Showing posts with label Questionable research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Questionable research. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 November 2022

"High End" Audiophile Science? On Milind N. Kunchur's hard-to-believe research articles.

It has been a busy week so let's keep this article somewhat shorter. ;-)

Beyond the typical audiophile magazines, websites, and videos, I think it's interesting once awhile to think about some of the research out there in the academic literature related to "audiophile" topics.

As I have said many times, I believe that typical 2-channel hi-fi audio is very much a "mature" science these days so on balance it's probably unlikely that understanding of core technologies should be too contentious. I know, some audiophiles and companies will protest this idea with the belief that human hearing somehow has much more potential and that we cannot measure all domains of auditory acuity as applied to our audio tech. As science-driven hobbyists, since we can perform blind tests and show that people have difficulty differentiating high bitrate MP3 from lossless, even relatively high distortions are difficult to hear, and hi-res audio is generally indistinguishable from 16/44.1 lossless (except for a few minor instances which can be statistically significant but practically not likely relevant for music listening), I think the onus of proof remains on those who make contentious or dramatic claims outside of the standard paradigm.