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This article is bordering on pseudoscience. When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testi

This article is bordering on pseudoscience. When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testing and what conclusions can be drawn from that. If you do A/B testing of 8-bit/16-bit (which is a good idea) you have to understand you're doing the test through your current audio hardware. The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences. If you do this test through your laptop speakers you really might not be able to tell the difference. If you'd like to "debunk" the Pono player then do this test through a Pono player pushing music through quality studio headphones. Making things worse they're using Neil Young's Rockin In The Free World which contains, get this, large amounts of harmonic distortion to begin with. The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits. If you don't own high-fidelity music equipment then this test is like proving high definition television is impossible because you can't tell the difference between a standard and high definition signals on your standard definition TV.

aurelian15 11y ago
> The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences. Yes, hardware quality might make a difference in fidelity. Still, 16 bit CD-quality audio is enough. The marketing of the Pono player with 24bit/196kHz is just nonsense. And of course any listening test requires quality hardware to make sure it can actually reproduce the test-signal correctly. > The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8bit. With dithering, smaller sample depths only decrease the signal to noise ratio. There are no distortions. The sample is chosen "badly" (but that was by design) because it contains little to no dynamics.
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  Dithering basically raises the noise-floor by trading harmonic distortions for random noise at the cost of the last bit of information (for the uninitiated dithering means you randomly flip the last bit to create a soft truncation.) It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it? I have no patience for articles like this because instead of setting the record straight it just adds more pseudoscience to the mix. Their "experiment" doesn't prove what they claim it proves. Is 24-bit useful for playback? Yes it is. Do you need it for properly mastered audio? Absolutely not. But there are 10,000 home studios across the country who have music files at 24-bits and a large chunk of those engineers don't know how to master audio. Is a raw 24-bit track better than a poorly mastered 16-bit track? It is to me. Is 192kHz useful for anything? Probably not. Does it hurt anything? Maybe a little. I would expect a quality music player to go up to 96 anyhow so 192 isn't so bad. Similar reasons as before. Does this reflect badly on the Pono player? Not really. Over-engineering isn't a bad thing in my book.
  - dietrichepp 11y ago
    > It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it? That's not splitting hairs. Harmonic distortion and uncorrelated noise are completely different from a mathematical stand point. They also sound audibly different to my ears. Merely saying that "24-bit is useful" or "it is better to you" does not mean that you can actually hear the difference, and you include no empirical justifications for why you believe this to be true. Perhaps I could help you conduct a scientific experiment at home?
    - nerd_stuff 11y ago
      24 bits has more information. It's useful for mixing and in cases where things haven't been properly gain-staged, an engineer had an off day, a track hasn't been mastered, etc. Seems pretty basic to me.
      - dietrichepp 11y ago
        It probably sounds basic to you because you still aren't doing the math, and you still aren't doing the experiments. The whole point of 24-bit is to give you flexibility when the singer decides that he's going to whisper one verse from three feet away and then shove the mic down his throat while he screams the chorus. Or you can be sloppy when you set the preamp gain—just give yourself enough headroom, and you'll adjust the levels later. Notice that I said "later", not "never". Even the most amateurish home engineer with a hangover the size of Texas is going to adjust the levels of different tracks in the mix. Once you've done the mixdown, the levels are "reasonable", and you can listen at home on 16-bit system. You won't hear the difference. No mastering, no compression. 16-bit audio is still enough, once you've mixed a song.
