How Science Got Sound Wrong

You are being incredibly disingenuous....or you didn't actually read what I wrote.

It was never offered as proof it was offered as something...

That proved kinda interesting and sorta relevant

Now if you can read that as me offering proof....well that is entirely your problem....maybe bone up on reading comprehension....and maybe stop using a quasi-strawman based response.

All I'm asking is for you to provide some reasonably cogent articles about we have been discussing and in a setting that directly applies to music...not pipelines...not testing amplifiers...but music. I mean you have indicated there are thousands of them...so it shouldn't be difficult to find maybe a couple that will prove your point.

The articles were very cogent for those with the knowledge to understand them. Both were fairly simple actually as papers go.


If you need it applied to music, then again, you clearly don’t understand the science behind sampled data systems. Reality doesn’t suddenly change for the hifi industry no matter what some would wish. When a 30db SNR system achieve timing on the order of 100th a bit, audio systems at 90+ are not going to have an issue.


The whole premise of the article is laughable and you keep beating the dead horse. And yes, you did you the quoted and linked text as attempted proof that I was wrong. Why you didn’t cite it, only you can answer.

I'm not even going to try to settle the argument but I can tell you as a the husband of a woman with a PhD who studies brains and neurophysiology for a living, each of us perceive sound differently. It was mentioned earlier that the re-creation of music is a mechanical process. That is true up to the point that that process is converted to an electrical signal and de-coded by our brain's neural pathways. That perception is what makes us all uniquely different AND why we will never agree on the best sounding format.
Here is something to consider. What sounds "better", live music where some bozo is coughing in the background while another couple are chatting during the music or the same piece recorded in a high end music studio and replayed on high quality equipment? It's all about perception. You decide.

Thanks for chiming in geoffkait. So would that CD edge shaver be of value?

falconquest,

I would like to think that no one is suggesting we don’t all perceive sound differently. I think that is a given. This is not even a discussion of whether 44.1/16bits is enough bandwidth/resolution. It is about whether audio sampled at 44.1 khz has sub-sample timing resolution. Well really it is not even a discussion, no more than 1+1 = 2, or whether the earth is round or flat. No one who understands sampling theory and digitized systems thinks that audio timing resolution, monaural or binaural, or any bandwidth limited system is limited to the sampling rate. The author of the paper flat out states that timing resolution is limited to sample rate. That is just not true. Unfortunately, things like this pop up every few years, then get smacked down, but people have short memories and don’t do the required due diligence.

If the author had just stuck with 20KHz is not enough bandwidth, then he would have had a fairly supportable position (no matter how many scream Redbook is enough). There is a pretty strong case to be made that 20KHz is not enough. There appears to be no case for beyond 96ksps (40KHz).

Unfortunately, people from both sides of the argument are more interested in emotional positions than ones based purely on facts.