Please Educate Me

...just another 'nite on the 'net.....*g*

Btw....I'm not an angry anything....bemused, sometimes amused, slave of my muse, but not meaning abuse except in a general sense when I make some....sense, that is. *s*

Paul, swing accepted but felt free to duck... ;)

Being meatless entities as opposed to IRL is irritating....look, I'd rather have a drink or share a blunt with any and all instead of 'all this'.  We could obviously 'read' each other and either come to common ground or avoid as needed.....

The OP states a rather open-ended commentary, and we all go off on our particular tangents; responses vary as typical and as expected.

Such is SOP for 'Gon.  Personally, I'm pretty pragmatic about audio and my approach to it.  I don't strive for the perfection that I know (IMHO) doesn't exist.  Too much between me and the performers at the mic or pickups in the studio or the venue.  What I employ to listen to that is a varied bunch of items that makes pleasant enough sounds to amuse me.

'You' may run from 'here' screaming or laughing; I'd rather 'you' pause and tell me what/why/YHO and discuss much; previous offerings accepted or declined.

As to Why we put ourselves through any/all of this is runs around the reefs of philosophy centric to music and the enjoyment of.

Spending time and pixels on the How is fine.
But whether 500 or 150K$...if it makes you smile and transported to the Other....by the Music, and not the How....

Wonderful.
Enjoy.
J

I got so tired of reading the harsh comments I decided to scroll down and just post. Seams to me @paul6001 posed an interesting question - got me thinking. Our DACs are processing digital information the same as our microwaves, yet we judge them very differently. The difference I believe is that music is an aesthetic pursuit - thus the method of delivery comes under more scrutiny. If our goal was to heat food - or process a word document - we would judge it by different standards. I’m not much on a video guy, but I expect those who are judge there DVD players the same way. 

Really?

Yes. Let me put it like this.
Programmer of a game put in a specific CONSTANT hex #13220 is a dark green of green-cyan. And in RGB color mode model #13220 is comprised of 0.39% red, 19.61% green and 12.55% blue.

So it is a constant variable that is in the software and it is not changing.

Take ten laptops install software that includes that constant.

Put all ten laptops side by side and you WILL have 10 DIFFERENT shades of green.

And as I explained why in the previous post, all of the laptops screens reproduce that constant slightly different.

That’s why there is a calibration devices that you suck onto the display and make a calibration of the screen.

The same goes for CD or any digital device there is a data constant number that is made sure that it always stays the same with error correction (matematics calculate checksums and so on to make sure of that.)

But after that what that constant data is leaving the CD transport and what is coming out of the speakers is ALMOST the same like with the monitor example above.

It stops to be a constant and for audio it is in the analog domain and you need to understand that there is no check sums and no control over that the information (the constant) is intact it is now a sliding scale..

You can build two identical amplifiers and when capacitors, resistors, inductors opamps and so on they are ALL individuals and different from one to another for the exact same component!

That is why they have tolerances. So if you have a tolerance of ±1% then it is at the most only for that component alone at most 2% variation between one and another part of the same capacitor for example.

That is why very serious amp builders measure and match each component in the signal path. Like you could pay someone to match and find two tubes that measure closer to each other than other ones in the same batch, to use in a amp tube. So in the analog domain everything is in a flux state..

paul6001,

"...infinitesimally small sense superiority..."

"...infinitesimally small sense of superiority..."

It is not a big difference. It only gives those who questioned your writing a little more credibility and your baffling response to them a tiny bit more silly.

It’s a good question, Paul. The ones and zeros are intended to represent SOMETHING. It might be something specific, like the letter “A“, or it might be something much more nuanced, such as the distance, speed and acceleration of a speaker cone at a precise moment in time. Now, the reason Word works consistently on any two different computers is because we (the collective “we”) have decided that it’s IMPORTANT, in a word processor, that letters not be confused with each other. So important that a system was developed, called ASCII, that has been universally accepted for use in word processors. ASCII tells us that an “A” will always be represented by the same sequence of ones and zeros. And if a computer couldn’t get that right, Microsoft would be out of business. 
But music is a very different beast, because you cannot listen to a note of music and tell whether it differs from another note of music as easily as you can tell that the letter “A” your word processor spits out is different from the letter B. Yes, I know, audio has its own standards too, like Redbook. If we want to reproduce the sound of an orchestra for one second, the Redbook standard tells us that we need 44,000 bytes of data. But if one of those bytes has a single flipped bit, I’d wager that even @millercarbon would not be able to tell the difference; consequently, it is not as IMPORTANT to a normal listener as it would be if he or she were typing a letter on a keyboard, and a different letter showed up on the screen. Most listeners are willing to put up with a few errors in the translation of their music from digital to analog, as long as they can’t hear the difference.  But some peculiar people, called audiophiles, think it’s worth spending a lot of money to try to hear those differences, and will go to great lengths to ensure themselves that their reproduction of those 44,000 bytes is as error-free as technologically possible. You can think of it like a word processor for someone with a really bad case of OCD. Throw in the additional complexity of how two different humans prefer to hear the same musical piece on their ridiculously expensive systems, and you have a real hot mess, called “Audiogon”.  Hope that helps.