        nerd_stuff 11y ago
        What math exactly would you like me to do? 16 bits gives a theoretical maximum range of 96dB while the human ear can hear over 130dB. Good headphones can handle over 100dB signal to noise. Maybe you should save your grandiose lectures for somebody who doesn't know enough to see through it. There's no reason to assume levels will be at a "reasonable" level and there's no reason to think a high-quality portable music player should only play back 16 bits. That's absurd. Should consumer level music players stop at 16? Sure. I want better than that but if you want to listen to mp3s on your phone nobody's stopping you. I'm left wondering how much of this anti-Pono talk is shilling on behalf of smartphone manufacturers. I need 24 bit playback in roughly the same way I need a car that does 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds - I like things that are over-engineered so I can geek out on how awesome they are. But thanks to all the killjoys we can't even get excited about the first high quality portable music player because some amateur sound engineers want to show off they once read a blog post on Shannon-Nyquist theory.
JohnBooty 11y ago
Everything you say is true and it's clear that you understand these issues a lot better than Neil Young himself appears to. That's not sarcasm. Superior components such as a better power supply, pre-amp, and DAC can make a big difference. Something like the Audioquest Dragonfly or some of Schiit's low-end gear can make a difference that can be amazing in some instances. But in every interview I've ever seen, Neil Young focuses on the high resolution audio files which do not make a difference that human beings can hear. He has also, in general, been saying kooky things about digital audio for decades now, ever since CDs became popular.
dietrichepp 11y ago
> The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits. This is blatantly incorrect. The 8-bit conversion is not truncation, it is dithering. Dithering to 8-bit does not introduce any distortion at all, whatsoever, of any kind. If you don't understand the mechanisms and the science of how bit depths work, then you're going to come to false conclusions, like the conclusion that there's any point to the Pono player at all. We're not talking about just "subtle differences" here. In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, you have to bring your audio system into a quiet room and then crank the volume levels well above into the threshold at which you can damage your ears, and even then, you still won't be able to tell the difference with the most dynamic music. So, suppose you have a quiet room in your house, with an ambient noise level of about 30 dB. If you raise the 16-bit audio level so the noise floor is above 20 dB, then the peaks are going to be well into the 120 dB range. That's like having a symphony orchestra in the room with you, at the very peak of their performance, with all the instruments playing at once. If you've ever listened to a symphony orchestra, you know that the background noise is NOT 30 dB, but somewhat higher. So even at the peak of a symphony, your CD recording should still be able to reproduce the various unwelcome bits of noise that the musicians produce (stomachs gurgling, breathing, shuffling in their chairs, etc.)
- audiosampling 11y ago
  Here is my take on dithering, with online demos : http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php (still 8-bit though, because at 16-bit, it is barely noticeable, and it won't serve educational purposes very well)
  - Pyxl101 11y ago
    Interesting demo! Thank you for sharing.
- nerd_stuff 11y ago
  As I ceded in another comment, dithering trades harmonic distortion for noise. > In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, Only for professionally mastered audio which is not a safe assumption in this day and age. If some home engineer recorded a track with too much headroom and you get the 24-bit track you're fine, at 16-bits you have a problem. I would love a music player where I could play tracks at 88kHz/24-bit because that's what most music is during the mixing process and then an audio engineer can give you the raw version of what they're working with without having to deal with issues of headroom, downsampling and dithering. 24-bit audio doesn't hurt anything other than file size and it has real uses, be it remix culture or just high-quality unmastered music.

