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
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.
Oh Cleeds you totally crack me up. You 100% believe that every specification w.r.t. turntables and vinyl 100% correlates to our understanding of human hearing but you will jump through logical hoops and distort math, physics and reality in an attempt to claim digital cannot achieve the level of detail or accuracy of vinyl sort of like how this article does.


You want to pick and choose the experiments and scientific knowledge w.r.t. human hearing and signals that suit your desired outcome and ignore the ones that don't. That is charming but disingenuous.


You pretty much admitted you have no valid technical reason to prefer vinyl over digital. Thank You
atdavid673 posts12-07-2019 10:17am
Oh Cleeds you totally crack me up. You 100% believe that every specification w.r.t. turntables and vinyl 100% correlates to our understanding of human hearing but you will jump through logical hoops and distort math, physics and reality in an attempt to claim digital cannot achieve the level of detail or accuracy of vinyl sort ...
Oh no, I've never claimed that "digital cannot achieve the level of detail or accuracy of vinyl." Ever. Anywhere. That's just another silly "argument" that you are trying to advance because, it appears, you enjoy arguing for its own sake.
So basically Cleeds you have no point at all? Thank you for clarifying that.
I think that the point is not Digital versus Vinyl "per se"...
It is only that "the hearing brain" has his own distinguishing criteria for being "happy" that does not exactly superpose themselves with the actual frontier that separate the complex and mixed analog/digital links line in audio engineering...

In a word when somebody listen to music, his ego is listening, but his brain also, and they are not exactly the same entity or reducible to the samething… Just a 2 cent remark....

That explain why some brainless twit can enjoy trash sound from a trash source, digital or vinyl, but unbeknownst to him , his brain not so much... If we understand that perhaps we can go deeper in the analysis...

If not, there is only a trivial but very "informed" superficial but very technical debate indeed, instead of the search for a truth bigger than our own opinions...My other 2 cents... My best to all...