A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation

Reiss, Joshua D.

doi:10.17743/jaes.2016.0015

Cited by 22 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Clearly, the listening tests provided participants with some form of informal training for the object recognition (it was found that the object recognition test provides negligible training for the listening test). This is in line with results from [32] where it was found that participant training was the dominant factor in determining whether or not similar tests produced significant results.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Sound Synthesis of Objects Swinging through Air Using Physical Models

Selfridge¹,

Moffat²,

Reiss³

2017

Applied Sciences

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Featured Application: A real-time physical model sound effect that can replicate the sound of a number of swinging objects, such as a sword, baseball bat and golf club, has great potential for dynamic environments within virtual reality or games. The properties exposed by the sound effects model could be automatically adjusted by a physics engine giving a wide corpus of sounds from one simple model, all based on fundamental fluid dynamics principles.Abstract: A real-time physically-derived sound synthesis model is presented that replicates the sounds generated as an object swings through the air. Equations obtained from fluid dynamics are used to determine the sounds generated while exposing practical parameters for a user or game engine to vary. Listening tests reveal that for the majority of objects modelled, participants rated the sounds from our model as plausible as actual recordings. The sword sound effect performed worse than others, and it is speculated that one cause may be linked to the difference between expectations of a sound and the actual sound for a given object.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Sound Synthesis of Objects Swinging through Air Using Physical Models

Selfridge¹,

Moffat²,

Reiss³

2017

Applied Sciences

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“…Why higher resolutions should sound more transparent than CD has been debated for the past 30 years. High resolution formatting does not guarantee a perception of transparency, but music professionals with access to first generation data have widely reported subjectively better sound, and a meta-analysis of previously published listening tests comparing high resolution to CD found a clear, though small, audible difference that significantly increased when the listening tests included standard training [67]. This section considers four proposals for sonic differences, the third and especially fourth of which are the ones broadly accepted as likely.…”

Section: High Resolution Sound "Why?"mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In principle, formal listening tests carried out comparatively across different system set-ups might help to resolve the question of hardware contributions [67]. At a minimum, design for auditory testing must be careful to exclude known sources of hardware distortion.…”

Section: Hardwarementioning

confidence: 99%

High-Resolution Audio: A History and Perspective

Melchior¹

2019

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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Exploration of audio at digital resolutions higher than CD began in the late 1980s, arising from a wealth of interdependent sources including listening experiences, rapid technical advances, an appreciation of psychoacoustics, acoustic measurement, and an ethos that music recording should capture the full range of audible sound. High resolution formats developed and were incorporated into successive generations of distribution media from DVD, SACD, and Blu-ray to internet downloads and now to streaming. A continuing debate throughout has been whether, and especially why, higher resolutions should be audibly superior. This review covers the history of the period, focusing on the main directions that drove experimentation and development up to the present, and then seeks to explain the current view that, beyond dynamic range, the most likely technical sources differentiating the sound of digital formats are the filtering chains that are ubiquitous in traditional digital sampling and reconstruction of analog music sources.

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“…Sec. 13.7 includes some references including the metastudy by Reiss [41] and one in which great pains were taken to isolate parameters [42].…”

Section: Designing Listening Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gentle Art of Dithering

Stuart¹,

Craven²

2019

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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On the topic of high-performance audio, there remains disagreement over the ways in which sound quality might benefit from higher sample-rates or bit-depths in a digital path. Here we consider the hypothesis that if a digital pathway includes any unintended or undithered quantizations, then several types of errors are imprinted, whose nature will change with increased sampling rate and wordsize. Although dither methods for ameliorating quantization error have been well understood in the literature for some time, these insights are not always applied in practice. We observe that it can be rare for a performance to be captured, produced, and played back with a chain "flawless" in this regard. The paper includes an overview of digital sampling and quantization with additive, subtractive, and noise-shaped dither. The paper also discusses more advanced topics such as cascaded quantizers, fixed and floatingpoint arithmetic, and time-domain aspects of quantization errors. The paper concludes with guidelines and recommendations, including for the design of listening tests. SETTING THE SCENEIn [1] we suggested that "High Resolution" should be considered an attribute of a complete system in the analog domain (from microphone to loudspeaker)-rather than of the distributed signal or a specific technology.If the system includes a digital path, higher sample rates enable wider bandwidth and it has been questioned whether a listening preference for wider-bandwidth systems could result from the reproduction of signal frequencies above 20 kHz, or alternatively, whether it might arise as a side-effect of filtering in the chain, such as may be encountered when constraining bandwidth to meet a Nyquist criterion.In [3] and [4] we introduced a hierarchical method by which high resolution, defined as clear separation of temporal events, can be delivered efficiently. Prior to this there has been a tendency to describe resolution in the digital domain by the proxies of sample rate, bandwidth or data rate. We can't listen to a digital file without first converting it back to analog; this paper continues to consider the entire chain.A third frequency-domain hypothesis suggests that wider-band signals may cause misbehavior in playback systems (shown to be improbable in [5]).A fourth possibility, raised here, is that if a chain has defective quantizations in any part of a digital path, then the resulting errors (manifesting as distortion and/or modulation noise) also change with the inter-related variables of sampling rate and wordsize, with collateral consequences. Outline of This PaperThis paper is both a tutorial and call to action, reminding about some nowadays-overlooked fundamentals.Sec. 1 introduces the topic of modulation noise, a type of system error that can disturb or alter perception of background noise, or spatial or low-frequency elements.Sec. 2 reviews quantization distortion and in Sec. 3 we recap the properties of additive, subtractive, and noise-shaped dither, including maintaining linearity to levels well below the LSB (le...

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A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation

Cited by 22 publications

References 40 publications

Sound Synthesis of Objects Swinging through Air Using Physical Models

Sound Synthesis of Objects Swinging through Air Using Physical Models

High-Resolution Audio: A History and Perspective

The Gentle Art of Dithering

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