21 Apr
2010
21 Apr
'10
7:26 a.m.
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:28:06AM +0200, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote:
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 06:34:38PM -0700, Ken Restivo
wrote:
Hello Fons. Almost all consumer portable devices seem to distort signals
above 16Khz in uncompressed 44100Hz audio. I always wondered about this,
maybe they all have very crappy DA converters, or maybe it is because
the reasons explained by Niels and Arnold in their emails... no idea,
but the distortion is real and present in the vast mayority of devices
people commonly use to play music nowadays, sadly enough. The most
common artifact is the addition of frequencies not present in the
original. I can barely hear them (and I guess most people won't care),
but I know a person who was extremely annoyed by this fact; he is a
musician and has very good trained ear, so I ran several tests on a wide
range of media players, PDA, high end mobile phones, portable tablets
and such devices trying to find something that is not that crappy. Funny
enough, the distorsion is usually not present in compressed mp3 audio,
maybe because the compression itself filters high frequency signals so
they are not an issue anymore.
Nowadays, people (specially young people) even listen to music using the
tiny external speaker built in their mobile phone (which can barelly
reproduce spoken voice) and they don't care about the quality. It seems
that companies feel no reason to improve their crappy sound hardware :(
But yes, agree, please don't destroy your music just because of this.
Most people who don't care will convert to 128kbps mp3 anyways, so
please keep your music as good as possible for the rest of us ;)
and is there some reason I should do it in this
day and age?
No. Unless you know the signal will end up in a very
very very crappy DA converter, and you want to give
that one preferential treatment at the expense of all
others.