Boomzilla's Journey (ongoing)

[Deleted]

Feb 9, 2014 15:47:07 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Feb 9, 2014 15:27:01 GMT -5 DYohn said:

...But as you know, it would be a mistake to make any sweeping generalizations based on a single sample.

Agreed. I'm just trying to imagine what could have caused the change...

AS I've mentioned in another thread, my personal experience with AIFF on PCs is negative. To wit:

One MacBook Pro working perfectly  - used exclusively as a music player only using  iTunes to play, rip to AIFF and the such - no problems. About 1/4 of my collection were AIFFS, the rest WAVs and 320 mp3.
MacBook gets stolen, never recovered. I switch to a Samsung laptop, plus a copy of all my music on a desktop PC, plus onto another PC in the office.
Use iTunes on all these devices for playing and ripping = Disaster on multiple levels. Hates AIFF, loses tags, truncates some songs half-way through, mixes up playlists, loses playlists, invents it's own playlists....
Switch to using JRiver on these devices for playing = mixed, scrappy results but better. Decide I don't like the interface. Started ripping to FLAC using dbPowerAmp = fantastic
Switch player to MediaMonkey = trouble free, WASAPI playback. Plays mp3, FLAC, WAV but does not play AIFF so they get ripped to either WAV or FLAC.
Not a single glitch in 2 years.

Thing is, I know thousands of people if not millions have no problems with AIFF on Mac, but in my house via 1 PC laptop and 2 desktop PCs it just doesn't do what it's supposed to.

[Boomzilla]

Thank you, Blooloo - I think a mass conversion to WAV is in order. At worst, it shouldn't be any worse, and at best (as in the example that I mentioned), it might be an improvement.

[pop]

Boom, did you get your XV15 yet?

[Boomzilla]

No - It should arrive Tuesday ("next business day" in FedEx speak - Apparently they don't think that Monday qualifies).

[Chuck Elliot]

Boom,

Why are you so convinced that an uncompressed format is what you should shoot for?
FLAC and Apple-Lossless contain all the info.
Do you really think decompression time will bottleneck your processor?

Chuck

[DYohn]

By the way boom, whoever "called you out" for starting too many threads is apparently forgetting that this is a forum. Start as many threads as your heart desires!

[Boomzilla]

Hi Chuck - I selected lossless simply because storage is so cheap. If I stored my music on a portable device also, compression would be justified. Since I don't, uncompressed is fine for me.

Hi David - No worries, thanks - If I think there's a need to start a specific thread, I will. If it's just my general ramblings, this thread suffices.

And to further the comments on AIFF vs. WAV formats, my friend (and retired Electrical Engineer) Walter M. Scott III sent me this: "That is caused by the H2IK factor (H2IK= Hell If I Know!) Seriously, that is one for the books. I can't see how the converter can REMOVE distortion, yet it obviously did. I'm pretty ignorant of AIFF, but Wikipedia does say "With the development of the Mac OS X operating system, Apple created a new type of AIFF which is, in effect, an alternative little-endian byte order format." That may be the issue. I've run into hassles with big vs little endian formats while bringing analog signals into older PLCs."

[garbulky]

Feb 10, 2014 1:30:42 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Hi Chuck - I selected lossless simply because storage is so cheap. If I stored my music on a portable device also, compression would be justified. Since I don't, uncompressed is fine for me.

Hi David - No worries, thanks - If I think there's a need to start a specific thread, I will. If it's just my general ramblings, this thread suffices.

And to further the comments on AIFF vs. WAV formats, my friend (and retired Electrical Engineer) Walter M. Scott III sent me this: "That is caused by the H2IK factor (H2IK= Hell If I Know!) Seriously, that is one for the books. I can't see how the converter can REMOVE distortion, yet it obviously did. I'm pretty ignorant of AIFF, but Wikipedia does say "With the development of the Mac OS X operating system, Apple created a new type of AIFF which is, in effect, an alternative little-endian byte order format." That may be the issue. I've run into hassles with big vs little endian formats while bringing analog signals into older PLCs."

or it could be likely anything else Like how j river decided to play back that single file. Or a coruption in the non audio section in the file causing issues.
I converted some of your files to wav - no difference. try converting some others and if there are no issues then it's a freak incidence.

[Boomzilla]

I've installed DBPoweramp on my Toshiba & will try it this morning. I have about 25 new CDs to rip, so it'll get a workout. I'm going WAV & will see how that works. Another artifact I've noticed is that the former AIFF file that I converted to WAV now sounds more dynamic! I'm totally incapable of any reasonable explanation for this. It doesn't matter, though, so long as it works.

THANKS to all for the feedback and suggestions. Boomzilla

[garbulky]

It may be of interest that one of the sound magazines talked about how they felt uncompressed wav files sounded better to their ears than a lossless FLAC. I don't understand how and neither did they. But that was their findings.
I wonder if you are running some sort of WASAPI/bit perfect mode through jriver?

[Boomzilla]

JRiver is a black box to me. It works (and well) so that's sufficient.

