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

@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.

Thanks all for not letting this devolve!  The concensus seems to be pointing to "desirable" noise and/or distortions such as even harmonics, cross talk, phasing etc creating (or the illusion of) a difference, preferred or not . Im thinking of all of the ways a sound in nature propogates.  Reverbs, numerous random reflections (creating distortions and affecting phase in frequency dependent way) density variations in the air, etc.  Indeed maybe our brains might "expect" less than ideal waveforms.  Perhaps "ideal" might be best approximated by something like DDD studio recordings on highly  resolving systems (dither its own issue).  While potentially similar but not proof, in digital signal processing some computations converge best, even require, some additive digital noise (variations in the digitized stream).  Maybe our ear/brain pair expects similar to be happy.  Im asking,  but do full digitally recorded live performances suffer as much as studio recordings to folks?  Or is the point of divergence at playback?  Perhaps a recording "live" in a venue (think natural distortions) mitigates the "perfect" waveform idea, even if it is a DDD recording.

Strike a tuning fork at any frequency.   Play the same pure  frequency on a modern electronic device.  Conduct a poll as to which sounds subjectively better. Seems obsurd but extrapolate to a guitar and even virtuoso performer on a hypothetical "pure note" guitar.

Enjoy what you find most pleasing, but i too am curious like the OP.  Im guessing this topic never goes away. 

@fair 

I am familiar with binaural representations of full immersive audio space. It is still only a representation of a full immersive space and sound sources. Do you have a link to these data points? I think I have seen that before or had it mentioned to me and there is another error in your interpretation, probably more significant than the one I mentioned.

The hair cells each respond to a range of frequencies and triggers the nerve associated with it. The cell next to it does the same. There is a large overlap of the frequencies between cells / nerves, but each one generates a signal, or data based on your inference. Because there is overlap and the range of frequencies is large for each cell/nerve, then there must be massive data redundancy. There may be what looks like 3.5-4.0 megabits of data, but most of it is redundant, and if combined to generate a single data stream, the amount of data would be far less.

We cannot hear over 20Khz. In a listening room, 90db exceeds the full range of human hearing from the quietest detectable sound above the noise floor to the loudest sound we can tolerate, and at those levels, much of it distorted. Are you familiar with Shannon Hartley formulas, C(bps) = B * log₂(1+SNR) ?

This states that the maximum data that can be transmitted in a channel is Bandwidth * log2(SNR+1). This provides the CD data rate.