Apple shares dropped 3.8%, 23$ billion yesterday. We can't call iPhone 6's effect on their shares a success even if they bounce back. We can arguably call it a flop.
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Yes, we are in agreement. I just wanted to add that detail.
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Audio Testing Confirms iPhone 6 Not Yet Capable of Direct HD Audio Playback
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Apple shares dropped 3.8%, 23$ billion yesterday. We can't call iPhone 6's effect on their shares a success even if they bounce back. We can arguably call it a flop.
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Yes, we are in agreement. I just wanted to add that detail.
One day stock performance is meaningless. IF so, then I will say that today's 3% pop show that iPhone 6 was anything but flop.
So this means the chip is there to do it. There is talk of s new audio format. This chip will be In all the new iPads. I do not see them holding this from the 6 and soon iPads if they have the hardware built right in. To the .265 arguments they have not started the store change cause they have nothing in there computers to off load the stress yet and the software codex is not ideal yet. I see these two things coming more out in the next year or so.
But while we can't tell if that 3% increase was related to the iPhone 6, we know that the decrease likely was.
LOL, because you know exactly why/how stock behaves. You should go start a hedge fund because you'll make billions.
You just quoted him as saying "You have enough information to perfectly reconstruct up to 22 kHz." If you've reconstructed a signal that's "the same frequency of the original signal," then you've perfectly reconstructed the signal while shaving off everything above 22 kHz. Period. That's the whole point of the theorem.
This conversation is bizarre.
Dropping three percent in a day is a drag but it's hard to take it as a major sign of anything when they came back 2.94% the next day.
Nope, that's a statement that screams from a mile away that someone has no clue how digital audio works.
Higher sampling rates provide the ability to record higher frequencies, nothing more. There's no "more definition" from higher sample rate, the frequencies recorded don't get any better sounding, just higher ones can be recorded. And those higher frequencies are outside the range of human hearing.
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I'm making an assumption about their 3.8% drop based on the bad PR that Apple received over Bendgate and iOS8 issues.
There may also be evidence that Apple bounced back because of positive reviews of the iPhone 6 (or something). But I haven't seen any yet.
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I agree. Not making a major claim. Just said that iPhone 6 could be considered a flop relative to other Apple releases. The word relative is key here.
Well, that's precisely the difference: marketing targets. Even if there is no technical benefits to HD Audio because it goes beyond the capacity of our ears, there is still the benefit of moving to another marketing segment.
The audio quality is going down. Back when I was a kid, the popular way to listen to audio was on a "ghetto blaster" with a tape player. That was not very good, but still way better than nowadays. Now, kids listen to music on a smartphone through a "loud"speaker the size of my nail. Most kids do not even bother with piracy or even proper streaming platform, they listen to music from Youtube at very low compression rate.
When you buy mp3/CD, you're in that marketing demographic. You're getting music meant to be listened on tiny-speakers at worst or on DrDre headphones at best. The whole recording volume is going to oscillate between very loud and clipped. The bass are going to be turned all the way up, to compensate for the size of the tiny speakers (or to go boom-boom in the DrDre).
When you buy HD audio, you're in another marketing demographics. You're supposed to be old people with hifi. You're not getting the same mix at all. You will be much closer to a traditional vinyl, with a good portion of the dynamic range, with a flatter response. And, that alone, makes getting HD audio worth it...
I listen to music all day long while I work. I just can't listen to radio or to CD with high compression like most do. But I have a lot of HD Audio that are rips from vinyl and, these, I can listen all day long without wanting to tear off my ears. Maybe it's the HD Audio, maybe it's the better dynamic range, but the experience is better in any ways. Moreover, storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. My HTPC has terabytes of storage and a movie weights more than several HD albums anyway (and this will be even worse with 4k), so storage is cheap. Even with streaming, the mobile data plans are getting huge (currently I have only 5GB but I could change to 20GB for 16/month including unlimited voice). So, file size is not going to matter much anyway in the future.
But I agree that it doesn't make much sense for merely listening to a phone on the streets. You have a noisy background, you have headphones that are not always the highest quality... For myself, 320kbs in streaming seems to work fine, especially since I don't listen to music that way for very long. Higher quality would be interesting to use the iPhone as a media center and to play on your hifi. But then, it would be better to improve Airplay to include HD Audio rather than to play it through the audio jack.
