How Science Got Sound Wrong

And I shall hereby dub you "DetachmentFromRealityist".  If you want to use childish names, lets go all in.

This notion that we cannot measure electrical signals with enough detail to match human human is false. It is not a supportable position. To that end, if you like the way that a turntable and the whole vinyl process modifies what started as an electrical signal in a measurable way, there is nothing wrong with that. Just don't call it accurate, as it is not.

cleeds2,611 posts12-06-2019 5:18pmI understand that you really believe that. It’s your measurementalist bias on display to the extent that even when it’s explained to you, you can’t see it. That’s ok; that’s how profound bias sometimes works. No one should interpret it as offensive.

A phenomenological experience (like hearing a sound or seeing a rainbow) cannot be reduced to measurements of any number, now and for eternity...


Measurements help  to design something, be it a theory or an apparatus, an invention  and are necessary for that...I dont understand how measurements alone can explain anything at all...It takes some new concepts if we want to understand something, amd way more than new concepts, it takes the living phenomenological experience also...


I dont say and will not say anything about vinyl or digital audio , for me they are always different, or better said, always existing in an embedding context in specific implementation and they are of different nature and complementary... 

Saying that, I cannot accept that by measuring something with some limited  actual theory, we can deny not only this radical difference, but also the phenomenological experience that is lived by each one of us differently...

 It is evidence that digitalization is necessary and useful, and that vinyl and analog process are also necessary and of some different nature for their effects...I know that no one contest that also... But the frontier and limits that differentiate these 2 process in audio engineering is not perfectly always clear for all of us user and even designer...And it is the same thing for their effect in the human hearing  brain... I apologize for my rant...I like perhaps too much speaking...:)

If we want to talk about reality, all of reality is subjective and can be no other way. Objectivity is an agreed upon subset of a purely subjective reality. Objectivity is a thought device. A fiction.

We are figments of our non existent imaginations, is what the quantum sciences say. And everything is quantum, when we get down to it.

Reality is a hallucination

Objectivity is a collective construction through language that educate the individual spirit in the collective game name : culture...


Subjectivity is the other side of the same coin: it is a collective construction through language also...


The distinction between the interior and the exterior of the consciousness is also some creation that is relative and agreed upon collectively by some higher form of consciousness...Then reality cannot ultimately be an hallucination, because it is objectively agreed upon and the result of a collective participation in the phenomenon...An hallucination " per se" is purely specific to one consciousness disconnected from the collective participation for a moment...

Quantum sciences does not teach that we are figment of some arbitrary imagination, but teach us that all phenomenon are ultimately linked to one another and with the consciousness...Then Q. science teach us that reality is a creative imagination yes, but in no way an arbitrary imagination with no depth, a non-sense...(My favorite interpretation of Q. M. is from Roger Penrose...And my favorite description of the genesis of consciousness in the physical world is also from Roger Penrose).


Each part of cultural activity is an expression of this collective construction through language, be it science or religion or poetry...

Language is way more profound instrument that people think … Language is a programming brain-body technology that linked all human consciousness … Language is used in communication by animals... But for humans, language is more than just external communication, it is a way to begins to be humanlike in the same matrix of constructed significations ...Studying linguistic the right way is very rewarding...On par with mathematics for illumination of the understanding...

Poetry is like number theory, most people cannot fathom these level of depth of signification, they takes numbers and metaphors like already made nuts without knowing the growing kernel...


I think I am a bit too serious :) Dont takes my words....investigate yourself...


Now I must really apologize to many of you and shut my mouth....

atdavid

This notion that we cannot measure electrical signals with enough detail to match human human is false.

I haven’t made that claim here, so this is just a red herring.

.... if you like the way that a turntable and the whole vinyl process modifies what started as an electrical signal in a measurable way, there is nothing wrong with that.

Golly, thanks for your permission.

Just don’t call it accurate, as it is not.

That we can measure limitations in LP playback doesn’t support your claim that the performance is not accurate. W&F, for example, can be well below the level of audibility. There’s no need for it to perform any better than that. LP can achieve S/N levels in excess of what is required by the music. There’s no need for it to perform any better than that. Sure, CD can achieve S/N ratios that are tens of dBs better. But so what? That can have value on the production side of things, but not on playback. (As an exercise, have you ever measured the S/N level in your listening room? The results might surprise you!)

Perhaps the one area where LP specs look really deficient is channel separation. But in the real world, there’s really no such thing as 90dB channel separation - music doesn't happen that way in real space. Again, the LP can achieve channel separation that exceeds the need.

So your assertion that LP isn’t "accurate" doesn’t withstand scrutiny - nor is it consistent with actual results when a fine recording is properly played back - because an audio component needn’t be perfect to be "accurate." Your "argument" looks at the numbers without correlating them to the real world. That you can’t understand this is a consequence of your bias, and that’s the nature of measurementalism: Your preoccupation with numbers introduces a bias so profound you can’t even recognize it.

Of course, lots of LPs sound awful. But that’s a separate issue entirely.