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What do we hear when we change the direction of a wire?

Douglas Self wrote a devastating article about audio anomalies back in 1988. With all the necessary knowledge and measuring tools, he did not detect any supposedly audible changes in the electrical signal. Self and his colleagues were sure that they had proved the absence of anomalies in audio, but over the past 30 years, audio anomalies have not disappeared anywhere, at the same time the authority of science in the field of audio has increasingly become questioned. It's hard to believe, but science still cannot clearly answer the question of what electricity is and what sound is! (see article by A.J.Essien).

For your information: to make sure that no potentially audible changes in the electrical signal occur when we apply any "audio magic" to our gear, no super equipment is needed. The smallest step-change in amplitude that can be detected by ear is about 0.3dB for a pure tone. In more realistic situations it is 0.5 to 1.0dB'". This is about a 10% change. (Harris J.D.). At medium volume, the voltage amplitude at the output of the amplifier is approximately 10 volts, which means that the smallest audible difference in sound will be noticeable when the output voltage changes to 1 volt. Such an error is impossible not to notice even using a conventional voltmeter, but Self and his colleagues performed much more accurate measurements, including ones made directly on the music signal using Baxandall subtraction technique - they found no error even at this highest level.

As a result, we are faced with an apparently unsolvable problem: those of us who do not hear the sound of wires, relying on the authority of scientists, claim that audio anomalies are BS. However, people who confidently perceive this component of sound are forced to make another, the only possible conclusion in this situation: the electrical and acoustic signals contain some additional signal(s) that are still unknown to science, and which we perceive with a certain sixth sense.

If there are no electrical changes in the signal, then there are no acoustic changes, respectively, hearing does not participate in the perception of anomalies. What other options can there be?

Regards.
anton_stepichev
anton_stepichev OP
150 posts
 
@manueljenkin
06-24-2021 3:25am
The data content is 100% identical if you’re considering digital bits (threshold levels), including the hash values. The sound change is very likely to be from the intrinsic noise / charge distribution patterns inside each storage cell (which can be influenced by the conditions in which the write action happened).
I can't quite understand it. IMO if the noise and charge distribution somehow affect the integrity of the file, then this should affect the checksum. Conversely, no matter what noise and interference may occur on our hard disk or anywhere else, if the checksums of the files are equal in the end, then any previous interference does not matter, since they do not affect the final result.

To find out that there is no negative impact of noise and charge, you can simply copy the file about ten times, and if the checksum of the last copy does not change, you can be sure that the hard disk, software or anything else on this computer does not cause digital errors. Therefore, copies of files on this computer should sound exactly the same.
But this is not the case. For example, the file will sound different if you copy it to a second hard drive or USB flash drive and play it from there. At the same time, if we copy the file back to the hard disk and check its integrity, we will not find any errors. All this looks more than strange for a theoretically perfect digital sound, doesn't it?
ebm
9,311 posts
 
Lots of cool stuff.
manueljenkin
11 posts
 
@anton_stepichev you seem to be making some assertions which may not really be completely true. Digital data works on "thresholds" and has some tolerance to specific distribution levels. Multiple types of charge distribution can correspond to the same digital data if they fall on a specific side of the threshold. So you can have a different charge distribution corresponding to the same data but a different noise pattern when accessing. And this is considering just a very basic memory/storage unit structure. Modern memories are a little more complicated, with self error correcting schemes and other stuff - even a compact disc format uses Reed Solomon codes to recover from certain bit error, and hence they can be corresponding to the same final data even in scenarios where internal noise levels are quite large.

Analog and mixed signal design circuits are however sensitive to all these changes since they don’t work on thresholds. I recommend you to kindly have a read of the full write up I made in the previous posts I have explained the same there.
anton_stepichev OP
150 posts
 
@manueljenkin

Wait. I know about thresholds, error correction and about various difficulties of reading from damaged storage media cells. All this should not concern us, since when copying and reading a file in a working computer, after all the background correction operations we get either an identical copy or a read/write error. We have no errors while copying and playing back files, therefore the noises, the charges etc. are within normal limits. Moreover, even if we hypothetically assume that some latent digital error occurs, it is not clear where exactly it occurs so that it cannot be detected. Do you have any ideas on this?

Another question - can you explain how the file sound optimizer can affect the noise, charge or any other ANALOG properties of a HDD for the better?
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
you seem to be making some assertions which may not really be completely true.


"Seem" to be. "May" not "really" be. "Completely". Awful lot of qualifiers for just one sentence. Would it not be more clear and direct to say, "You ripped my whole story to shreds, and I don't like it one bit"?  

There is nothing wrong, when confronted with a genuine mystery, in admitting it really is a mystery. 

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