Some JRiver features (bulk format converter) don't seem to work at all, but that's OK too - I can use something else (like DB power amp, IF I can figure out how to use it - no luck so far).

I'm furious at PC programs. Every time you try to download one, a dozen other junk-ware programs ask to install, and if you're not vigilant, you end up with even more crappy, useless programs on the computer. I've NEVER had that issue with Mac programs. The Toshiba is two weeks old, and already it needs to be "cleaned." But I digress...

IF FedEx Ground delivers on Mondays (I don't think so), then my sub arrives today; otherwise, tomorrow.

[pop]

Did you not get a tracking number Boom? I have received many packages on Mondays from fedex. All of my business packages come on Monday.

[Boomzilla]

Hi Pop - Yes, I have a tracking #. It says "On truck for delivery next business day." My previous experience with FedEx Ground, though, is that they DON'T deliver on Monday here. We'll see...

[monkumonku]

Feb 10, 2014 10:38:38 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Hi Pop - Yes, I have a tracking #. It says "On truck for delivery next business day." My previous experience with FedEx Ground, though, is that they DON'T deliver on Monday here. We'll see...

Doesn't your tracking info have an estimated delivery date on it? As soon as FedEx picks up the package, the tracking info's that I have seen all have an estimated date. I've received ground packages on Monday in the past. They've come on all of the weekdays, and Fed Ex Home delivery also has delivered on Saturday.

[Boomzilla]

The "estimated delivery date" is today, 2/10. We'll see...

[KeithL]

My first question would be whether they did "the final confirmation" (convert those FLAC files BACK into WAV files, and confirm that they were bit-for-bit identical to the original WAV files). Obviously if, for any reason, the result wasn't identical, then there was something wrong with their conversion process. (It is possible that whatever they used to do the conversion simply screwed it up; likewise, it is possible that the player was malfunctioning and wasn't putting out the same bits - which it should have been. It would have been nice to rule this out.)

Now, even if the bits are the same (and correct), it is always POSSIBLE that there are some sort of timing/decoding issues. It could be that decoding the FLACs puts additional load on the CPU; it could also be that there were hard drive fragmentation issues (if they didn't put the files on a new freshly formatted drive, some could have been more fragmented than others, which will make the computer "work" a lot harder). Since FLAC files are smaller, it's actually possible that reading the smaller file puts LESS of a load on the computer. (With certain streaming devices, using FLAC files with higher levels of compression, and so requiring more work to decode, makes them perform BETTER; because the more compressed files use less network bandwidth to transfer, and it turns out that the CPU cycles to process packet transfer matter more than those required to do the decoding.)

Also, what DAC did they use, and what type of USB connection? (A DAC with an asynch USB connection should be immune to timing issues on the source computer, as should one with an ASRC, but a DAC with an old-style isochronous connection could be VERY sensitive to jitter, which could in turn be sensitive to CPU load on the computer.)

Of course, there are two other possibilities:

1) Faulty methodology. Maybe they didn't do the experiment correctly. Did they start from the same experimental conditions? Was the experiment double blind (even if the files were switched by someone else - it's all too easy for them to "telegraph" their expectations to the test listeners - either by their timing, or their tone of voice, or even their facial expressions). Does jRiver take exactly the same amount of time to start playing FLACs as WAVs? You also have issues like the order in which trials occur. Did they mix up the files so that sometimes the WAV was played first, and sometimes the FLAC... and did they do it randomly? Or did the tester play the WAV files first on the songs he or she liked? (Yes, it all matters. The guys who do those taste tests with the three cups of soda know that more people prefer the soda in the cup ON THE RIGHT, even if the soda in all three is the same.... and most people prefer the FIRST one they taste.)

2) Faulty analysis of the results. Most people don't entirely understand how statistical analysis works. The odds of a coin coming up heads are 50/50. However, if you throw a quarter 100 times and get 53 heads and 47 tails, that DOESN'T mean that your quarter is biased.... in fact, the odds may actually be against a "perfect" 50/50 run. The fully described odds for a given situation also include something called standard deviation - which is (to oversimplify) "the odds of how far your results are likely to be from the theoretical odds". (So, for example, it may turn out that, if you throw a quarter 100 times, 20% of the time they will come up 50/50, and 30% of the time they will come up between 47/53 and 49/51. Of course there is a "second order" condition that states how likely the SD spread is to be how close to THAT curve.) Standard deviation is usually expressed as a curve, and when the results you get EXCEED this curve, we say that they are "statistically significant". (If 70 out of 100 people like something, that is a lot more significant than if 7 out of 10 like it. And, if between 65 and 75 out of 100 like it on each of ten different test runs, that obviously is a lot more significant.) Throwing 47/53 once is NOT at all statistically significant; but throwing between 10/40 and 20/30 more than half the time most certainly is. Many people don't understand how to perform this type of meta-analysis to determine how valid their results are.

I certainly don't fault them for reporting their results..... but..... I do wonder how much effort they expended to figure out how they got an obviously unexpected answer.....

(If you threw a match into your toilet and a two foot flame came out, you would NOT conclude that water was flammable. You would confirm it. And, if the same thing happened at two of your neighbors' houses, you STILL wouldn't conclude that maybe water really was flammable. Instead, you'd probably start doing things like having the water analyzed, and searching for gas leaks near water mains and drain pipes.)