Well if you're going to put the goalpost wherever you'd like, you can consider pretty much anything a failure.
Michael Jordan only scored 58 points last night?
Avengers made only 1.5 billion worldwide?
There IS nothing more. A 22k sampled signal will play back the original exactly (assuming it's also below the input and output filtering, which is why we would generally talk about 20k signals, not 22).
A 22k signal means a 22k sine wave. If it's not a sine wave that simply means other signals are present along with it. If those signals are above 22k they will be filtered out (as they should be) and if they are below they will also be recorded perfectly.
First, aliasing is what happens when digital output is NOT filtered. Modern digital playback is neither "bad" nor is aliasing an issue with high frequencies. And all digital audio playback uses a low pass filter on output, it's simply part of the design of how digital audio works. It takes out frequencies over 20k, not sure where you got this 16k idea from, and it's not to hide some sort of problem, it's just a part of how the process works properly.
If you ever hear aliasing on output it's because you have a defective player that is not doing LPF properly (or at all). Any working CD player will play up to 20k without aliasing, period. That's just how digital audio works.
96dB for 16 bit is false?? Are you kidding me, that's just a basic fact that everyone accepts, and you're trying to dispute it? Seriously? It's 6dB of dynamic range for each bit. Six times sixteen is ninety six.
It's hard to believe but it seems like you don't even understand how binary numbers work.
Upper half? It's a sixteen digit binary number, not some weird way of splitting up bits. It's a range of amplitudes with 65536 possible values, so any amplitude in the range has that many options and anything below the low end of that isn't loud enough to get recorded. Bits aren't somehow split up, each bit that is added doubles the number of possible amplitude values. Which is exactly why it works just fine with something logarithmic like audio.
Wow.
You can't have pianissimo? You're trolling, right? You're saying when I listen to an orchestral CD and I hear passages that are so quiet that I have trouble hearing them over the furnace in my house, those aren't pianissimo? The ones that I can actually measure as dozens of dB quieter than the loudest parts?
Half of it is bad, for the love of all that is holy.
Quoted for humor.
Insert trippy Scooby Doo flashback sound effects here.
And I hate to break it to you, but CD audio blows away the dynamic range of vinyl and audiocassette. There also is no easter bunny.
Even more than that, as a sampling frequency of 2x is not enough. What if you just happen to sample the points where the wave crosses zero? Even if that's not true, you cannot tell the amplitude of the true signal. You actually need 3x the signal frequency.
The problem with this reasoning is that what makes a 20kHz square wave different to a 20kHz sinusoid, etc. are the frequencies above 20kHz, which becomes clear when considering the Fourier transform. That means that if a person can only hear a maximum of 20kHz, then it doesn't matter what shape the wave has, it will sound the same.
That's just a failing of whoever designed present audio formats. Maybe if Apple end up releasing their own high quality audio format, it will feature an exponential amplitude multiplier.
Except audiophiles have already proven that CD quality is enough: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
tl;dr: Boston Audio Society uses multiple setups of super duper expensive audio gear to test 24/96 against 16/44.1, and finds that no one can correctly tell the two apart
It's not that simple. Neither of those are examples of relative failures because they're both good numbers. A better analogy for Apple's big stock drop would be:
Jordan only scored 15 points last night.
The Avengers only made 1 million last night.
You could fairly say these are relative failures.
So true. HiFi is one rare example where electronic gadget does not expire. The only thing that need constant upgrades are my AV receiver. And when I said constant it's somewhere between 5 to 7 years.
An iPhone iPad or any "smart" gadgets on the other hand, expires within 2 or 3 years. Look at my 4S, now it has iOS 8 just for numbering purpose. Doesn't mean a thing nor benefit because the hardware is obsolete.
Now I will just buy the 6 or 6+ after it has heavy discount. Upgrading a smartphone is a pointless race to nowhere .. Sighh
One advantage of staying with a long term investment strategy is the market fluctuations haven't bothered me at all. Having continually increased the amount of stock I own each and every year for decades means it's easier to absorb the dynamics, one is far less concerned than those attempting to make a fast buck.
Even better than that due to dollar cost averaging market fluctuations actually increase your returns.
This is not news
The ipod classic has a pretty good audio output.
