Hard / Software for testing Very High quality Audio equipment

Hi folks
Are there any pieces of hardware or software out there now in these days of mp3 compressed muisc, hideous cheap ear bud phones and poor computer speakers to do a really old fashioned "Stress test" of high end (almost studio quality) Audio Gear.

Years ago there were loads of "CD" samplers to test this (probably a load of youngsters now will be saying "What's a CD" !!!

E.g these sorts of discs from way back in 1983.




Cheers
jimbo

It mainly depends on how you like to define "old fashioned". There exists no linear relationship between the magnitude of a given type of distortion, or 'error' and how severely it detracts from the music listening experience. It is perfectly possible to build a system that measures accurately, but is simply not satisfying. 'Studio quality' can also be a marketing term above anything else, and, even in situations where it factually is not, it is still possible for an audio engineer to choose the kind of loudspeakers that are inclined to exaggerate certain characteristics of the sound, purposefully, to be able to better hear those specific things that are getting engineered. That is, rather than choosing the kind of loudspeakers that make the actual music listening experience itself more enjoyable. I take it that the purpose of music is for it to be enjoyed, so that's a problem then.

Surprisingly however, the majority of engineers who design the gear are more occupied with making graphs and measurements look great on paper than they are occupied with trying to learn about how human hearing works─the science of pyschoacoustics. A demo CD played through flattering, or 'colored' HiFi speakers only serves one goal. It's to try to impress a potential customer over the course of just a few minutes as much as possible. If you're not accustomed to listening to a neutral sound signature, then neutral sounds dull and boring on first impression. Yet, neutral is the only way to go if you want to hear real detail. A lot of patience is needed if the goal is to let your ears adapt. Being old fashioned, it took me several weeks to, in a meaningful way, judge the sound quality of what I currently have. For that, I didn't actually even use any kind of rapid A/B switching whatsoever. Only use longer sessions (full albums) and don't try to listen for differences. Listening for differences as opposed to listening for music is what causes a person to hear differences as opposed to hear music, and, in addition to this, I strongly recommend NOT to use audio CDs for making reliable audio gear comparisons BTW.

Finally, because we have memory, listening to the same recording twice is one of the best ways to get yourself doubly confused, and is among several reasons why blind listening tests (also including double-blind listening tests) are fundamentally flawed. A lot of people (mostly audio egalitarians and self-professed ojectivists) will tell you that double-blind listening tests (e.g., ABX comparison tests) are the only way to eliminate 'hearing bias'. But the assumption, that these test results will NOT be skewed heavily toward 'hearing no difference' is blatantly false. To elaborate, those who love to pay attention to musical details are often familiar with the fact that it is possible for an inferior, 'veiled', playback system to repeatedly─and with 100% consistency rate─prevent a listener from hearing subtle details in a recording that, after the listener has heard these subtle details for the first time ever (i.e. by switching to a more revealing playback system), the listener can go back to the inferior playback system and will always hear these subtle details.

Hi there
I was thinking of perhaps a super high quality Audio stream that could be fed into now the very high quality of Genuine fibre optic Internet connections --here in Iceland even for domestic consumers 1 Tbps streams are being tested while most places world wide don't even have 1 Gbps yet.

Not sure though even in this country -- now with one of the highest incomes in the world -- a huge difference from my Grandad's day when we were really poor with outside loos etc (and using those in minus 15 deg C was an experience !!!) whether domestic consumers really need 1 Tbps -- better in my view to ensure everybody has at least 1 Gbps before really going crazy on this stuff.

To any Brits -- not getting too involved in politics but Iceland's real economy took off like a rocket after aligning itself to the EU via EEA membership.

Nobody wants to undo that -- Perhaps you guys should look at that possibility if re-joining the EU is a step too far -- you've so many problems over there which only international solutions can solve -- I regularly visit so I'm not "biased".

Brexit was and is a100% disaster for you lot.

We voted 90% EEA membership and non EU / Euro, but also for Schengen and the CU and Single Market. Best of all worlds.

