When will the level of human perceptability be reached?

Consciousmess posted:

......but I ask your thoughts! 

What are yours on this?

C.

Good question, and the AES has some interesting analysis on this. In short we are light years away from perfection, and true hi definition audio will be when we are not able to differentiate between reality and replay. It's worth remembering that this reality needs to be maintained within the complete chain if  capturing, recording, encoding, transporting, decoding and replay. I suspect in a hundred years we will still not be there.

Simon

I agree with Simon.

Just taking the crude figures for 24/192, we can already exceed the range of human perception.  This however doesn't tell the whole story as
1  that's just the mathematical encoding level of the recording, not the whole chain
2  we don't even know how the entire hearing chain (from the auricula of the ear through to conscious perception) actually works.

This lack of knowledge is exemplified by more recent discoveries, such as finding that human perception can beat the Fourier limit of time/frequency discrimination; we don't know how we can do this, but we can.

Huge, there is no mystery to this in the research articles I have read,, and some are not even that recent. Our ability to determine pitch is different from our ability to determine timing between sounds. But a machine using Nyquist sampling theory will be limited by this to capture both unlike our ears and brains.

From what I have read (and dare I say even possibly experienced ) our pitch detection deteriorates significantly more with age than our ability to determine timing.

Simon, "no great mystery", really?

We're not even close to understanding how the low speed massively parallel organic frequency analogue computer we call a brain is used to do such things!

You can say that the "ability to determine pitch is different from our ability to determine timing between sounds", and that's patently true.  But the real question is not that we can do this, but how we do this.  And that (at least in part) is done by processing in the brain - the very part we don't understand.

I'll ask my wife, she'll know.

Long before the limit of human gullibility is reached.

tonym posted:

I'll ask my wife, she'll know.

According to my wife it's all about colour coordination..... 

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

and true hi definition audio will be when we are not able to differentiate between reality and replay.

Reality and replay?  But what's the currency here? Distinguishing between your wife's spoken voice or a recording of it in the same room? For most the currency is replay of recorded music to which we have no reference to reality. Live music listening is great for energy, performance, ambience, etc., but for me the few live performances I attend have little bearing on how I perceive replay on my gear at home. I never enjoyed music more than as a teen in my bedroom on a relatively crap system. Well mastered vinyl still does the trick for me these days. Certainly our brains are conditioned to how replay is "supposed" to sound and for some no amount of technology or advanced algorithms are likely to change that. Accuracy is one thing, pure enjoyment another. Too many brains out there to find one fit for all.

When robots can enjoy listening to music.

Just to cool down a minute, I have not had the pleasure of hearing a Naim system with a Statement.  For something costing over £100,000.00 I would expect the Statement (together with appropriate associated equipment) to be nothing short from excellent.  However is it a 'realistic sound' to live music?  That would be my own measurement in order to answer the original question to this thread.  Anything other would be distortion (eg, Tube amp, solid state amp, class A, Class D, Class A/B) no matter how nice it sounds.  Even Naim itself appear to add to the sound to illuminate the PRAT side to its sound (which deters some other audiophiles who prefer a different presentation.) 

Huge posted:

Simon, "no great mystery", really?

We're not even close to understanding how the low speed massively parallel organic frequency analogue computer we call a brain is used to do such things!

You can say that the "ability to determine pitch is different from our ability to determine timing between sounds", and that's patently true.  But the real question is not that we can do this, but how we do this.  And that (at least in part) is done by processing in the brain - the very part we don't understand.

Huge - ok I agree - I think I mis understood you - there is no great mystery to the fact we recognise timing differently to pitch - but yes how our brains interpret and decode this is a total mystery to me - whether it be pitch, timing - or merely standing up right. 

Simon

joerand posted:

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

and true hi definition audio will be when we are not able to differentiate between reality and replay.

Reality and replay?  But what's the currency here? Distinguishing between your wife's spoken voice or a recording of it in the same room? For most the currency is replay of recorded music to which we have no reference to reality. Live music listening is great for energy, performance, ambience, etc., but for me the few live performances I attend have little bearing on how I perceive replay on my gear at home. I never enjoyed music more than as a teen in my bedroom on a relatively crap system. Well mastered vinyl still does the trick for me these days. Certainly our brains are conditioned to how replay is "supposed" to sound and for some no amount of technology or advanced algorithms are likely to change that. Accuracy is one thing, pure enjoyment another. Too many brains out there to find one fit for all.

But if you go beyond contemporary recording and capturing techniques, let alone replay methods - you soon see that the field is full of compromises and distortions. Each compromise further removes true hi definition or removes you from reality. It will come and it will be liberating - but I doubt it will be so with current technology and techniques. 

An amplified concert is also a huge compromise - great fun yes - but sonically quite an abstraction. Now going to an acoustic concert with no amplification what so ever - just can be spine tingling. The last such concert had me in tears - much to my emberassment. When you experience that you realise what a compromise current amplified and recorded music is - although as you say we are conditioned to enjoy it as a manufactured product,

Simon

Great points made and well thought out!

Is it too reductionist to say there is a limit?

Maybe its a continually fluctuating limit, influenced by other moods, states of mind, emotional engagement, quantities of alcohol...

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

An amplified concert is also a huge compromise - great fun yes - but sonically quite an abstraction. Now going to an acoustic concert with no amplification what so ever - just can be spine tingling. The last such concert had me in tears - much to my emberassment. When you experience that you realise what a compromise current amplified and recorded music is - although as you say we are conditioned to enjoy it as a manufactured product,

 

However, for music that starts out as amplified, e.g most rock music, the compromises in recording should be far less, therefore the ability to reproduce at home something very similar to live has a better chance than acoustic music - though always will be limited by the listening room.

I think it will require the microphones used for recording and the speakers used for replay to perform a few orders of magnitude better than at the moment. I guess the best speakers currently would be headphones like Stax or Sennheiser HD800s (no crossovers, no room interactions, TDH below 0.01% 10Hz - 40kHz).

Recording microphones are miles behind the state of the art for amplifiers.

Should discrete control of pressure in a 3D space be possible the way we have such control over light on a 2D surface then the "absolute sound" will be achievable. I don't know how we'd even go about developing such technology.

Apart from the quality... I think that going beyond stereo (1 dimmension, i.e. left-right) to full 3d sound.

The thread, for some reason seems to have drifted to the assumption that reality is the goal.

The OP suggested an active statement would sound superb, it probably would, the standard statement sounds superb. But, sounding superb has nothing to do with reality, the statement sounds superb because the sound it produces is Enhanced Reality.

By comparison reality is flat and dull, and not just when it comes to music. People don’t want it and it doesn’t sell, they crave something better.

In 30 years time we’ll probably be listening to “Advanced Enhanced Reality”.