FALSE! There were some 16bit in there from Street Fighter II and Streets of Rage.

However, Neo getting a star from punching the asian dude in the face was a nice tough of authenticity.

It's been tested and the "best" audiophiles can't hear differences between 14bit and 16bit, nor can they hear differences between 44.khz and ANYTHING higher. In some tests they could use12bit sound with 36khz sampling frequency... The differences they hear are inside their head. Thus the description of improved sound is always "air", "brilliance", "organic" etc.. Don't be fooled by their fancy gear, most of it is for nothing. Cables: i am always willing to bet my months salary on doubleblind tests, 10 000€/m against a coat hanger, no audible differences.. It's all about confirmation bias, you think there's a change and suddenly you hear it.

About MP3s vs PCM:
Here we have audible differences. But. Put on high enough energy, ie turn your amp high enough, suddenly double blind studies can't find which is which. But it can be audible, mp3 is lossy format and even 320kbps can be heard. Not with all material, it's about in the limits of human hearing. Some might hear high end loss, if you're in your twenties. Once you hit 40, everything above 17khz is gone, forever. You will never hear 20k again. And to really notice the difference, you need good gear. Your laptop earphone output most likely won't even output anything past 18khz well and it's dynamic range can be represented with 8bit depth.. It can be just horrible. Fix that with usb box, around 80€: you can take that box anywhere on planet to the most "hifiest" guy out there and he can't hear the difference between his 10000€ A/D converter.. In fact, 5€ A/D converter can produce the same output as 3000€ one... That's not why i said buy a external.. It's more to do with RF and other shielding, protection against the noises a computer makes than A/D conversion quality. Note, i'm talking about audible differences, you can find faults with measuring equipment and 95% of the gear price is about "just to be sure".

If you want a good sound, first, treat your room. Dampen it, shape it.. If you spent 10k on stereo and 0 on acoustics, you will not have a good sound no matter what you do. Spend the same amount on acoustics than what you do on you equipment, room makes a lot more differences than gear. Next comes speakers, they are the worst link in the chain by a large margin. Quality costs, still wouldn't go to extremes here either, the changes are again "just to be sure", not always audible.. Then amps, beefy, low noise, A/B. You don't need to spend a huge lot of money but some. Then cables.. Take the 50€ version instead of 300€ or 3000€. Build quality and connectors, durability. Those are the reason to buy more expensive than 5€. Not because of sound quality.. There will always be group of people that will swear they can hear the differences, that's bullcrap. Human ear CAN NOT detect any chances, even meters are having a REALLY hard time getting any changes. You need to either amp up the signal to saturation point, or use frequencies in the Mhz ranges, thousands of times higher than what media needs to get any changes between cheapest crap and high end scams.

Audiophiles can't be convinced they are wrong, they are suffering from the same thing antivax people do: give them facts, they will be even more convinced they are right.

Going from 16 bits, to 24 bits will lower the noise floor which, if you have the audio turned up enough, you can hear it ever so slightly. It's not a huge difference and you're not going to hear it in a typical song. It's definitely there, but it's already insanely quiet at 16 bits. An "Audiophile" on pristine gear may notice the slight change in hiss in a moment of silence, with the speakers cranked up - but that's about it.

As for pushing up the sampling rate, when you get beyond 44.1kHz, you're not really dealing with anything musical anymore. All you're hearing, if you're hearing it at all, is "shimmer". or "air". It sounds "different" and you might be able to tell which is which, but it's one of those differences that doesn't really matter in effect. A 44.1khz track can still make ear-piercingly high frequencies - the added headroom just makes it glisten in a really inconsequential way.

This is coming from 17 years of music production. I've gone through all of this, over and over again, testing myself, trying to figure out what is and isn't important.

At the end of it all, I work on everything in 16bit 48kHz - I record audio files in 24 bit 48 kHz - then export as 16 bit 44.1kHz. I don't enable dither anymore. I don't buy pro-audio sound cards anymore. I don't use "studio monitors" anymore. I just take good care of my ears and make music now.

This goes beyond my knowledge level of signals and waveforms, but it was very interesting anyway.

That being said, OK, I'm sold on the concept that ADC and back doesn't screw up the signal. However, I'm pretty sure that real audiophiles could easily listen to several copies of the same recording at different bitrates and frequencies and correctly identify which ones are higher or better quality with excellent accuracy. I bet that is true even for 16bit vs 24bit, or 192kHz vs 320kHz -- stuff that should be "so good it is impossible to tell the difference".

Since some people that train themselves to have an ear for it CAN detect differences (accurately), the differences must actually be there. If they aren't artifacts of ADC issues, then what are they? I'm guessing compression artifacts?

In a visual version of this, I remember watching digital satellite TV around 10-15 years ago. The digital TV signal was fine and clear -- almost certainly better than what you'd get from an analog OTA antenna. BUT, the satellites used (I believe) mpeg compression to reduce channel bandwidth, and that compression created some artifacts that were easy to notice once somebody pointed them out to you. I specifically remember onscreen people getting "jellyface" anytime someone would nod slowly, or make similar periodic motions. I've got a feeling that some of the artifacts that we (or at least those of us that are real hardcore audiophiles) can notice in MP3 audio files are similar to an audio version of that jellyface kind of issue.

>> ^deathcow:

I am doing the AVR thing right now, but not with Arduino.


I work with AVR in C/ASM as well, which is why Arduino initially annoyed me. The Arduino system forces you to use a large pre-loaded library, which assumes lots of bloaty things, like non-native 16bit math, so any low level work, like software uarts, or anything else highly time dependant is much more of a pain to implement.

Of course you can always do inline ASM, if you need to count the timing.

I tend to proto with my Ardunio, and then port over to an attiny once my other circuitry is working. It especially useful for doing proof of concept before you put too much time into something.

The best thing about these boards: they are cheap. I had to drop >$100 to get a devel board and chips, and necessary peripheral components when I started doing AVR 6 years ago. Now somebody can get in the door for <$20 and they can be up and running in less than an hour, with only the most basic understanding of programming, and a common usb cable.

>> ^pavel_one:

8-bit?
Don't think so.


The samples used are digitized and not FM synth which is usually what is implied when people say 8 bit chip tunes, but the samples are indeed 8bit. They also usually range from 8-22khz and are uncompressed. I think the only mod formats that support 16bit samples were XM and I think mtm (When I last looked up the scene, I saw that one of the formats was upgraded to support full 16 bit stereo samples).

Starcraft was one of the last games released with 8bit graphics, everyone else had moved on to 16bit by then.

Tags for this video have been changed from '8bit, pixel, animation, Paul Robertson' to '16bit, pixel, power up, up down a b, Jeremie Perin, Laurent Sarfati, Mikael Robert' - edited by SlipperyPete