But the iphone and ipod touches??? The speaker is so muddy it's not even funny. And the volume barely gets loud enough to hear it.
The ipod classic has a pretty good audio output.
But the iphone and ipod touches??? The speaker is so muddy it's not even funny. And the volume barely gets loud enough to hear it.
this is probably a good thing for a while...
Even when it does come what can you do with it but only take advantage of the limited 24bit tracks for sources like HDTracks..
Like anything new, until it becomes wide spread adoption, to me, its not even a feature.
The users who can can tell the different will all like this, but me ? Personally i don't care, just as long it sounds good.
You can split hairs all you like.
Even when it does come what can you do with it but only take advantage of the limited 24bit tracks for sources like HDTracks..
Like anything new, until it becomes wide spread adoption, to me, its not even a feature.
The users who can can tell the different will all like this, but me ? Personally i don't care, just as long it sounds good.
You can split hairs all you like.
IF this new chip supports up to 24/96, then what stands to chance is that they are holding back updating the software app. It would kind of make sense in that they haven't started to release 24/96 files on iTunes and maybe they are planning a big whoopty do about it since they have to first get as many customers with the new DAC first and then once they have the majority of their customers with phones, iPads and other devices with internal 24 Bit DACs, then they might be able to create a big enough demand for iTunes content. The problem is this.
There isn't enough 24/96 content even available.
If you look at HD Tracks, which is the leader in 24 bit content download sales, there is only a little over 1,000 albums even available, which potentially another 1,000 to 1,500 albums as they just signed on another major record label that plans on releasing that many more albums. With only about 2,500 albums, that's just not enough content.
If you look at how many hundreds of thousands of albums on iTunes, most of those albums were originally recorded at 16 Bit and it makes almost no sense to up sample it to 24/96 unless they get decent filters to make it actually sound better, so up sampling won't really solve the problem.
So, the rest of the content was originally recorded in analog and most of those recordings won't generate much sales unless they have willing to buy it, but it's a VERY slow process.
Not many albums have been originally recorded in 24/96 or better.
So all in all, there just isn't enough content because they will only generate a VERY limited demand for a very small number of albums.
I think what Apple has to do is first get the DACs in these devices without making a big deal about it, and then when they have their install base updated, then they have to look at how much content they actually have and then do a major PR/Ad campaign and release the content and update the OS app to support it, so implementing the DAC now quietly makes more sense. It doesn't make a good sales pitch to say you have something when there is almost no content to take advantage of it. I think it's smarter to quietly release the products with a better DAC and then when they have quietly converted every and actually have a decent amount of content, then they can make a big stink about it.
If a 3rd party can write their app to take advantage of this now, then that's a 3rd party issue, but again, there's practically no content available.
There isn't enough 24/96 content even available.
If you look at HD Tracks, which is the leader in 24 bit content download sales, there is only a little over 1,000 albums even available, which potentially another 1,000 to 1,500 albums as they just signed on another major record label that plans on releasing that many more albums. With only about 2,500 albums, that's just not enough content.
If you look at how many hundreds of thousands of albums on iTunes, most of those albums were originally recorded at 16 Bit and it makes almost no sense to up sample it to 24/96 unless they get decent filters to make it actually sound better, so up sampling won't really solve the problem.
So, the rest of the content was originally recorded in analog and most of those recordings won't generate much sales unless they have willing to buy it, but it's a VERY slow process.
Not many albums have been originally recorded in 24/96 or better.
So all in all, there just isn't enough content because they will only generate a VERY limited demand for a very small number of albums.
I think what Apple has to do is first get the DACs in these devices without making a big deal about it, and then when they have their install base updated, then they have to look at how much content they actually have and then do a major PR/Ad campaign and release the content and update the OS app to support it, so implementing the DAC now quietly makes more sense. It doesn't make a good sales pitch to say you have something when there is almost no content to take advantage of it. I think it's smarter to quietly release the products with a better DAC and then when they have quietly converted every and actually have a decent amount of content, then they can make a big stink about it.
If a 3rd party can write their app to take advantage of this now, then that's a 3rd party issue, but again, there's practically no content available.
24/88.2
Let me reassure everyone here that does not have the opportunity to use professional recording equipment and monitors:
"Yes Virginia, you can hear the difference between 44.1 khz and 88.2 khz..."
