BAS Message
February / March 2015

1.  From John Atkinson in reply to a letter in the November 2014 Stereophile:
"By the time this issue hits newstands...the Meyer-Moran article to which you refer. [Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High Resolution Playback] ...will have been shown to be incorrect in a paper presented at the 137th AES convention [by Robert Stuart of Meridian].”

I forwarded this to the people involved and in the resulting discussion Robert Adams of Analog Devices pointed out the the filters used in the testing were much sharper than those used in typical pro audio convertors. In fact the total impulse response length of their (Stuart's) digital filter is in the range of 8ms. A typical converter filter is in the range of .5ms to 1ms. So this is overstated by a factor of at least 8.

Why Stuart did this is not clear, perhaps to generate an audible result for the purpose of the paper. And his company (Meridian) is in the business of marketing high resolution audio equipment. However it's meaningless for real world results. Unfortunately this paper has caused some mischief in the audiophile community since it is being used by proponents of high resolution audio to justify their cause (“High Resolution Audio: Does it Matter? “ Amir Majidimehr, Wide Screen Review, January 2015).

2.  BASS V36N4 has been published. It features meeting summaries of Charles P. Repka: Engineering, Recording and the Videodisc by David Hadaway, and Tom Perazella: Unlock the Music by Alvin Foster. Also West Side Story at Symphony Hall by John S. Allen and Audio Exp North America by Jim Buchanan and reports on CEDIA Expo 2014.


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updated 4/18/15