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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

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. 

andy2
1,555 posts
 
It always is interesting to see how people resort to simple and basic reasoning in trying to understanding something as complicated as how humans perceive music.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Resort? Simple and basic reasoning is how we understand something as complicated as human DNA. Simple and basic reasoning is how we understand something as complicated as how we came to have DNA at all.

The origin of species by means of natural selection, otherwise known as Darwin’s theory, accounts for all life on Earth, yet is extraordinarily simple: Species produce more offspring than are viable in the environment. Offspring are not identical, they vary in their characteristics. Nature selects for the most successful variants. These pass on their successful variant genes to the next generation.

Simplicity is not a "resort" to be taken when all else fails. Simple and basic reasoning is a virtue.  Indeed, it is the very foundation of the scientific method.
manueljenkin
11 posts
 
@millercarbon my apologies. English isn't my first language, I'll correct this next time. The context is, his assertions come from a surface level abstraction of a more complex thing. Every physical manifestation of what we call as a bit, is a set of charges occupying a specific location, within a certain "threshold".

"We have no errors while copying and playing back files, therefore the noises, the charges etc. are within normal limits." - normal limits for a digital read/write circuit. There is no bit error anywhere here, if that's what you're wondering, even at the dac input interface. But that's not the only way to create sound change. The transistors and other analog components in the amplifier and the dac (dac also has lots of gates) can be easily influenced by noise in the data, clock and especially ground lines and here we are looking at the output in a continuous spectrum and not merely threshold conditions. No simple way to correct these errors, actually no simple way to fully characterize and analyse these errors even. Arbitrary signal generation and fidelity is a very complex area.

"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?" - it's hard to say how this tool exactly does that since the developer doesn't want to leak much details. To go into exact details of the modes in which the write environment affects the access noise profile, it'll require a deeper understanding into the actual physical characterization of the floating gate cells used (and most of this is proprietary and not visible to general consumers, includes me). I had a few links regarding just how much noise an sd card can pump out into the ground lines, and the swap of an sd card changing reducing it by a large margin. This is because the phy layer design, choice of fabrication methods, read/write circuit design, power design and also the firmware for controlling all these (including throttling and power saving profiles) are all different. Unfortunately the links don't seem to be available now: https://forums.terraonion.com/viewtopic.php?t=1217 . I'll check if I can find the video.
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