How Science Got Sound Wrong

Another post hijacked. Why is this allowed. I thought the OP had an important point but this has descended into immaturity pure and simple.

What? Here? On Audiogon?? Say it ain't so!
Why would anyone even think such a thing?
What is wrong with audiophiles!?!

The math says nice things. The real world says it is dog poo.

Yup. Exactamundo mister audio. First digital was "perfect sound forever" then digital had "lossless codecs" then "oversampling" then "Direct Digital Streaming" or whatever the dopey jargon the roobs would lap up. Not being anywhere near so gullible any more and having quit paying attention somewhere around the fourth or fifth utterly disproven cycle of hopium high followed by crushing reality, don’t even hold me to getting the BS even in the right order. Pretty sure it began with "perfect sound forever" but who knows, maybe the pabulum for the mentally and aurally infirm goes back even further.

Can we get a "whatever"?

There was a guy at work absolutely convinced I was clinically insane, first of all for daring to even consider that records might not sound just awful, but even worse uttered the heresy that all digital was not perfect. Until one day the guy actually heard some of the supposedly lossless MP3. And then let me play him some records.

The people pushing the digital measurements BS have one fundamental problem they never will be able to acknowledge, let alone face up to. And that is that we measure to quantify and expand on our human perception and not to substitute for it.

If it sounds better the onus is on the measurers to figure out how to more accurately measure.

Pretty simple stuff yet beyond their grasp.

Oh well. As penance ye shall spend the rest of your life listening to digital. And not even knowing its a fate worse than death. If that ain’t punishment I don’t know what is.

Just when I'm sure its all just swirling down the drain along comes glupson with this:

This year is coming to an end.

Is it time to start submitting "Post of the year" nominations?

This has to be one of the strong contenders.

"Do yourself a favor. Skim right past the loser wannabes - above and to follow, as night follows day- and appreciate those like me who thank you for posting this brilliant article."

This is not even a post. This is literature.

Indeed.

Thanks!

Humans can generally hear a ’one inch’ shift of the position of the phantom between the speakers ’ping’ sound.

This equates to a perfected zero jitter timing change of 1/100,000th of a second. Which in Nyquist terms, means a clock and signal rate of at least 225khz, with zero jitter.

Yeah, and this is probably being really, really conservative.

I have over the years learned the most efficient speaker setup, in my room anyway, is to measure from the corners of each speaker to the side and front walls. Its all set up and fine-tuned first by ear of course, but then once that is done out comes the tape measure. Real handy since if they get jostled vacuuming, laying down to clean connections, or whatever, its real easy putting them exactly back where they were, no guessing, no doubt.

So anyway what I have learned over the years, move even just one speaker even as little as 1/8" and the imaging starts to go. Sad to say how many so-called audiophiles roll their eyes at this. Well, too bad. Its their loss. Whatever you think you have, unless you are dead on, just that one (free!) tweak alone and it will be better.

So one inch to me is a gross error. One inch is so far off I would hear it in an instant. Something a smart-a-- co-worker unintentionally proved one night when he tried to prank me by moving things. By about one inch. I heard it - and figured out what it was and fixed it - so fast (under a minute!) he could not believe it.

So do the math on that one, probably be in the nano-seconds. Whatever. The fact that people can hear a billionth of a second of jitter starts to make a lot more sense when you look at it this way.

artemus_5

Do yourself a favor. Skim right past the loser wannabes - above and to follow, as night follows day- and appreciate those like me who thank you for posting this brilliant article. 

You said "despite" but for me its actually the technical aspect that I find most fascinating. Every once in a while someone comes along, takes a few seemingly ordinary facts, and combines them in a way that is a light in the darkness. 

Here it is (from the article): 

The guiding principle of a neuron is to record only a single bit of amplitude at the exact time of arrival. Since amplitudes are fixed, all the information is in the timing.

On the other hand, the guiding principle of digitization is to record variable amplitudes at fixed times.

Then just in case you missed it the first time:

So unlike digital recorders, nervous systems care a lot about microtime, both in how they detect signals and how they interpret them. And the numbers really matter: Even the best CDs can only resolve time down to 23 microseconds, while our nervous systems need at least 10 times better resolution, in the neighborhood of two to three microseconds. In crass amplitude terms, that missing microtime resolution seems like “only” tiny percentage points. However, it carries a whopping 90% of the resolution information the nervous system cares about. We need that microtime to hear the presence and depth of sounds outside us and to sense others’ emotions inside us.

Boom. Mic drop.

When Michael Fremer says of vinyl, "There's more there there" this is the science behind it.

Good stuff.

Thanks!