When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testing and what conclusions can be drawn from that. If you do A/B testing of 8-bit/16-bit (which is a good idea) you have to understand you're doing the test through your current audio hardware.
The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences.
If you do this test through your laptop speakers you really might not be able to tell the difference. If you'd like to "debunk" the Pono player then do this test through a Pono player pushing music through quality studio headphones.
Making things worse they're using Neil Young's Rockin In The Free World which contains, get this, large amounts of harmonic distortion to begin with. The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits.
If you don't own high-fidelity music equipment then this test is like proving high definition television is impossible because you can't tell the difference between a standard and high definition signals on your standard definition TV.
> The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits.
This is blatantly incorrect. The 8-bit conversion is not truncation, it is dithering. Dithering to 8-bit does not introduce any distortion at all, whatsoever, of any kind. If you don't understand the mechanisms and the science of how bit depths work, then you're going to come to false conclusions, like the conclusion that there's any point to the Pono player at all. We're not talking about just "subtle differences" here. In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, you have to bring your audio system into a quiet room and then crank the volume levels well above into the threshold at which you can damage your ears, and even then, you still won't be able to tell the difference with the most dynamic music.
So, suppose you have a quiet room in your house, with an ambient noise level of about 30 dB. If you raise the 16-bit audio level so the noise floor is above 20 dB, then the peaks are going to be well into the 120 dB range. That's like having a symphony orchestra in the room with you, at the very peak of their performance, with all the instruments playing at once. If you've ever listened to a symphony orchestra, you know that the background noise is NOT 30 dB, but somewhat higher. So even at the peak of a symphony, your CD recording should still be able to reproduce the various unwelcome bits of noise that the musicians produce (stomachs gurgling, breathing, shuffling in their chairs, etc.)
Here is my take on dithering, with online demos : http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dithering.php (still 8-bit though, because at 16-bit, it is barely noticeable, and it won't serve educational purposes very well)
Can you hear the difference between 16-bit audio with dither and 16-bit audio without dither?
Most people can. Now consider - that difference is created by adding a noise signal which is more than 90dB down compared to the maximum possible level.
By all reasonable expectations that difference should be completely inaudible under normal listening conditions.
But the effect it has isn't inaudible at all.
When you understand why, then you'll understand the difference between peer-reviewed and objectively tested psychoacoustic theory, and hand-waving about numbers.
You'll also understand why it's trivially easy to tell amplifiers and converters apart even when they have distortion products well below -90dB.
That aside - you're making the usual mistake of confusing dynamic range with resolution.
What's the effective bit resolution of a -48dB signal on a 16 bit system?
What's the resolution of the same signal on a 24dB system with the same output level?
What's the minimum number of bits needed to make quantisation noise inaudible? (Clue: rather more than 8.)
I'm honestly confused here, because you claim to be disagreeing with me, but when I read the content of your post, it sounds like you actually agree with me?
When I was talking about hearing the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit, I was assuming that we dithered our audio. You can't hear white noise at -90 dBFS in typical listening conditions. You'd have to be in a quiet room with the volume turned way up, and you'd have to have very low-noise equipment.
The effective resolution of a -48dB signal on a 16-bit system will depend on that signal's bandwidth. If you don't understand that part, then you don't understand the math.
It makes no difference if you're sampling a sine wave or broad-band noise - the effective resolution stays the same, because it's solely dependent on quantisation error, not on signal bandwidth.
The latter depends on sample rate not of sample resolution.
If you're making mistakes like that, it's not a brilliant idea to tell people who write DSP code and have designed audio hardware that they don't understand the math.
The other point still stands. If 16-bit resolution is already good enough to represent signals without audible distortion, why does it need dither to sound acceptable, while 24-bit audio doesn't?
I'm still waiting for anyone who believes 16-bit recording is perfect to explain why the industry bothered to invent a clearly audible conditioning process for signals that are supposed to be ideal already.
Let's not resort to comparing credentials here. For the record, I've designed and built audio hardware, and I'm the author of a sample-rate conversion library, which does SIMD band-limited sample rate conversion, and I also wrote the accompanying test suite. I'm not just some dude who read a blog post about audio.
Let's talk about bandwidth. If you have a pure sine wave and want to measure its amplitude, you can do a DFT on your signal and measure the appropriate bin. Let's assume that the sine wave does land in one particular bin. If your data is 16-bit with dithering, the dithering and quantization will add noise to all of the bins, but the noise will be equally divided. As you increase the length of the sample that you're analyzing, the bandwidth of each bin decreases, and the amount of noise in each bin decreases as well. However, the signal will always be concentrated in that one bin.
