Has anyone been able to define well or measure differences between vinyl and digital?

Is the impact of 2 channel speaker systems equal for either source?

Regarding Atmos as a multi source format, I wonder how robust it is vs say binaural recording playback. My impression also is that Auro3D is more ‘immersive’ and therefore more accurate in capturing natural environments. 

Oth ambiophonics offers another method of playback that reveals the power of certain types of immersive systems.

Ambiophonics reference

@johnread57,

We are in the early days of ATMOS and Auro3D. I have heard some bad recordings and some exceptional ones. I think it will be difficult to find a sweet spot with users, most will not put in that many speakers. In theory the object oriented nature of ATMOS takes this into account, but my gut is it may be difficult to translate recorded live events with multiple microphones to a different speaker array. Of course, where all the speakers get a signal manufactured for them through mixing, then it likely will work fine.

These formats on headphones will be popular far before they are for speaker systems.

Can you imagine the remixes from older material? Scary!

I do not know what you mean is the image of 2 channel speaker systems equal?

@wturkey do you have a link?

G’day @thespeakerdude An esoteric question I admit, just wondering if 2 channel speakers present digital and analog audio in the same way or do the different audio profiles get presented in different ways by the same speakers/system? Maybe system dependent.

And I’m sad to say that Auro3D looks gone before it had a chance to grow. This format used less speakers to create a solid immersive experience. Shame Dolby didn’t buy it.

@thespeakerdude

I see one major flaw in your logic. CD and two channel DSD is just that, two channels. When I am in a room, out in the wilds, or anywhere, there could be an infinite number of sound sources, that all contribute to that data you mention. When I am at home, there is only 2 sound sources. They may bounce off the walls, the floor, the windows, but there is only 2 sources. In another thread we are talking about ATMOS with 9, 11 or more speaker which still only simulates all that we can hear.

Use that 11 speaker example at CD data rates. The rate is 7.8 mbits / second. 11 speakers is not enough. 24? Now 16.8 mbits/second. Well beyond your 3.5 - 4 mbits/second.

I don't think you can correlate the data rate for the cochlea with the brain, which I suspect is a WAG, from sound information that comes from all directions, with what comes out of 2 speakers.

How much have you experimented with binaural recordings? Done right, at 24/192, they provide convincing illusion of being there. Until listener turns his or her head.

Turning the head, moving it, standing up and moving body around, going to an adjacent room, and so on. Those of course break the illusion.

Yet this is an orthogonal consideration. Naturally, physical movement and physical action may change what the listener hears, with all else staying same.

What I was discussing wasn't Complete Illusion of Being There. That would heavily depend on the degrees of freedom the listener possesses.

For instance, let's restrain the listener to only rotating the head 60 degrees left and 60 degrees right. Then we'd need to increase the amount of information 121x, in a brute force approach.

121 variants of binaural recording made for this particular listener with the rotation resolution of one degree would maintain convincing illusion of still being there, as his or her head rotation is tracked.

There are ingenious compression schemes cutting down the amount of information that needs to be recorded in such case, yet, as with any lossy format, one must carefully think about compression artifacts elimination. 

What I was discussing is rather different: the amount of audio information that needs to reach each ear, every second, such that further increase of this amount can't change what the listener perceives.

If there isn't enough information - because it just can't be encoded in a given format - then there is a possibility of the listener noticing the artifacts beyond those inherent in the audio setup. The artifacts may ruin music enjoyment.

Yet another relevant consideration is that high amount of information may not even be contained in a second of a specific piece of music. "A girl and a guitar" and "full symphonic orchestra" have quite different information-generating capabilities.

In this context, I claimed that CD format is insufficient for capturing full information inherently transmittable by stereo setup, whereas stereo DSD128 and PCM 24/192 formats are sufficient.

So, discussion of Analog vs Digital ought to take into consideration what is meant by "Digital". It is true regarding "Analog" as well of course, yet the context of this discussion was clear on that, the Analog being stereo LP format.