Tag: hi-res audio wireless over-ear headphones taph805bk/00

In recent years, Neil Young has been the most outspoken advocate of “high resolution audio” or HRA. These are huge audio files that in theory sound much better than any other digital file. To put this sound in everyone’s hands and ears, he created the PonoPlayer, a portable device that promises the highest fidelity.

He is not alone. Last week at CES, Sony announced a series of new products with high-resolution audio. The main one: an absurdly expensive $ 1,200 Walkman, with hardware that supposedly optimizes the playback of songs recorded on it.

At the most basic level, the desire for high-resolution audio is based on reality. We sacrifice audio quality for convenience by adopting digital formats like MP3 and lossy encoding from streaming services like Spotify. A music lover should be concerned with improving audio quality using better files.

This is fair! But from there, the arguments for high-resolution audio crumble.

There are no scientific bases

Although the term “high-resolution audio” is freely used, it generally refers to music that has been digitally encoded at a high sampling rate and bit depth. Specifically, we are talking about higher rates than the CD-quality digital standard, adopted for decades.

Below is a Pono chart that describes various levels of audio quality. At the bottom, we have lower quality files for streaming; in between, we have the CD-quality 44.1 kHz / 16-bit standard; And on top, we have absurdly high resolution files that are 192 kHz / 24 bit encoded.

The logic behind HRA is that by maximizing the sample rate and bit depth, you also maximize the sound detail and dynamic range of the music you are listening to. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it is an absolute fantasy.

The CD quality standard, which is insufficient for the Young and HRA defenders, has not been adopted at random. It is not a number taken from the air. It is based on sampling theory and the real limits of human hearing. For the human ear, audio above 44.1 kHz / 16 bit does not show an audible difference.

Still, this does not prevent people from claiming that they can hear the difference in the highest quality audio. The “proof” that PonoPlayer is superior begins with a testimonial video, posted on Pono’s Kickstarter page. Young used his connections to the music industry to fill the PonoPlayer with high definition audio tracks and bring it to famous musicians. They, of course, say they got goosebumps and say that Pono is the best they have ever heard.

This proves nothing. I am not calling Norah Jones and Dave Grohl liars, but I am saying that they are succumbing to confirmation bias, that natural urge to see what you want to see, or hear what you want to hear. If Neil Young pushes a device into his hands and says, “Listen to this, man, you won’t believe it,” you will probably hear exactly what Neil Young wants you to hear.

There is a scientific way to overcome confirmation bias, called a double-blind test, in which two alternatives are presented at random, so you have no idea which is which. There are some issues with the double-blind test, but it’s generally accepted as a good practice, especially when it comes to evaluating something as elusive as the audio quality.

Young and Pono do not cite studies of this type on the benefits of high audio rates or their music player. But there were those who investigated this problem: in a study published in 2007 in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Brad Meyer and David Moran did a double-blind test with a large sample of “serious” listeners. In it, the 44.1 kHz audio was compared to “the best high-resolution discs we could find.” The goal was not to show which one was better, but to find out if you could tell the difference.

“None of these variables showed a correlation with the results, and there was no difference between the responses and the results of tossing a coin,” they write in the conclusion. I mean, people couldn’t figure out what the high-resolution audio was and what the CD-quality audio was.

In general, expensive hardware is unnecessary for music to sound good, especially if it promises a quality that human ears cannot perceive.

Neil Young even upholds a commendable principle: We should be listening to higher quality music, but high-resolution audio promises more than it has to offer.