Linux nerd. Music lover. Specialty coffee obsessed. The list goes on; stop using so many gosh darn periods!
Interesting, Oatly is by far the best tasting for me (I’ve tried all brands here in Germany because lactose intolerant). Maybe I’m just being manipulated by the packaging though, I find it so funny. I get almond milk as well, and like the BioCompany brand the most there, but I reckon that’s a Germany exclusive.
For real, it’s so obviously ridiculous. Big Cow Milk must be pretty influential…
It’s not really deceptive marketing. See https://feddit.org/comment/11537120.
This awesome, thank you for your contribution to the open source space!! I have been looking for something like this for a while :), more powerful than apostrophe, more aesthetic than neovim. This fits the bill, thank you!
Nowadays, it’s about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy’s no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn’t have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.
This is 10000% true!! I worked as a mixing and mastering engineer for a while, and lemme tell you… the loudness wars never ended. This is why I still collect vinyl, the medium is kinda shit, but the masters are so much better that it’s hugely worth it for a about 2/3 albums I own (1/3 are duds; I can live with that).
I don’t about you, but in my country Tidal is cheaper than Spotify. But that might be placebo
/jk, though tidal is actually cheaper here. I can’t tell the difference in blind testing between 320 kbps mp3 exported in Reaper and the original wav; they’re indistinguishable to me. Actually, I can tell them apart with some airwindows dithers, but that is a pretty esoteric exception.
I realize I may have left out something key to understanding dBFS for the unfamiliar. Unlike with dB SPL, which is what you are referring to with “at audible 0dB,” zero dB refers to the loudest possible sound in dBFS. The unit stands for decibel relative to full scale, where full scale (loudest possible sound) is 0 dB. So in dBFS, unlike with dB SPL (sound pressure level), all audible sound is stored as a negative dB value. When you listen to the audio file, this is first converted to a voltage, and then to sound pressure, which is finally measured in positive dB SPL.
If that doesn’t explain it for you, I don’t know what you don’t understand, and I can’t help. I would recommend finding some YouTube videos on the subject, in case you’re a visual learner.
That is very much possible. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to presuming it’s something like that — if not the pre-amp, then the CD-player, etc. — and calling it a day. The burden of proof lies upon the YouTuber, and he certainly hasn’t tried making it scientifically valid (no video evidence of the trials, only one trial, no control trial, no repeatability, etc.).
Thank you!
I suspect you haven’t missed anything and the audio tracks provided have been either inadvertently or deliberately manipulated by some other factor unrelated to the RCA cables.
This is very, very possible, especially given that the measurements were hardly taken scientifically or with video evidence. And that suspicious pre-amp…
Apart from something extraordinarily badly designed, broken or dirty, there is no plausible reason why a cable carrying a signal with no significant current and no high frequency components can have any effect on that signal - high frequency audio is approximately DC in the wider scope of Electronics Engineering.
This has been and still is my understanding, but the video just freaked me out a little, as it makes very tall claims about it’s magical measurements. But it’s good to get the reality confirmed by an expert, thank you!
That answer doesn’t suite people trying to get rich selling ridiculous cables though.
Yeah, I’m still a little in shock that the weird cable costs $200… how can people take that seriously when cables for $5 sound identifical in blind testing??
So, ironically, the expensive $200 cable he compliments to greatly might actually have the worst shielding. This just goes to show that the only way to approach this is scientifically, and that the YouTuber’s very unqualified self shouldn’t be performing these tests with any authority!
BTW, you also seem to have misunderstood dBU. That is in voltage, which means the signal is amplified before you listen to it. I would highly recommend reading the wiki page on decibels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel
I think there’s good YouTube videos on how decibels and digital audio work as well.
What you quote is for conversion with analog levels, which is not what’s happening here. Everything I’m doing is 24 bit digital audio, which has 144 dB of dynamic range. That is a little over-kill, which is why most audio files are distributed as 16 bit, so 96 dB. That means you can hear anything from 0 dBFS to -96 dBFS (with proper dithering). That is why the cutoff point in the graphs I showed you is -100 dBFS, since you realistically won’t be able to hear below that anyway (audiophiles disagree), in the final file.
