Sorrry artemus_5, you did post a very valid question, and unfortunately I got carried away responding to ad hominem attacks and not addressing your question. I reposted what I think was your question below. For my answer, I want to define "Information", i.e. what the recording engineer intended to commit to media, whether vinyl, CD, streaming whatever, and "sound" namely what comes out of the speakers and gets to our ears, and perception ... how we interpret what reaches our ears. From that:
- Unintentional colorations of the "information" that may result in a sound we like (or don’t like), i.e. cross-talk on vinyl, aliased noise on a NOS-DAC, certain harmonic distortions, etc.
- Intentional colorations of the "information", i.e. intentional voicing of the frequency response wherever that happens.
- Unintentional colorations of the "information", that we typically don’t like, like IMD in poorly implemented solid-state amplifiers, dielectric absorption cross-over capacitors.
I see it repeated regularly that we can’t measure everything. There are three aspects of that in audio, going back to my premise, information, and sound. We obviously cannot measure all aspects of perception, we are all built differently so the best we could hope is to measure individuals. Even measuring the sound that reaches the ear we cannot, or at least from a practical aspect cannot measure "everything". We would need to measure the incoming sound arriving in a spherical pattern at the ear. However, information, i.e. how well the original "signal" is faithfully reproduced in the digital/electrical domain, we can measure with great accuracy (think of all the amazing measurements we can make today).
So, in a long about way, we can objectively and quantifiably say whether "something" provides a more true communication of information, but what we can’t say is whether you will prefer that truer communication or not. I really don’t understand the heated argument w.r.t. CD or Vinyl, some prefer one, some prefer the other. Who cares. Where it gets dicey is when claims about their "information" ability get tossed around willy nilly .... which leads to all the mud-slinging w.r.t. things like cable and interconnects, things that directly impact information, something we can measure very very well, especially when you take the next point into account ....
Adding a final thought, there has been a lot of work done in the fields of psychoacoustics, neuroscience, neurophysics, neurobiology, etc. that has put bounds around "audible". i.e. we have not been able to show conclusively any audibility beyond about 20KHz. There were some experiments that suggested we may "perceive" higher frequencies, but later it was shown it was as likely there was harmonic modulation either in the transducer or the environment. Unfortunately, you also see misapplication of studies, a common one being that since we can detect arrival times between the ears to the microsecond level, then we must be able to detect frequencies beyond 20Khz, and/or we need >44.1KHz sample rate, neither of which is true. The other misuse of this fact is to suggest phase response is super important, but this properties is the ability to measure the time difference of a signal, any signal, arriving to two ears. Screwing up the phase does not matter, though consistency between left and right channels on the screw up would be important. If the "bound" is felt to be fuzzy, we can always add tolerance when comparing it to "information". I.e. if we are never able to show 0.1% THD is audible, under any testable condition, then a device that has 0.01% THD or lower is likely inaudible. Similarly, i.e. we cannot detect a 1db difference in level at 15Khz, then any product making a less than 0.1db difference is likely to be inaudible. There are many similar measures.
The biggest question I have is this. How can an objective quantitative answer be given to such a subjective subject as music, its reproduction and one’s interpretation of what they hear? Oh sure, we can give some ideas or thoughts about it. But our knowledge only goes so deep. One may look at figures and speculate what should be heard. But can we absolutely know what IS heard by 100 different people listening to the same music on the same equipment? I don’t think so. My $.02 worth.
