How Science Got Sound Wrong


I don't believe I've posted this before or if it has been posted before but I found it quite interesting despite its technical aspect. I didn't post this for a digital vs analog discussion. We've beat that horse to death several times. I play 90% vinyl. But I still can enjoy my CD's.  

https://www.fairobserver.com/more/science/neil-young-vinyl-lp-records-digital-audio-science-news-wil...
artemus_5
Feel free to show me how I misinterpreted what you wrote:


teo_audio1,249 posts11-22-2019 11:02am
a premise 100% false within the confines of a bandwidth limited system and no one has ever shown that our ears/auditory system is anything but a bandwidth limited system, and this article did absolutely nothing to disprove that it is not bandwidth limited.
Say what?

Your reading comprehension is way way off....which indicates a multitude of other ......

I feel you are not being honest with me or yourself by accusing me of a double standard. I have done nothing but address the actual technical content of the original article, and the posts made against what I said, that as opposed to actually addressing what I wrote, essentially only attack me.

As opposed to attacking me, perhaps you could address what I have actually wrote and show me and everyone else how I am clearly wrong. I  have posted data simulations and links to several papers (written by people that understand the topic) that clearly show that a digitized system can carry within it relative timing information that is well beyond the sample rate. The whole premise of the article is that the timing is limited to the sample rate. That is false. That makes the whole premise of the article also false.


teo_audio1,249 posts11-22-2019 11:55amcareful with those double standards... and your penchant for putting words in others mouths that they have not said.... and then using those false premise to attack their view or position.
that clearly show that a digitized system can carry within it relative timing information that is well beyond the sample rate. The whole premise of the article is that the timing is limited to the sample rate. That is false. That makes the whole premise of the article also false.


not so fast.
the limit, mathematically... is ..fairly high

The real world of jitter, quantization noise, dither, etc, decreases that quite drastically. The idea of micro temporal differentiation across channels hits the intrinsic limits of the real world 16/44 rather quickly.

As one tries to ’draw’ or ’write’ that micro differential that is above 1/ 22,000 of a second..., it’s capacity to express itself brickwalls on the capacity of the system to micro-resolve signal.

One might say that the noise floor and distortion limits of not just one but both channels together (in excess of 2x distortion, ie, two channels in action, together) begin to be expressed as inter channel timing limits...

So it is nowhere close to being as the mathematics make it out to be.

We also know that noise floor... it wanders all over the place, is signal dependent, and each channel is different. So yeah, well over 2x distortion in the inter channel temporal domain. And a few other problems, not really all that well addressed in the real world.

We hear it in the given dac as indistinct and hazy imaging spread/smear. Especially under complex loading. Not so much a problem with simpler signals. When the song gets busy the worst of the given dacs --get hazy, bright, congested, etc..

The math says nice things. The real world says it is dog poo.

the article tells you why this is all so important. Eg, the MSB range of fine limits means the micro expression amplitude perfection which the ear is built on and out of...is not possible in a peak situation of micro timing differential in an actual 16/44 dac.

Yet, it is by the peaks that we recognize these differences and this is the part where the dac falls down. So, not just the noise floor limits for the body of the signal (complex mid to high level harmonics) but the inability of the MSB area of dac signal expression to subdivide fine enough.

One might even say that delta-sigma was an attempt to fix this problem but was executed so poorly that it sounded worse than R2R.
The math says nice things. The real world says it is dog poo.


Yup. Exactamundo mister audio. First digital was "perfect sound forever" then digital had "lossless codecs" then "oversampling" then "Direct Digital Streaming" or whatever the dopey jargon the roobs would lap up. Not being anywhere near so gullible any more and having quit paying attention somewhere around the fourth or fifth utterly disproven cycle of hopium high followed by crushing reality, don’t even hold me to getting the BS even in the right order. Pretty sure it began with "perfect sound forever" but who knows, maybe the pabulum for the mentally and aurally infirm goes back even further.

Can we get a "whatever"?

There was a guy at work absolutely convinced I was clinically insane, first of all for daring to even consider that records might not sound just awful, but even worse uttered the heresy that all digital was not perfect. Until one day the guy actually heard some of the supposedly lossless MP3. And then let me play him some records.

The people pushing the digital measurements BS have one fundamental problem they never will be able to acknowledge, let alone face up to. And that is that we measure to quantify and expand on our human perception and not to substitute for it.

If it sounds better the onus is on the measurers to figure out how to more accurately measure.

Pretty simple stuff yet beyond their grasp.

Oh well. As penance ye shall spend the rest of your life listening to digital. And not even knowing its a fate worse than death. If that ain’t punishment I don’t know what is.
What are all those numbers in cartridge specifications? Do they have anything to do with measurments and math?