So, as you decrease the bandwidth, the quantization noise decreases as well. This is equivalent to saying that you have increased resolution.
I know this is counterintuitive. However, this is the foundation of how most modern ADCs work. It's called delta-sigma modulation, and it uses a low-resolution ADC internally to derive a high-resolution digital output. It's also been used in DACs. For an extreme example, look at DSD, which gives high-resolution outputs using a 1-bit signal.
The argument that "if 16 bits is enough, why do we need dithering" is kind of pointless, because we don't use 16-bit audio without dithering. It's like asking, "if this amplifier is good enough, why does it use negative feedback?" The answer of course is that negative feedback increases the linearity and flattens the response of the amplifier, and makes it less sensitive to variations in manufacturing and temperature.
As I ceded in another comment, dithering trades harmonic distortion for noise.
> In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio,
Only for professionally mastered audio which is not a safe assumption in this day and age. If some home engineer recorded a track with too much headroom and you get the 24-bit track you're fine, at 16-bits you have a problem.
I would love a music player where I could play tracks at 88kHz/24-bit because that's what most music is during the mixing process and then an audio engineer can give you the raw version of what they're working with without having to deal with issues of headroom, downsampling and dithering.
24-bit audio doesn't hurt anything other than file size and it has real uses, be it remix culture or just high-quality unmastered music.
You haven't done the math. Even home engineers won't have recordings with noise floors below -90 dBFS. That's just absurd. Double-blind tests have shown that trained listeners in ideal listening environments with high-end, calibrated equipment can't tell the difference between 44.1/16 and 88.2/24.
Audio engineers don't have to "deal" with the issues of downsampling and dithering. The DAW just does it. It's a solved problem. It's not even a button you have to press, it's all automatically set up for you these days. We know what algorithms to use: band-limited interpolation with dithering, possibly combined with noise shaping.
Headroom is a different issue, but even the sloppiest home engineer is going to take a look at the levels at some point. If they don't, they can just check the "normalize" checkbox when they bounce. Or they can just ignore it and leave it checked. They're still not going to give you files with noise floors below -90 dBFS, and therefore, there's still no point in giving you a 24-bit file.
Even for remixes, you're not getting any benefit, since the noise floor is above -90 dBFS anyway.
However... you want to work on a project together? Let's keep things 24-bit until the final mixdown.
I disagree that these things are, in the real world, "solved problems" and I'd rather have an unmastered raw track at 88/24 than a poorly mastered track at 44/16.
I don't disagree that CD quality basically maxes out the ear's natural capabilities, I don't think it's that easy to do.
For a remix I'd rather get a 24-bit stream than a 16-bit stream (that's really 15 bits) and has to be padded up to 24 anyway.
> The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences.
Yes, hardware quality might make a difference in fidelity. Still, 16 bit CD-quality audio is enough. The marketing of the Pono player with 24bit/196kHz is just nonsense.
And of course any listening test requires quality hardware to make sure it can actually reproduce the test-signal correctly.
> The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8bit.
With dithering, smaller sample depths only decrease the signal to noise ratio. There are no distortions. The sample is chosen "badly" (but that was by design) because it contains little to no dynamics.
Dithering basically raises the noise-floor by trading harmonic distortions for random noise at the cost of the last bit of information (for the uninitiated dithering means you randomly flip the last bit to create a soft truncation.) It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it?
I have no patience for articles like this because instead of setting the record straight it just adds more pseudoscience to the mix. Their "experiment" doesn't prove what they claim it proves.
Is 24-bit useful for playback? Yes it is. Do you need it for properly mastered audio? Absolutely not. But there are 10,000 home studios across the country who have music files at 24-bits and a large chunk of those engineers don't know how to master audio. Is a raw 24-bit track better than a poorly mastered 16-bit track? It is to me.
Is 192kHz useful for anything? Probably not. Does it hurt anything? Maybe a little. I would expect a quality music player to go up to 96 anyhow so 192 isn't so bad. Similar reasons as before.
Does this reflect badly on the Pono player? Not really. Over-engineering isn't a bad thing in my book.
> It's "noise" which isn't technically harmonic distortion but that's kind of splitting hairs isn't it?
That's not splitting hairs. Harmonic distortion and uncorrelated noise are completely different from a mathematical stand point. They also sound audibly different to my ears.
Merely saying that "24-bit is useful" or "it is better to you" does not mean that you can actually hear the difference, and you include no empirical justifications for why you believe this to be true. Perhaps I could help you conduct a scientific experiment at home?