Usually, I'm a 24/44.1 recording guy because I do a lot of rock a stuff that uses the Logic EXS and UVI samplers. But this opportunity:
Thursday night I did a mobile session where I got to record a 9'2" Fazioli F278 with two rented Neumann TLM49's in a big recital room enclosed within a building. I went straight into an Apogee Duet @ 24/88.2 and into Logic X on a Mini i7 with SSDs. -I'm editing in Pro Tools 9. The combination of the performer, the piano, and the microphones was amazing. See, the 24/88.2 takes care of all that super high frequency stuff that affects phase and that brickwall filter, etc. It lets us studio guys capture a ton of information (like shooting camera RAW and using the Pro Photo RGB colorspace in Lightroom) these dense recordings dither and downsample nicely and cleanly 16/44.1 Red Book CD-audio without any rounding errors. -I was going to record at 24/176.4, but I was advised against doing so, re: higher quad-rate sample rates introducing higher error rates, so supposedly not worth the hassle.
Anyway, it's classical solo piano, no EQ, no compression, no limiting. I was all over that piano like a cheap suit during test runs -looking for the sweet spot, then I realized, "Oh yeah, it's a Fazioli, it's all one huge sweet spot!" The recording combo with those TLM49's was perfect and has ruined me.
The 24/88.2 is better. If you still believe it's not, fine, but I don't want to hear anybody saying that they can "see the difference" between 2k, 4k, and 8k video, let alone the frame rates. ;@p
Let me reassure everyone here that does not have the opportunity to use professional recording equipment and monitors:
"Yes Virginia, you can hear the difference between 44.1 khz and 88.2 khz..."
Usually, I'm a 24/44.1 recording guy because I do a lot of rock a stuff that uses the Logic EXS and UVI samplers. But this opportunity:
Thursday night I did a mobile session where I got to record a 9'2" Fazioli F278 with two rented Neumann TLM49's in a big recital room enclosed within a building. I went straight into an Apogee Duet @ 24/88.2 and into Logic X on a Mini i7 with SSDs. -I'm editing in Pro Tools 9. The combination of the performer, the piano, and the microphones was amazing. See, the 24/88.2 takes care of all that super high frequency stuff that affects phase and that brickwall filter, etc. It lets us studio guys capture a ton of information (like shooting camera RAW and using the Pro Photo RGB colorspace in Lightroom) these dense recordings dither and downsample nicely and cleanly 16/44.1 Red Book CD-audio without any rounding errors. -I was going to record at 24/176.4, but I was advised against doing so, re: higher quad-rate sample rates introducing higher error rates, so supposedly not worth the hassle.
Anyway, it's classical solo piano, no EQ, no compression, no limiting. I was all over that piano like a cheap suit during test runs -looking for the sweet spot, then I realized, "Oh yeah, it's a Fazioli, it's all one huge sweet spot!" The recording combo with those TLM49's was perfect and has ruined me.
The 24/88.2 is better. If you still believe it's not, fine, but I don't want to hear anybody saying that they can "see the difference" between 2k, 4k, and 8k video, let alone the frame rates. ;@p
Nobody questions that a higher depth/sampling-rate is necessary for recording: the point is that after post-production it's not necessary to go above 16/44 in the final master meant for reproduction.
Jeez, I haven't posted (or even really visited) here in a couple of years, but I really have to with the amount of mis-information floating around here.
Great to see that so many people are keen on getting better sound, but going above 44.1KHz is not the way to do it. Aim your energy at something which actually makes a difference.
The sampling theorem is correct. Sample rates above 44.1 KHz, do not yield 'more resolution', it does not yield more 'high frequency detail', and it does not make the recording more 'transparent'.
All it does is mean you have frequencies above 22.05 KHz being reproduced where they weren't before.
Most amplifier designs and speakers suffer from IM distortion issues. IM distortion tends to leads to audible affects below where the distortion lies in the frequency spectrum.
If you pipe audio above much above 20 KHz into a pair of B&W speakers (with their resonant tweeter designs) or your Bose iPod Dock (which use switching or 'class D' amplifiers), you are going to end up with distortion stretching down into the audible spectrum below 20 KHz.
It is also important to consider that there is no truly scientific evidence whatsoever to conclusively show that humans can hear sounds much above 20 KHz, although we can sometimes hear the side-effects of this out-of-band audio producing audible distortion below 20 KHz.
