Quote:


Now here comes the fellow who wants to talk about those delicate harmonics way up there and how they add a lot to the music. I'd like to see that dude's actual hearing test results (grin). Especially if he's over 40. And I can tell him that his soundcard, while maybe able to produce response above the 20KHz mark, is in almost every case delivering that high frequency energy to a speaker monitoring system that is rated out to only 20KHz or so. Couple that with the FACT that he can't hear 10KHz reliably and what do we really have here?

Yes, the WMA format chosen by pgmusic sounds pretty darn good!


--Mac




Mac,

It's pretty silly for you to make assumptions and be judgmental about people without any knowledge of who they are, their experience or their setup. I'm not sure if that comment is directed at me or not but it wreaks of arrogance which I'm sure wasn't intended.

As far as my question as to what method of compression was used for creation of the WMA files, Prior to the version 9 specification, the quality of the audio on WMA files was undesirable. The WMA9 spec introduced WMA9_LL lossless codecs able to sample audio at 44.1 khz (cd) or 48khz using 16bit depth. The new WMA10 spec is capable of 24 bit/96khz (dvd) audio in stereo as well as 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. What this means is if PG sampled their wave files using the WMA 10 codecs, the quality of the files would be virtually the same as the WAV files for mastering to CD or DVD.

It is not a question of what someone can "hear" in frequency response, but rather how much is lost in the process of mastering due to additional compression, FX and sample rate reduction that can cause phasing and warble or unwanted harmonics in the mix. Hi-Quality hardware DAC's in Apogee and RME as well as Protools HD equipment will represent these flaws whereas consumer grade soundcards won't.

There also seems to be some confusion between sample rate and frequency response. Sample rates are the number of times an analog signal is sampled by A/D, D/A converters to represent the smoothness of the Analog audio curve. These rates are represented by (44.1 - 196 khz) respectively in today's most popular pro-audio equipment. The more samples the smoother the curve, the closer you represent the original sound.

File size also becomes much larger due to the quantity of data being captured at the higher rates. Today's consumer products utilize rates up to 96 khz on DVD audio. The new SACD specification being utilized, can represent rates up to 2822.4 khz. As of Oct 2009, there are over 6000 SACD releases. These are not "delicate" frequencies that the human ear can hear, that is "frequency response" represented by the 10-30 Khz spectrum for which a highly sampled audio signal can reproduce.

Bottom line is I'm trying to decide if I want/need to switch to the "Audiofile" version. Based on your comments on using the WMA's without complaints, I'll give that a shot and see how it goes. I can always upgrade at a later date if the need arises.

Thanks for your input.

Vince

Last edited by Vince Rooney; 12/23/09 08:19 AM.