Marketing throwdown, or eat your words.

[zeronyne]

I think all the MI companies in the market today are a bunch of wusses. I also think many of the opinionated "golden ears" that we (including myself) revere, are all talk, even if their body of work is stellar.

 

Why? Because they won't do a blind taste test.

 

These jerks want us to read an ad or an article that says "better then the real thing" or "96k, for the extra clarity that 48k cannot provide", and just take it on faith.

 

Or some industry guy wants us to hate some plug in because it's not accurate, even though there were so many variables in the "test" that it's impossible to actually come to a conclusion about the product in question.

 

Anecdotal evidence or non-controlled experiments are simply meaningless in a statistical analysis.

 

Nika has a three year thread going on GM's forum talking about why 96k provides no advantages over 48k WITH ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. He is not saying that the Digi HD stuff is no better than a different 48k convertor...there are too many other factors. But people have a hard time swallowing the math.

 

So here's what I'd like to see happen.

 

1) Two famous engineers in a room together (A and B). Engineer A records a single vocalist with a mic split into two convertors that are identical except for the sampling rate, one at 48, and the other at either 96 or 192. Then Engineer A also does a typical mix with synths, guitars, drums, etc for each vocal line.

 

Engineer B then listens to mixes and individual lines (blind) and must announce which is which.

 

This will never happen because any company would be idiotic to provide identical units with differing native rates for an actual test like this, and I think that most famous engineers have too much to lose.

 

2) This time, a vocal is recorded in 4 ways, first, with some vintage pre, second, with a second pre of the same vintage (in other words, a supposedly identical unit), third with a plug in purported to be an emulation of that pre, and fourth, with a Behringer mixer pre.

 

Engineer A mixes each vocal into a typical acoustic pop song. Engineer B has to listen to the mixes and ID them.

 

_________________________________________

Is it too much to ask for some accurate information and ratings? Or are we all just trolls, dissing things we never really evaluated fairly or praising things based on insecurity?

 

To be fair, Keyboard Mag did a softsynth shootout, and it was OK for what it was, but it was hardly scientific.

[Salyphus]

The truth is underrated/overrated.

[Anderton]

There was a wonderful test at AES a few years back where music was switched back and forth among 44.1, 48, 96, 192, DSD, etc. Basically you had to listen without knowing what you were listening to.

 

To my ears, it was easy to pick out the 44.1 k version, because there was one version that was audibly worse than the others. There was also one that was audibly better than the others, which I found out was the DSD. I could hear no significant difference between the 96 and 102 kHz tests, either one sounded a bit better than 44.1 but not quite as good as DSD. Having said all that, though, the differences were not HUGE, but noticeable.

[djwayne]

Jeeezzz, I've called radio stations who don't know the difference between Loreena McKennitt and Lynyrd Skynyrd, nevermind any of the other stuff.

 

Try dj'ing for awhile, after a couple of beers, most people don't know the difference from beauty queen to butt ugly bar fly, nor do they care.