24 bits has more information. It's useful for mixing and in cases where things haven't been properly gain-staged, an engineer had an off day, a track hasn't been mastered, etc. Seems pretty basic to me.
It probably sounds basic to you because you still aren't doing the math, and you still aren't doing the experiments.
The whole point of 24-bit is to give you flexibility when the singer decides that he's going to whisper one verse from three feet away and then shove the mic down his throat while he screams the chorus. Or you can be sloppy when you set the preamp gain—just give yourself enough headroom, and you'll adjust the levels later. Notice that I said "later", not "never". Even the most amateurish home engineer with a hangover the size of Texas is going to adjust the levels of different tracks in the mix. Once you've done the mixdown, the levels are "reasonable", and you can listen at home on 16-bit system. You won't hear the difference.
No mastering, no compression. 16-bit audio is still enough, once you've mixed a song.
What math exactly would you like me to do? 16 bits gives a theoretical maximum range of 96dB while the human ear can hear over 130dB. Good headphones can handle over 100dB signal to noise.
Maybe you should save your grandiose lectures for somebody who doesn't know enough to see through it. There's no reason to assume levels will be at a "reasonable" level and there's no reason to think a high-quality portable music player should only play back 16 bits. That's absurd. Should consumer level music players stop at 16? Sure. I want better than that but if you want to listen to mp3s on your phone nobody's stopping you.
I'm left wondering how much of this anti-Pono talk is shilling on behalf of smartphone manufacturers. I need 24 bit playback in roughly the same way I need a car that does 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds - I like things that are over-engineered so I can geek out on how awesome they are. But thanks to all the killjoys we can't even get excited about the first high quality portable music player because some amateur sound engineers want to show off they once read a blog post on Shannon-Nyquist theory.
130 dB dynamic range is unreasonable. It's not like having a car that can go 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds, it's more like having a furnace that you can set to keep your house at 50°C. 130 dB SPL is downright bad for you. It will result in pain and permanent hearing loss. 130 dB SPL is very close to OSHA limits for instantaneous (not sustained) volumes, and it is physically painful to experience.
Can you elaborate? What makes you think that people are shilling for smartphone companies?
Everything you say is true and it's clear that you understand these issues a lot better than Neil Young himself appears to.
That's not sarcasm. Superior components such as a better power supply, pre-amp, and DAC can make a big difference. Something like the Audioquest Dragonfly or some of Schiit's low-end gear can make a difference that can be amazing in some instances.
But in every interview I've ever seen, Neil Young focuses on the high resolution audio files which do not make a difference that human beings can hear. He has also, in general, been saying kooky things about digital audio for decades now, ever since CDs became popular.
Momentum and Special Relativity don't conflict. Momentum is modified with a Lorentz Factor which for a particle with mass runs to infinity as the speed approaches the speed of light.
For electromagnetic radiation like light the momentum is a function of the energy, not the velocity.
> I wonder what the turning point was when people stopped thinking of electricity as magic and instead thought of it as science
Once they could make predictions and those predictions were verified by reality. "When I flip this switch the light will turn on.....When I move this magnet past this wire I can shock my lab assistant...."
I don't know much about D&D but I would venture the guess that electrons are far stranger than mana. I mean, not only do they have a wavelength[0], you can do the Double Slit experiment with them[1], but they also have an intrinsic angular momentum and there are rules of which electron can be where based on this "spin"[2]. That's just for starters.
Calling them "mana" (whatever that is) might not be any more wrong than calling them particles.
To say electricity is roughly the flow of charge looks perfectly fine to me. Opening statement of the wikipedia article on electricity:
> Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric charge.
I doubt the article will steer people wrong. The gravity/e-field analogy is accurate, and they're clear to state that Bohr model of the atom is a useful model while providing a link to more info so interested readers could dig in there if they wanted.
> Electricity is the force not the flow...."Electricity"...is always the EMF
Speaking of details the Electromotive Force isn't a force because it doesn't have Newtons for units. EMF times charge does give a force but EMF alone is just Volts. In circuits we may think of it as if it's a force, and it has force in the name, but it's just a potential difference.
Lol, so if it's on Wikipedia it must be true and accurate. Nice. Hey, if it's on the Internet then it must be true.
I think it is reckless. A lot of young up and coming engineers perhaps use sparkfun for their high school electronics work might read this and come away with incorrect understanding of things making new material confusing or longer to understand.
You think what's reckless? The guy who wrote the article has a degree in Electrical Engineering and the article's great.
