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RE: The -90 dB argument and the "H" word.

Posted by Tony Lauck (A) on April 7, 2015 at 08:39:26

In Reply to: RE: The -90 dB argument and the "H" word. posted by Ugly on April 6, 2015 at 19:19:09:

There is no debate possible between people who have a fundamentally different concept of truth, based on fundamentally different epistemology, metaphysics and ontology. You give away this difference through your use of words such as "statistically significant", "adequately proven" and "qualified as fact". Who gets to determine what is "qualified as fact" or not? This is the essence of the matter. My position is simple: I get to determine what I consider to be fact. I don't care what other people think, except as to their ability to aid me in making these determinations. This is especially true where people use "statistics" as the basis of arguments, since the vast majority of statistical arguments are either outright bogus or rely on unstated models of causality. (Of course I am well aware that I could be wrong in my determinations. Such is the nature of personal knowledge.)

My preference is for high quality recordings over lower quality recordings. I know these when I hear them. My experience is that the highest quality recordings in my library are all high res. Furthermore, my experience with hundreds of hours of using state of the art conversion tools has convinced me that the finest hi-res recordings can not be transparently down converted into the 44/16 format. In doing these comparisons my motivation was to do the best possible conversion to make my best possible attempt to achieve transparency in down conversion. Note that preference played no part in these experiments, so as to avoid the issue of coloration, especially coloration on recordings vs. coloration during playback, and the possibility of cancelling coloration. In addition, it became clear that different downsampling settings changed what was lost in the downsampling operation in terms of specific sonic qualities that were changed. I was not trying to make the "best" downsampling that everyone would accept, or even the "best" one that I would accept. I was trying to find at least one setting that would provide transparancy. I made my best effort and failed, believing that it was a fundamental problem of "putting 10 pounds into a 5 pound bag" or "squeezing a large balloon into a small suitcase." As the setting space I worked with had three dimensions and millions of possible settings, it could be that I missed the best possible setting. It is possible that better conversion software might become available in the future that provided an expanded choice of settings and more accurate execution thereof. However, I gave up. There is no reason to even consider this debate any more, since the extra cost of higher resolution is pennies per album. (Take note: I am talking about "cost" not "price".)

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

• Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy   (Open in New Window)

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