-40 dBFS only represents how the signal is stored in the digital file. It has nothing to do with the signal’s actual volume. I play those -40 dbFS through my computer, then my DAC, which outputs at about 2 VRMS, into my pre-amp, which increases the voltage again, into my amp (which, again, increases the volume), and finally into my speakers, which output that -40 dBFS, which is now signal at about 70 dB SPL (actual volume).
Edit: just checking now, and my DAC converts -40 dBFS to about 0.02 volts RMS. With no additional amplification, that outputs roughly 80 dB SPL on my earbuds. But you would usually add additional amplification.
dBU is for analog line-level, and the conversion you showed is what I would use when routing my console back into my computer. But analog line levels are still very audible at -40 dBU, usually, not that that’s relevant.
You have to understand that this is not real volume. It is just how the volume is stored digitally. If you have a -40 dBFS noise floor in your audio file, and the music has a 12 dB dynamic range peaking at -1 dBFS, you will hear the noise clearly throughout the entire track, because you are amplifying the entire thing greatly, since you are ultimately transforming this into dB SPL.
Yeah, you’re right. I should have just stopped when he said his source was a CD player, meaning he had no pure digital copy (i.e., no control) to compare too. Or, at least, he didn’t provide one… I get hung up on things easily. Thanks, though, you’re 100% right
I’m not sure if you’re reading the graph correctly, this is the delta between two of the digital files from the video’s description. So a signal of -40 dBFS is quite audible, since it’s all relative to 0 dBFS (full scale).
And it isn’t the recording itself, it’s just the difference between two of the recordings provided in the video’s description. This is commonly known as a digital null-test, and let’s you find the amount (and significance) of difference between two digitally encoded recordings, and in particular at which frequencies those differences lie.
You can try doing it yourself by downloading the audio from the YouTube video’s description and then playing two of them at the same time in audacity, but with the phase inverterted for one of them. Just make sure the phase and volume are aligned. Then you can hear the difference between the recordings yourself!
The question is, where does this difference come from.
I love ASR and am a long time reader of Amir’s reviews and measurements :). I am more curious, in this case, about what, since it’s probably not the cables themselves, is creating that delta in the null test. That’s the part I can’t figure out, though I’ve pretty much resigned myself to just presuming it’s something else in the YouTuber’s signal chain and calling it a day.
I looked the actual cables up, and all of them look pretty dang fancy. The brands and specific cables, according to the video’s description, are these:
I actually own an old monster cable! It looks awesome, but has horrible shielding. Today, I usually get Cordial cables from Thomann, because they’re pretty cheap, have beefy connectors, and decent shielding. But for anything professional it’s balanced all the way, I would never use RCA if I can help it, to avoid ground-loops and stuff.
I’m not reading all that
lol, I can’t blame you. Brevity is not my strength.
This is it, thank you. I have never even seen a cable that expensive in person, and I’m certainly never going to buy one. I don’t know why this YT video triggered me so much, especially given that there’s no way to verify what that guy is saying he did is actually accurate.
What you say is very interesting, but I am starting to suspect that it really is just inconsistency with some other component. The delta isn’t consistent like it would be (I think) with ordinary noise or interference. It’s that weird delta between 2k Hz and 15k Hz that I can’t explain. The YouTuber is also a rather odd in that he doesn’t reveal what pre-amp he’s using, which in the case of taking measurements, is all the more suspicious. I don’t know, I think I need to stop thinking about this. Maybe you’re onto something, and some computer part was creating noise at that frequency range right when that cable was being measured.
The problem is, though, that I will never know, because I’m relying on a random YouTuber’s opaque recordings. And I’m not about to buy cables in that price range to test myself. Thank you for your expertise, though! I’ve always wanted to get into radio, but it has seemed awfully complicated and rather expensive
Maybe I’m messed up somehow (I guess I am in the 98th percentile of dyslexics), but the instructions aren’t clear to me at all.
This happened a lot to me in reading comprehension exams in highschool as well. I would have hated the teacher and the class had I received a question like this, because I genuinely don’t know how to proceed.
Funny, I did so badly in highschool until grades 11 and 12, where I started the IB, got a different set of teachers, etc. And suddenly I get straight As (or in IB lingo, 7s) instead of Cs. And I think a big factor, not kidding, was the style and formulation of exams like these. It really does make a difference for some people.
Good test design would be to have Bob‘s first answer already filled in, so you get a pointer to how the dialogue is supposed to develop. Or just to have an oral exam, which I think are superior anyway.