EMF is not a force and it's not the only thing the word electricity refers to. I've just checked a physics and an electrical engineering textbook and neither refer to electricity or EMF the way you are. I honestly don't know where you're getting these ideas.
In physics there is a fundamental force sosmetimes called The Electromagnetic Force, and in a sense it does describe all of electricity, but it's not the same thing as The Electromotive Force.
Without invoking the maximization of utility we could use game theory and ask if the players were simply minimizing their maximum regret. It was during the qualification rounds, not the finals. It looks like they each preferred taking an advantage or a draw (chosen by their opponent) over playing against a world-class player at a slight disadvantage.
Nakamura's shown that he'll play interesting and sometimes dubious moves because he wants chess to be more entertaining for spectators. He spends a lot of time playing online against weaker players so they can have the memory of that one time they played against one of the best. He's done so much for chess and its popularity that if he takes an early draw once in a while he gets the benefit of the doubt.
> I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
That's almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority. This wasn't just anybody saying this and this wasn't just any physicist saying this - this was Feynman. This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics. Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers.
If that's not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheS...)
> It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942—
that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called
Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again.
This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that
changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the
Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia
Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted
in a text. The secret was out, you see.”
Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book. Keep in mind this was the 1940's and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn't just a kid and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today. When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one.
This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.
That's heartening to read! But still, it rather damns with faint praise, doesn't it? With its "in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary" and its "you may be able to get something out of it" and its observation that "we" have never been able to communicate with "the female mind".
Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.
And yes, I know that Feynman was condescending to everyone who wasn't Feynman. Here, though, he continues a trend of being condescending toward women as a group. Just because he could recognize individual women as talented (his wife, too!) doesn't mean that he didn't have negative (and harmful) attitudes toward them on the whole. And I think that those harmful attitudes have become a more lasting part of his popular image than have the quotes you've shared here.
> "...and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today."
This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective.
> This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective.
Does it? I was pointing out that today there are motives for publicly supporting women in the sciences that didn't exist in 1966. In that quote Feynman pushed things in a progressive direction in a different political atmosphere than we live in today.
No, it does not and you're completely right nerd_stuff. With all the feminism going on these days, accepting women as equals does not seem to be enough anymore.
> Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.
He said that literally sixty years ago. Is every historical figure who didn't have the good fortune to live in our modern era of tolerance to be disavowed?
I don't think there's a single word in what I've written here that says "We must disavow Feynman!"
But Feynman is still held up as an ideal here in our modern era, for very good reasons. As such, it is both just and necessary for us to point out to the next generation the handful of areas where emulating him is not a good idea.
Out of curiosity, what's the background that lets you be so dismissive of a Fields Medal winner?
At this point I see a blog post written by a well respected mathematician whom I feel comfortable trusting and it's being brushed aside by I don't know who.
Well you can just read the reviews to see that the Durrett text isn't well regarded while others like Chung's are. And the criticism about a probability space not being a sample space is correct, but I think it's clear what Tao meant there, namely that the sample space would be a part of a probability space.
The Amazon UK reviews of Chung's book lead me to A Probability Path by Sidney Resnick which appears to be aimed at non-mathematicians. I have invested (speaking as a renegade physicist lacking a systematic exploration of measure theory).
Being a great mathematician doesn't necessarily make a great math educator. It is odd Tao chose Durret, but I assume it's due to the book being freely available online.
As the blog comments suggest there's a difference between a good self-study book and a good textbook for a class. The book will be accompanied by (at least) what look to be a good set of course notes.
Some googling around suggests his students are quite pleased with him. He has, according to Wikipedia's intro for him, the undisputed king of math blogs. Both of these point to him being at least a good or above average educator.
Background: From a famous,
world class research university,
Ph.D. from research
on stochastic optimal control.
Good to see that Durrett's book
touches on regular
conditional probabilities -- I needed
that topic!
I learned from a star student of
E. Cinlar, long at Princeton.
We used Royden, Rudin,
Neveu, and Chung, and there
were some nice topics in the
course not in any of those
texts, e.g., the Lindeberg-Feller
version of the central limit
theorem, a really nice, astounding,
result on an envelope for
Brownian motion, more on ergodic
theory, some on additive processes,
and more. Super nice course.
Of course. Appeal to authority was never a fallacy; the fallacy is "appeal to false authority". "Terry Tao knows much more about math in general and this in particular than I do, so I'll trust what he says here" is completely valid.
Appeal to authority is a dumb logical fallacy in reality geniuses are better at everything and we should prioritize their opinions by some decent weight over everyone else. Obviously.
