This is true and a lot of blind tests have proven it, but I think that some audiophiles and audio professionals might hear a difference, if there is one. TWP’s musician was able to “barely tell” the difference, so it’s possible and I assume that other people might be able as well.
I just think that these people might be a very small percentage, both because most players don’t use professional audio equipment and because different people have different hearing abilities.
I´m pretty sure those tests have included professionals and audiophiles as well, otherwise they wouldn´t be worth much.
This usually implies a strong tendecy to the negative and not the opposite as you seem to assume. So I think he means he really does not hear much of a difference if any at all.
It´s like the people of TwP can “barely” tell a resemblance between the sherrif, the coroner and the hotel clerk.
Actually, I was interpreting it in the same way you interpret it. Probably I didn’t express my thoughts clearly.
I meant “99% of the time a professional can’t tell the difference and 1% of the time a professional can. That 1% proves that it’s possible for some humans to hear a difference”.
Yet, I´m still not convinced that 1% doesn´t fall into the failure quota. But interpreting numbers is always harder than producing them.
I know what you mean but to me it seemed you grouped the musician among those 1% when I wasn´t sure if in that case he really could tell any difference because as I´ve said that “could barely tell a difference” is often used synonymous with “couldn´t really tell much if any at all”.
Maybe I have erroneously interpreted the expression “could barely tell”, which I’ve never considered a synonymous of “could not tell”.
Well maybe not strictly synonymous but as I´ve said with a stronger tendency to the negative than to the positive. But you don´t have to take my word for it, speaking as a non-native myself. It´s just what I gathered from experience.
There was a time when music changed from a defined state to a mess. You had a couple of cards with different and partly weird sample sets, MIDI (not only timing) issues and so on. People were curious about separate samples mimicing real instruments but songs as a whole fell apart and bling blang replaced good tunes.
Today there exist many options which allow a decent quality (memory vs. processing time) but you still might want to make good decisions at each step in your pipeline. If you take audio serious and can afford doing so, then there is room for improvements (also noticeable for those undemanding ears).
I’m a musician with some knowledge of game audio. Still after all these posts I’ve no idea what are you talking about and what exactly is your problem with TWP.
If you´re refering to the problem of normalising in the loudness wars I totally agree with you. Nothing more terrible to listen to than extremly loud music that has no dynamics(this is the reason why I like concerts but hate what comes out of the speakers in the disco, even if it´s the same tunes).