aurelian15 11y ago

> The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences. Yes, hardware quality might make a difference in fidelity. Still, 16 bit CD-quality audio is enough. The marketing of the Pono player with 24bit/196kHz is just nonsense. And of course any listening test requires quality hardware to make sure it can actually reproduce the test-signal correctly. > The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8bit. With dithering, smaller sample depths only decrease the signal to noise ratio. There are no distortions. The sample is chosen "badly" (but that was by design) because it contains little to no dynamics.

nerd_stuff 11y ago
Dithering basically raises the noise-floor by trading harmonic distortions for random noise at the cost of the last bit of information (for the uninitiated dithering means you randomly flip the last bit to create a soft truncation.) It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it? I have no patience for articles like this because instead of setting the record straight it just adds more pseudoscience to the mix. Their "experiment" doesn't prove what they claim it proves. Is 24-bit useful for playback? Yes it is. Do you need it for properly mastered audio? Absolutely not. But there are 10,000 home studios across the country who have music files at 24-bits and a large chunk of those engineers don't know how to master audio. Is a raw 24-bit track better than a poorly mastered 16-bit track? It is to me. Is 192kHz useful for anything? Probably not. Does it hurt anything? Maybe a little. I would expect a quality music player to go up to 96 anyhow so 192 isn't so bad. Similar reasons as before. Does this reflect badly on the Pono player? Not really. Over-engineering isn't a bad thing in my book.
- dietrichepp 11y ago
  > It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it? That's not splitting hairs. Harmonic distortion and uncorrelated noise are completely different from a mathematical stand point. They also sound audibly different to my ears. Merely saying that "24-bit is useful" or "it is better to you" does not mean that you can actually hear the difference, and you include no empirical justifications for why you believe this to be true. Perhaps I could help you conduct a scientific experiment at home?
  - nerd_stuff 11y ago
    24 bits has more information. It's useful for mixing and in cases where things haven't been properly gain-staged, an engineer had an off day, a track hasn't been mastered, etc. Seems pretty basic to me.
    - dietrichepp 11y ago
      It probably sounds basic to you because you still aren't doing the math, and you still aren't doing the experiments. The whole point of 24-bit is to give you flexibility when the singer decides that he's going to whisper one verse from three feet away and then shove the mic down his throat while he screams the chorus. Or you can be sloppy when you set the preamp gain—just give yourself enough headroom, and you'll adjust the levels later. Notice that I said "later", not "never". Even the most amateurish home engineer with a hangover the size of Texas is going to adjust the levels of different tracks in the mix. Once you've done the mixdown, the levels are "reasonable", and you can listen at home on 16-bit system. You won't hear the difference. No mastering, no compression. 16-bit audio is still enough, once you've mixed a song.
      - nerd_stuff 11y ago
        What math exactly would you like me to do? 16 bits gives a theoretical maximum range of 96dB while the human ear can hear over 130dB. Good headphones can handle over 100dB signal to noise. Maybe you should save your grandiose lectures for somebody who doesn't know enough to see through it. There's no reason to assume levels will be at a "reasonable" level and there's no reason to think a high-quality portable music player should only play back 16 bits. That's absurd. Should consumer level music players stop at 16? Sure. I want better than that but if you want to listen to mp3s on your phone nobody's stopping you. I'm left wondering how much of this anti-Pono talk is shilling on behalf of smartphone manufacturers. I need 24 bit playback in roughly the same way I need a car that does 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds - I like things that are over-engineered so I can geek out on how awesome they are. But thanks to all the killjoys we can't even get excited about the first high quality portable music player because some amateur sound engineers want to show off they once read a blog post on Shannon-Nyquist theory.

JohnBooty 11y ago

Everything you say is true and it's clear that you understand these issues a lot better than Neil Young himself appears to. That's not sarcasm. Superior components such as a better power supply, pre-amp, and DAC can make a big difference. Something like the Audioquest Dragonfly or some of Schiit's low-end gear can make a difference that can be amazing in some instances. But in every interview I've ever seen, Neil Young focuses on the high resolution audio files which do not make a difference that human beings can hear. He has also, in general, been saying kooky things about digital audio for decades now, ever since CDs became popular.

dietrichepp 11y ago

> The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits. This is blatantly incorrect. The 8-bit conversion is not truncation, it is dithering. Dithering to 8-bit does not introduce any distortion at all, whatsoever, of any kind. If you don't understand the mechanisms and the science of how bit depths work, then you're going to come to false conclusions, like the conclusion that there's any point to the Pono player at all. We're not talking about just "subtle differences" here. In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, you have to bring your audio system into a quiet room and then crank the volume levels well above into the threshold at which you can damage your ears, and even then, you still won't be able to tell the difference with the most dynamic music. So, suppose you have a quiet room in your house, with an ambient noise level of about 30 dB. If you raise the 16-bit audio level so the noise floor is above 20 dB, then the peaks are going to be well into the 120 dB range. That's like having a symphony orchestra in the room with you, at the very peak of their performance, with all the instruments playing at once. If you've ever listened to a symphony orchestra, you know that the background noise is NOT 30 dB, but somewhat higher. So even at the peak of a symphony, your CD recording should still be able to reproduce the various unwelcome bits of noise that the musicians produce (stomachs gurgling, breathing, shuffling in their chairs, etc.)

audiosampling 11y ago
Here is my take on dithering, with online demos : http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php (still 8-bit though, because at 16-bit, it is barely noticeable, and it won't serve educational purposes very well)
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  Interesting demo! Thank you for sharing.
nerd_stuff 11y ago
As I ceded in another comment, dithering trades harmonic distortion for noise. > In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, Only for professionally mastered audio which is not a safe assumption in this day and age. If some home engineer recorded a track with too much headroom and you get the 24-bit track you're fine, at 16-bits you have a problem. I would love a music player where I could play tracks at 88kHz/24-bit because that's what most music is during the mixing process and then an audio engineer can give you the raw version of what they're working with without having to deal with issues of headroom, downsampling and dithering. 24-bit audio doesn't hurt anything other than file size and it has real uses, be it remix culture or just high-quality unmastered music.