For anybody who studies science that isn't an uncomfortable question and it's over century old at this point. The last time the field of science had a high level of certainty that it would solve everything ever was probably the late 1800's.
I dealt with this question in high school physics, it's really no big deal. When you get to a point where all you can do is make a "metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite" you go find something better to do with your time.
It's a good approximation but it misses the mark. String Theory is not verifiable but it's still a scientific theory. Bohmian Mechanics is, some say, by definition not verifiably different from Quantum Mechanics but it's a scientific theory. You might call them "speculative" scientific theories to save the idea but at the end of the day the Popperian [sic?] view of science is a bit too simplistic to be useful.
I don't understand why should String Theory be labeled as "scientific". Can you explain? Why cannot we be happy just calling it philosophy?
To me, "scientific" means "uses scientific method", which in turn is a set of tools that are pretty successful in understanding universe. Scientific method is certainly not fixed set of tools - for example, computer simulation became very useful only recently.
Maybe doing whatever string theorists are doing will become useful in the future, and as such their method will become part of scientific method; but since we aren't really sure if string theory itself is true, we can't consider their methodology to be useful (or useless) and so part of scientific method.
For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a good way to learn that the Popperian view of falsifiable==scientific is a bit too simplistsic and that classifying things as scientific/not-scientific may not even be a productive activity. It's just not that simple.
A good quote from that thread which may answer your question: "Anyways, my point is that String Theory is not just some whacky idea "what if everything was strings" that exists in a vacuum, but is rather a very natural and conservative extension of Quantum Field Theory to a more general and less arbitrary framework."
For the opposing view see Street Fighting Mathematics which encourages not only using tricks but using them well and often.
The problem is if you only learn the trick without the reasoning behind it. The solution isn't to not learn the trick, it's to learn why it works.
I think it's a disservice to kids who will go into science and engineering if they've never been allowed to use heuristics before. Too often you learn a long-form solution method and then the "trick" to solve it quickly and you need to be able to do both.
The linked website seems to confuse mnemonics (like FOIL) with 'tricks' like cross-multiply (which I thought was for ratios: x/5 = 3/15- I learned 'invert and multiply' for dividing fractions).
I think that tricks that allow you to do things quickly in your head are great- they help build numeracy.
FOIL is the worst offender in my experience tutoring people in math. I recall several instances of people being completely stumped when trying to multiply a trinomial and a binomial, because they couldn't figure out how to apply FOIL.
Then come up with a better mnemonic or trick that captures the essence of the general case.
Like Fanana: First times all of them, next times all of them, next times all of them... it's not 100% clear but it took 10 seconds to come up with and it works with trinomials and beyond.
Or FettuchENE: First times each of them, plus next times each of them.... Ok, that's kind of bad, but you get the point. FOIL sticks around not becuase it's the best but because it's the most memorable, it's a meme. We should introduce better memes to compete with it.
Why do we need a mnemonic or a meme for this? Is understanding distribution really that much harder than memorizing FOIL?
At the same time, understanding distribution is so much more powerful because it generalizes to many other uses and later concepts.
I think FOIL sticks around primarily because it is what people are taught. Even when people actually do understand distribution, they may not realize that FOIL is just a special case of distributing.
Is it harder to understand distribution than memorize FOIL? Probably. It's memorizing a process vs. understanding a concept. FOILing won't help you master algebra but if you're in a science class and your teacher needs to get you up to speed on multiplying pairs of binomials then they'll likely just show you FOIL.
I agree with you that FOILing is stupid and might make the student worse off in the long run, but I think depriving them of getting practive with heuristics might be worse. Ideally a student would notice that FOIL isn't a good trick and stop using it, but there are other "tricks" that are extremely useful.
If you're using FOIL to replace the distributive property then you're doing it wrong. It's simply a bookkeeping device, like the little ditties that people have to "memorize" the names of the planets or the Great Lakes.
When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testing and what conclusions can be drawn from that. If you do A/B testing of 8-bit/16-bit (which is a good idea) you have to understand you're doing the test through your current audio hardware.
The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences.
If you do this test through your laptop speakers you really might not be able to tell the difference. If you'd like to "debunk" the Pono player then do this test through a Pono player pushing music through quality studio headphones.
Making things worse they're using Neil Young's Rockin In The Free World which contains, get this, large amounts of harmonic distortion to begin with. The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits.
If you don't own high-fidelity music equipment then this test is like proving high definition television is impossible because you can't tell the difference between a standard and high definition signals on your standard definition TV.