Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Lossless Audio

Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by pnw on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:29PM (#43488721)

Calling it pseudoscience is a little simplistic IMHO.

There are double-blinded studies which shows experts can distinguish between 44khz and 88khz sampling rates. The Pras & Guastavino paper [1] is the most convincing and offers insight on the difference between content types. In particular, for the recording test, the differences only held for orchestral content, not other types of music.

There are earlier studies which shows the general public cannot discriminate e.g. Meyer and Moran [2], which kicked off the entire controversy back in the day. And even the Meyer and Moran paper points out in the conclusion that the introduction of higher bandwidth audio in turn has enabled recording engineers to spend more time on producing quality recordings, and that has increased listening quality for all users, versus recordings made just to maximize loudness.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068631_Sampling_...

[2] https://drewdaniels.com/audible.pdf

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Re:Don't Buy into Apple's Hype About AirPods Max Gaining Los... by jampekka on Wednesday March 26, 2025 @07:49PM (#43488876)

The statistics in the Pras & Guastavino paper seem a bit suspect. They do a lot of significance tests with no multiple comparisons compensation, and find few statistically significant results.

The problem is that with enough testing, you're very likely to get statistically significant results just by chance.

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