Cheers

and happy Easter to everybody before that is banned by the Woke brigade.


jimbo

Higher bitrate does not always translate to getting better sound, though. It's just that the transition band of digital (FIR) filters commonly used for audio CD content is too narrow to be able to eliminate pre-ringing, post-ringing and group delay (phase shift) artifacts that can become audible. Similarly, the noise floor of a 16-bit PCM channel can become audible, whereas, unlike PCM, a 1-bit quantizer (used in the DSD format) cannot sufficiently be dithered so DSD is not suitable for high resolution audio applications, either in terms of practicality or in terms of fidelity.

There's actually more samples now than ever - at the highest level of quality too (by current standards). For example - Chesky Records:


There's also a digital version at bandcamp:


I don't get the "stress test" part - since you don't that's now how you verify sound quality or capability. Tho, on a PC you can/should measure the Latency - to get an idea if it's actually capable of real time audio. You can use a tool like...


As for hardware tools - i guess you could check the electricity - to make sure it's running stable (without spikes and such) - since this can impact your audio gear and the sound reproduction (you could hear random clicks - which seems to really trigger audiophiles - in particular). You could start with the usual...

8 Different Types of Electrical Testers and How to Choose One

On the other hand - there is some hardware gear dedicated for testing headphones:


Tho, be it hardware or software - neither can replace an acoustics engineer (i guess - they go hand in hand - since you can't have one without the other / we're still not at a point where this process can be automated). If you have good pair of headsets - there's a huge list of presets compiled by a group - who tested individually each and everyone of the models on this list:


Then again - it's also worth to be added that the audiophile experience (to put it like that) - is subjective to a large extent (what works for one - doesn't work for the others). Same goes for the multitude of headsets - even so called professional or Hi-Fi certified - especially since they're "quite expensive (and that's saying to little)". And that's just it.... "nobody can justify their price from a empirical and technical point of view". Point being - more than 99.99% of products are overpriced - just because.... be it cause it has a Grado labs label on it or because some of the top tier Audio gear brands - decided that pair is worth 300$ -> 59.000$ (ofc, didn't take into account gold or diamonds imbued products worth over 100.000$ - since there - the price is justified by luxury). There's even dedicated brands which were created quite recently - yet the prices of their products seem to say otherwise. To be fair... a lot of so called audiophiles are blinded by their passion - and since they're rich and naive (or at least - they have enough money not to care if they throw away 100.000$ on gear that would actually cost less than 1000$ to produce) - you can't blame the opportunists who try the get rich themselves of their back. Since again - a lot of this products are not intended for "normal" people - not even those who have a passion for music and quality (at least not to that extent).

neves said:

To be fair... a lot of so called audiophiles are blinded by their passion - and since they're rich and naive (or at least - they have enough money not to care if they throw away 100.000$ on gear that would actually cost less than 1000$ to produce) - you can't blame the opportunists who try the get rich themselves of their back. Since again - a lot of this products are not intended for "normal" people - not even those who have a passion for music and quality (at least not to that extent).

Click to expand...

To be MORE fair, this one swings both ways. Because, let's face it: how many people (and for how many decades) kept getting told the same old song of "CD sounds perfect for all, with 0% quality loss 100% guaranteed forever"? How much do you reckon someone like Monty @ Xiph has earned by simply repeating that his lossy streaming codec is audibly transparent "just like a lossless CD rip with tracks having been stored losslessly as FLAC"? You don't think that forum websites from the likes of hydrogenaud.io have been trying to heavily manipulate by keep claiming a cheap internal soundcard or cheap integrated DAC stage is audibly the same as a separate DAC that can offer performance similar to that of my relatively expensive, "overpriced" (that's the word that these individuals love to use in their continuous battle against anything that could reveal how crappy their cheap inferior type stuff TRULY sounds like, lol) Eastern Electric MiniMax DAC Supreme? Those people are opportunists because they stop at nothing while trying to convince the naive that everything sounds the same. Steve Jobs earned milions selling mp3 during the day at his office and after he got home from work in the evening he listened to vinyl records. I could go on... but I think I'll stop here.