Yeah but if someone gives you a bag containing 1000 pounds of (minced) beef, then you empty the beef out and some of the beef is stuck to the insides of the bag, and you throw the bag away you can't claim that you didn't originally receive 1000 pounds of beef.
I think you've got that wrong. If they're measuring DSL overhead, error correction, etc then the proper analogy would be:
Somebody sells you a crate of apples they claim is 1000 pounds. What they neglected to tell you was that the crate itself weight 200 pounds, and they included that in their calculation. You only got 800lbs of actual apples.
sorry, but you are wrong.
for people like me (50's) I can't hear the details. beyond a point, it sounds 'good enough' for me. we each have our own threshold of where 'good enough' is enough.
BUT, don't assume that a mastering engineer is going to have as dull a set of senses as you or I typically do. master chefs can taste their cooking creations to fine levels. pro photographers can obsess about micro-contrast and details. a lot of fields have sensitive observers.
I've known people who can detect absolute polarity (phase wiring on the back of your spkrs). I can't, but I've seen someone be able to tell, almost right off. people are not faking it! some have very good hearing. most don't, but don't judge by JUST your own experience.
Um, I'm not going by "my experience" at all, this is fundamental and *very* well-understood physiology, not to mention basic physics. *All* human ears exhibit the masking effect, because (as expanded on by someone else below) there is a fixed dynamic range possible in the construction of the ear. Actual muscles and bones *move* to "change the input gain" in the ear, just like your pupils change size when it's bright or dark out. Some people have a wider intrinsic dynamic range than others, but only by a narrow margin. If you can show me somebody who's pupils never change size yet they can see perfectly well in both extreme dark and full sunlight, then we can talk.
As for detecting speaker polarity, I can absolutely guarantee you that they are detecting *mixed* polarity: wire the left speaker one way and the right speaker "backwards" and they can sense it (I bet I could too). Wire *both* speakers "backwards" and there is no possibility anybody is going to be able to detect it. Anybody who insists otherwise is also going to refuse a double-blind confirmation.
The only difference between the pure sine and the piano is harmonics. If you couldn't hear harmonics you couldn't tell the difference between a guitar or a piano -- the only difference is the harmonics.
I was generalizing for the consumption of people who no relevant background, and should have been more specific. Harmonics are absolutely important, but not all of them. The challenge in perceptual coding is figuring out which harmonics are functionally relevant.
Also you are correct that Nyquist sampling is *not* sufficient for human perception of higher frequencies, as it introduces quantization and phasing errors if there aren't enough (or an integer number of) "samples per wave". It bugs me when people who ought to know better (Opus!!!) keep claiming this.
Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.
What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....
Maybe Australians will see their Fair Use rights expanded in a time when it's in fashion to expand copyright protections.
After spraying my keyboard with Pepsi, I honestly couldn't stop laughing....
Good luck with that.
I went to a very early digital cinema festival years ago, and in the round-table discussions all these people were focussing on how "sterile" digital looked, and moaning about how that "film look" was going to die a horrible ugly death, and the world as they knew it was ending. Everybody else was thrilled to death about how the image was actually sharp and consistent, you couldn't see the ugly film grain, colors were sharper, there was no crap stuck to every frame or spinning along down one side, you didn't have frames jumping all over the screen (60ft screen avg vertical jitter is +- 8 inches per frame!), etc etc etc.
Guess what? Digital won, end of story.
The "film purists" will always find something to complain about, while the rest of the world moves on.
they're trying to avoid getting into trouble in the first place.
No, they're looking to avoid getting into the kind of trouble they a) comprehend and b) actually care about. It's all the other kinds of trouble that are wreaking havoc with this country and planet right now.
Real Users never use the Help key.