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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me - people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in.

There are absolutely edits so subtle that without having seen or heard the original you'd have no way of knowing it was modified at all. Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is. These kinds of subtle changes are far more common than the drastic and noticeable edits or even smaller but still quite large edits where people with a trained eye/ear will notice but the average person wouldn't.

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> people who think they hear a difference in their audio because they're using $30,000 gold plated wires lifted 0.25mm off of any surface such as to not disturb the audio harmonics or whatever voodoo they've been sold to believe in

You're obviously entitled to share your opinion, but also I also find your strawman a little offensive. Vocal pitch correction is a very real and very noticeable category of processing, absolutely not the same realm of snake oil bullshit as $30,000 gold plated wires. If it was, it just wouldn't exist. Why would anyone ever take the time to write software that correct vocal tuning if it made zero perceivable difference to the output?

> There are absolutely edits so subtle [...] Pitch correcting someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step is not going to be noticeable no matter how perfect one thinks their hearing is.

Nobody ever 'corrects someone's voice up 1/1400th of a step'. It just doesn't happen, human voice can't consistently hold a frequency to that resolution for more than a few milliseconds. For reference, a 1/4 step vocal oscillation is only considered 'moderate vibrato' [0]. Even a 1/128th pitch variation is rarely considered noticeable or consistent enough to correct. This is miles away from a '1/1400th' (which is also a very strange fraction to choose btw, even when you take harmonics into account).

I posted this in another comment, but you should take a couple of minutes and take the MusicLab Tone Deafness test [1]. It'll give you an idea of what 1/64th variance sounds like, and how noticeable it is or isn't to your ears.

[0] https://www.vocaltechnique.info/vibrato.html

[1] https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td

The fraction was pulled out my behind as a "Yes, there are edits that - even if completely pointless to make - are made nonetheless and nobody will ever know about it without being told it has been edited and anyone claiming otherwise is a liar."

I'm not sure the point of the Tone Deafness test - I scored a 31/32 but on many of the questions if one tone had been replaced with the lower/higher tone I'd never know it had been replaced despite my ability to tell them apart from one another. My point wasn't that you couldn't tell A from a very similar B (you can!) but that if A had been replaced by that similar B in the first place you'd never have known (because you couldn't!). You'd need to have been privy to the editing process to actually know if it had been edited at all.

Imagine an A/B test where A has been removed entirely and you've been asked which edits B has made to A. It's a very different test from an A/B test where you can compare A with B. While a trained ear may be able to hear obvious edits there are literally hundreds of non-obvious edits made to songs during production that you couldn't possibly know about without hearing the original recording to compare against.

> Sorry but it falls into the realm of audiophilia to me

Perhaps so. I'm not one of those people that picks up on (or claims to) these subtleties, so I wouldn't know. I wonder if any studies have been done on this.

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