Me too, It's the most reliable way.

Yeah, I did stick on that first point a LOT longer than I meant to :-) It just took way longer to tell all three stories than I expected. In hindsight, I could have settled for one! But as long as I told them well enough to keep you engaged I guess it's not a total loss. Hopefully it helps make the general idea stick even more, which is the most important thing I think. Yes, I like Warren as well. Just having a little fun :-) I don't watch his channel much, but what I have seen from him on production has been very good. -Justin

Common experience! Basically everyone's hearing is asymmetrical. It's just that some people know it and so can account for it, and some don't :-) -Justin

Anymore cliches we all know here?

@@morbidmanmusic If everyone knew, it wouldn’t work.

It would be pretty uncommon for me to add reverb or delay during mastering, but it does happen occasionally. Maybe on less than 10% or so of masters, I'll add a little bit of reverb. It's generally something that's done during mixing. But very often, the mastering will bring out more of the ambience that is already there, especially if you err on the side of faster release times for any dynamic control you may use. Stereo widening and decluttering things with EQ can bring out some of the ambience that's already there as well. Hope that helps! Justin

@@SonicScoop Super! Thanks Justin 🙏👍

Thanks for the comment! This is something that has been studied in some detail already, at both ends of the spectrum. It is true that studies indicate that people can feel frequencies below 20 Hz at sufficient amplitude. (It’s usually perceived as being very uncomfortable.) But similar studies also indicate that people cannot feel frequencies above 20kHz. In all the testing done so far, none has indicated any human sensitivity to frequencies above 20kHz. There’s only one exception all that I know of - - a study done in Japan in the 1990s, that barely suggested a very tenuous effect, and only on one piece of music out of many, just bordering on statistical significance, with a very small sample size. In almost 30 years, that study has never been replicated. Hope that helps! -Justin

Chris Swist did a post like this for us very recently. You can find it here: sonicscoop.com/2020/02/19/picking-the-right-all-in-one-studio-centerpiece-whats-the-best-8-preamp-interface/ Hope that helps! Thanks for the support, Justin

Thanks!!

I hear what you are saying, but super high resolutions aren't necessary for extremely dynamic consumer playback. 16 bit audio and high bitrate mp3s easily handles even the most wildly dynamic material without issue. The dynamic range of commercial releases today is usually between 14 and 5 dB. But even if you were to double or triple the dynamic range of commerical releases, this is still easily handled by the 96+ dB dynamic range of 16 bit. I'd happily agree that something like 5dB of dynamic range is WAAAAAY too squashed for most genres. But 14 dB is pretty darn dynamic for most popular music. That is easily handed by 16 bit audio and good quality mp3s for consumer playback. So is double that dynamic range, which puts you squarely in the extremely dynamic ranges of classical recording. But here's something interesting to note: Once you start to get more dynamic than say, 16 dB, consumers are more likely to hate your guts for the material being *too* dynamic. The actual experience of most music listeners is that they find the volume fluctuations in classical music troublesome and annoying in the contexts that most people listen to music. It will be so quiet that they have to turn it up, and then so loud that it becomes overbearing for them, drowning out whatever else the are doing while listening. This is probably part of why something like 2% of the population listens to classic a music, and 1% listens to jazz. (And I say this as someone who actually really likes jazz and classical music) I mean, "moms" are supposed to like classical music (at least they think they are supposed to) but my experience with my normie mom is that the music will be so quiet that she'll start talking, so it gets turned up.... and then the loud part comes in and she'll say "ack! why is it so loud??".... Well, "it's because it's the loud part mom. It's supposed to be loud." This is just an example. But I find it's indicative of how the majority of the population responds to music that dynamic. But even those extreme levels of dynamic are easily handled by 16 bit audio and good quality mp3s. So again the problem just isn't the playback resolution. Hope that makes sense! -Justin

As mentioned in the episode, it’s at 320kbps that no one has ever heard a difference on record in a proper double blind trial. Not 256. Double blind testing suggests that a very small subset of trained listeners can occasionally hear a difference at 256kbps on a small portion of selections. (At 128kbps, I’d argue that anyone sufficiently young enough with healthy enough high frequency hearing can learn to do it with enough practice. Though the differences are increasingly subtle these days, even there.) My guess is that you’ve never done such a test, or you wouldn’t be saying this with such confidence. But those of us who actually can do this kind of thing blind have to admit that under proper double blind conditions, any differences are extremely subtle as the rates get higher. If you’d done the double blind tests yourself, you’d know this. Based on your comment I’m guessing you haven’t listened properly double blind and are just assuming you can hear a difference. Correct me if I’m wrong-what kind of double blind testing have you done? How was it controlled? Did you use an ABX tester? Any monkey can tell himself he hears a huge difference during a sighted trial. He’ll even feel that difference down to his bones. Put the blindfold on him however, and everything suddenly changes. Try it sometime! Don’t take my word for it. Go download and ABX tester and see if you can do 320kbps for yourself. If you can get it right at a rate better than chance, please let us know. We’d love to prove to the world that it can be done! Hope that helps, Justin

Could you be any snottier?