Isn't that study trying to determine the best codec/bitrate for a radio broadcast?
Where do you derive this? The study was to determine standards for television broadcast... unless by "radio broadcast" you are referring to RF transmission.
This was at a time when AAC was only first being developed and was far from the quality of today's codecs.
Hardly. The foundations for AAC actually lay in Dolby SR-D/AC-3 which was developed in the late 1980's-early 1990's.
I'm sure the study found AAC the best one at 128kbps, but the title of that paper includes the phrase "low bitrate", so they were not looking at transparent audio, rather at what should be used for broadcast at lower bitrates.
AES specifically commented on transparency, however.
You can site all the papers you want, I'm not even sure what you're trying to prove anymore though and if you test a re-encode from 256 to 128kbps AAC, you will see the quality loss due to artifacts and compression that I am trying to demonstrate.
I already discussed this... I said it depends on the transcoder being used. Run of the mill transcoders do a crappy direct conversion instead of resampling the decompressed output.
I'm sure you're taking a very interesting course in DSP right now and you think you know it all, but as localoid said, you need to get your nose out of the books and train your ears to hear imperfections so you can start to question these decade-old studies and start forming an opinion of your own based on experience.
No actually I've been involved in professional audio and video for quite some time. I've produced professionally-encoded CD's and DVD's, and I mastered a nationally-released jazz album. I wrote a research paper on internet distribution of music in 1996. I have 15 years of experience with audio and video and while you're jumping to asinine conclusions in your ad hominem attacks (which is no way to substantiate an argument in a debate) I'll point out that during a mass media course in college, sitting in an auditorium of about 350 students I arose and went to the professor and asked him if he had switched on the video projector. He said he did. How did I know? I could hear the 60Hz refresh cycle of the projector over the noise of 350 students talking before class.
What irritates me is the assumption being made that I have no field experience and that I haven't used my own ears to sort things out. But look at it from my point of view... everyone wants to believe that their hearing is impeccable. You can't trust statements like that because they're loaded with confirmation bias. Scientific approaches filter out bias especially where perception is concerned.
What irritates me further is the confusing of Socratic/logical/academic theoretical principles in a book versus the hard empirical observation of science... Science does not rest idle on the pages of a book... Science takes the book and puts it to a practical, systematic examination to see if the hypothesis holds in the real world. But what I hear some people saying is that "No no... ignore the science. ignore the facts observed in controlled settings and instead take my word for it."
Why the hell should I? How do I know I can trust the ears of a bunch of self-affirming audiophiles who sit around and massage their Rotel monoblocks all day over professional engineers who have the ears AND the education to understand what causes what.
Maybe you'll tell me some BS like "controlled settings don't exist in the real world." This betrays a total ignorance of what a controlled setting means. It doesn't mean an environment so sterile and impractical that the results would not be replicable in the real world... it means an environment where other possible phenomena are isolated out so as to not allow any confusion as to what the root cause is.
As good as my own ears are, I don't trust them to tell the whole story... and neither should you. You can goad me with your stories of how audiophiles glued to their self-congratulatory message boards would laugh at me because of my insistence on book knowledge...
Do you mean to tell me I should not listen to SMPTE and AES engineers and instead entertain the opinions of those who speak without having even the cursory/fundamental knowledge of digital encoding and system design to actually know what it was they thought they were hearing and why?
If opinions based on experience are not rooted in fundamental academic knowledge, those opinions can lead down all kinds of corridors of aspersion and syllogistic nonsense.
