lower bitrates that it really starts to come into effect, like in the examples above.
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Feb 6, 2015 06:55
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Apr 25, 2024 23:32
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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I can actually see one and only one use for these, if they work: electrical isolation for a singing Tesla coil. However, fidelity is not that high a priority in this situation.
On the other hand, most audiophile equipment has no circumstances where they are superior to stuff at reasonable prices, so this is a success.
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Dec 26, 2015 01:09
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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So that's like enough money to get 2 or 3 decent used cars, and they put a Wal-Mart special quality panel in it? Yikes!
You may have misread it as "10k". 100k is enough to buy 2 or 3 decent new cars.
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Jan 5, 2016 02:28
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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Courtesy of the Better Call Saul thread...
I think that what he's trying to say is that for a while (maybe even today), the studios clipped the hell out of CDs trying to make them sound "louder", which more-than-negated the dynamic range benefits of the CD over vinyl (where they didn't try to pull that poo poo).
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Mar 29, 2016 01:14
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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I can't wait for an amplifier that has nanoscale vacuum tubes.
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Jul 9, 2017 04:22
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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I use $1 earbuds. The cord wears out in about a month, maybe two, but it was $1.
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Aug 4, 2017 19:35
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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I spend $1 on headphones and make fun of the people who spend a grand on speakers.
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Oct 30, 2017 21:02
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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So they're trying to coax you into it?
That's really twisted.
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Dec 8, 2017 19:03
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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I buy $1 earbuds in bulk and switch them out when they crap out (about 1-3 months), and they really expand the soundstage of the podcasts I listen to while walking alongside busy streets or riding a bus. They even enhance the experience while crocheting. I highly recommend it.
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Mar 1, 2020 02:26
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Apr 25, 2024 23:32
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- Zemyla
- Aug 6, 2008
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I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!
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Why does it have a buttprint on the front?
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Aug 28, 2022 03:51
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Feb 6, 2015 06:55
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