Further to this, I'd be surprised if many people here can actually hear 20 KHz. I certainly can't, my ears drop off very quickly above 17.5 KHz.
Any differences you are hearing between a 44.1 KHz and 96 KHz audio file are not a direct result of the differences in sample rates. If the audio does sound different, it's either a different mix/master, the audio has been badly converted from one sample rate to another, or your DAC/ADC is not doing it's job properly (which I would suggest is the case for 'James PDX', Apogee's digital conversion is rather poor until you reach the high-end stuff which is also no better than stuff costing a quarter the price).
As for bit-depth, 16 bits is almost enough in theory, and certainly enough in reality. It could be argued that 20 bits would be better, but 16 bits is enough to out-strip the dynamic performance of most loudspeakers.
The nyquist-shannon sampling theorem is not something which has been invented especially for CDs or audio, it's been around for a long time and underpins a huge amount of science from the last ~90 years.
The best way to achieve great sound in the home is to make sure you have a good quality pair of speakers (ignore the marketing hype of companies like Bose, B&W, Harmon/Kardon, Beats, KEF, Philips etc) plugged into a good source (and amplifier if necessary) - Beresford make an excellent DAC which costs very little and can easily be upgraded with a better power supply and spend some time getting your speaker placement right.
It's true that a lot of, if not most modern music seems to sound worse and worse all the time, and is increasingly 'mashed' in the mastering stage. Avoid remasters as these almost always sound worse in my experience.
I work full time as a freelance recording and sound engineer and occasionally produce. I monitor on ATC speakers in a great room, so believe I'm in a pretty good position to be able to compare recordings in an analytical way.
Great to see that so many people are keen on getting better sound, but going above 44.1KHz is not the way to do it. Aim your energy at something which actually makes a difference.
The sampling theorem is correct. Sample rates above 44.1 KHz, do not yield 'more resolution', it does not yield more 'high frequency detail', and it does not make the recording more 'transparent'.
All it does is mean you have frequencies above 22.05 KHz being reproduced where they weren't before.
Most amplifier designs and speakers suffer from IM distortion issues. IM distortion tends to leads to audible affects below where the distortion lies in the frequency spectrum.
If you pipe audio above much above 20 KHz into a pair of B&W speakers (with their resonant tweeter designs) or your Bose iPod Dock (which use switching or 'class D' amplifiers), you are going to end up with distortion stretching down into the audible spectrum below 20 KHz.
It is also important to consider that there is no truly scientific evidence whatsoever to conclusively show that humans can hear sounds much above 20 KHz, although we can sometimes hear the side-effects of this out-of-band audio producing audible distortion below 20 KHz.
Further to this, I'd be surprised if many people here can actually hear 20 KHz. I certainly can't, my ears drop off very quickly above 17.5 KHz.
Any differences you are hearing between a 44.1 KHz and 96 KHz audio file are not a direct result of the differences in sample rates. If the audio does sound different, it's either a different mix/master, the audio has been badly converted from one sample rate to another, or your DAC/ADC is not doing it's job properly (which I would suggest is the case for 'James PDX', Apogee's digital conversion is rather poor until you reach the high-end stuff which is also no better than stuff costing a quarter the price).
As for bit-depth, 16 bits is almost enough in theory, and certainly enough in reality. It could be argued that 20 bits would be better, but 16 bits is enough to out-strip the dynamic performance of most loudspeakers.
The nyquist-shannon sampling theorem is not something which has been invented especially for CDs or audio, it's been around for a long time and underpins a huge amount of science from the last ~90 years.
The best way to achieve great sound in the home is to make sure you have a good quality pair of speakers (ignore the marketing hype of companies like Bose, B&W, Harmon/Kardon, Beats, KEF, Philips etc) plugged into a good source (and amplifier if necessary) - Beresford make an excellent DAC which costs very little and can easily be upgraded with a better power supply and spend some time getting your speaker placement right.
It's true that a lot of, if not most modern music seems to sound worse and worse all the time, and is increasingly 'mashed' in the mastering stage. Avoid remasters as these almost always sound worse in my experience.
I work full time as a freelance recording and sound engineer and occasionally produce. I monitor on ATC speakers in a great room, so believe I'm in a pretty good position to be able to compare recordings in an analytical way.