If their results were valid, then it would require far more than "ahh, well, I guess we were wrong".... (If there is more jitter on the output of THEIR computer with FLACs than with WAVs, then we need to know if that's true with all computers, or only with some; if some, which ones; and we are then faced with the further complication that the sensitivity of each DAC to jitter, and to different KINDS of jitter, is also different... so this will then matter with some DACs and not others.)


If they WEREN'T running WASAPI mode, and hadn't confirmed that their output was bit-perfect, and didn't use some truly random ordering of the samples; and if they didn't STATE what DAC they were using, what mode it was in, and what else was running on that computer, then their test has no scientific validity whatsoever. (A DAC with an asynch USB input and using WASAPI mode would be the absolute MINIMUM conditions required to get useful results. Although we would always be left wondering if they would have gotten different results with a different DAC, or a different computer, or a different player.) Failing all that, their results are "mildly interesting" but really don't rise to a level past that.

Feb 10, 2014 9:04:49 GMT -5 garbulky said:

It may be of interest that one of the sound magazines talked about how they felt uncompressed wav files sounded better to their ears than a lossless FLAC. I don't understand how and neither did they. But that was their findings.
I wonder if you are running some sort of WASAPI/bit perfect mode through jriver?

[KeithL]

Unfortunately, it's difficult to test for bit-perfect-ness at the computer's output itself.

Here's what you can do easily....

Convert the WAV to a FLAC (no tags, no notes...).
Now,convert the FLAC back to a WAV USING A DIFFERENT PROGRAM.
Compare the two WAV files using a bit comparison program (one that does real checksums - like CDCheck).

Since it's unlikely that two programs would have errors that cancel out, if the result matches the original, then you can conclude that it's likely that the FLAC ENCODER on the first program and the FLAC DECODER on the second program both work correctly. If you now switch the programs (use the second one to encode and the first one to decode), you can get a pretty good idea that they both work in both directions. (Of course, it's possible that, if they were both written using the same programming library, that they do have the same error.... but not likely.)

Unfortunately, none of this will tell you if the PLAYER is sending exactly the same bits out when playing both. For that you'll need to record the digital output of both and see if they're the same.

Feb 10, 2014 1:42:35 GMT -5 garbulky said:

Feb 10, 2014 1:30:42 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Hi Chuck - I selected lossless simply because storage is so cheap. If I stored my music on a portable device also, compression would be justified. Since I don't, uncompressed is fine for me.

Hi David - No worries, thanks - If I think there's a need to start a specific thread, I will. If it's just my general ramblings, this thread suffices.

And to further the comments on AIFF vs. WAV formats, my friend (and retired Electrical Engineer) Walter M. Scott III sent me this: "That is caused by the H2IK factor (H2IK= Hell If I Know!) Seriously, that is one for the books. I can't see how the converter can REMOVE distortion, yet it obviously did. I'm pretty ignorant of AIFF, but Wikipedia does say "With the development of the Mac OS X operating system, Apple created a new type of AIFF which is, in effect, an alternative little-endian byte order format." That may be the issue. I've run into hassles with big vs little endian formats while bringing analog signals into older PLCs."

or it could be likely anything else Like how j river decided to play back that single file. Or a coruption in the non audio section in the file causing issues.
I converted some of your files to wav - no difference. try converting some others and if there are no issues then it's a freak incidence.

[Boomzilla]

I agree, KeithL - I put less weight on what I read than on what I hear. From a scientific standpoint, my hearing isn't too reliable, but from a personal frame of reference, it IS what matters to me. I heard a startling difference between that one AIFF file and the same file converted to WAV format. There's no sense extrapolating anything more from the experience. It may be unique.

But I'm not going to look a gift horse (.wav file) in the mouth! If it sounds cleaner, more dynamic, and less distorted, then I'm good with it!

It isn't worth running experiments to find out if it's consistent or if it was a unique set of factors - I don't care.

Since I've gone "over to the dark side" (Windows) for my music server, all future rips will be to .wav format.

[pop]

Feb 10, 2014 10:38:38 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Hi Pop - Yes, I have a tracking #. It says "On truck for delivery next business day." My previous experience with FedEx Ground, though, is that they DON'T deliver on Monday here. We'll see...

It's coming buddy! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

[Boomzilla]

Well, if it does, then Garbulky (on the far side of town from me) will get to wonder if we're having an earthquake! LOL

And I eventually DID get DBpoweramp up & running - I'm converting my existing AIFF files to WAV format. THEN I'll start ripping the new music. Special note for Garbulky - I ordered from Amazon a fresh copy of the "Singers Unlimited" disc that you liked.

Finally, to set the Oppo for the sub, I should enable the sub in the speaker setup, set the mains to "small" and setup the down mix how? Options are 5.1, 7.1, and "Stereo Downmix." If I select either of the surround down mixes, then the center dialogue channel will be missing for movies. What I want is a 2.1 setup with "phantom center channel" for movie use.