InnerFidelity

After we got the Bose Quiet Comfort 20i noise-canceling earbuds for Jeannette, I decided to sit down and compare them with my Bose Quiet Comfort 15 noise-canceling headphones, my Shure E3 in-ear monitors, and my Yamaha YHD-1 orthodymanic headphones. I was actually somewhat surprised by the differences between them, and I thought that they all sounded fairly good by themselves. I think that the Bose earbuds and headphones were very similar. I thought they my Shure E3 had better clarity, though the Yamaha sound was more open and natural, but lacked a little low-end. While researching the earbuds, I ran across numerous articles on high-resolution audio as well, which is loosely anything that is more than the 44.1KHz sample rate with 16-bit depth (16/44) used by CD recordings. While many of the articles proclaimed how 24/96 or 24/192 sounded so much better than the overly compressed 16/44 recordings. I also found a number of articles like this one proclaiming that HD audio is like the modern-day equivalent “snake oil” marketing hype like tubes vs. transistors or oxygen-free speaker cables… Kirk McElhearn points out that at 16-bit, you can record up to 65K volume levels, and that 44KHz is the minimum sample rate to capture frequencies up to 20KHz, the standard for high-fidelity audio. If you think back to the time when we went from 256 colors, to 65K colors to 16.7M colors, the difference was dramatic, with 16.7M colors more life-like and photo-realistic. While we were mostly content with 65K colors, and probably can’t detect all 16.7M colors, the optimal color bit-depth probably lies somewhere in between […]