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Please Educate Me

If I can’t find the answer here, I won’t find it anywhere. 

Something I’ve wondered about for a long time: The whole world is digital. Some huge percentage of our lives consists of ones and zeros. 

And with the exception of hi-fi, I don’t know of a single instance in which all of this digitalia isn’t yes/no, black/white, it works or it doesn’t. No one says, “Man, Microsoft Word works great on this machine,” or “The reds in that copy of Grand Theft Auto are a tad bright.” The very nature of digital information precludes such questions. 

Not so when it comes to hi-fi. I’m extremely skeptical about much that goes on in high end audio but I’ve obviously heard the difference among digital sources. Just because something is on CD or 92/156 FLAC doesn’t mean that it’s going to sound the same on different players or streamers. 

Conceptually, logically, I don’t know why it doesn’t. I know about audiophile-type concerns like timing and flutter. But those don’t get to the underlying science of my question. 

I feel like I’m asking about ABCs but I was held back in kindergarten and the computerized world isn’t doing me any favors. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do. I’ll be using Photoshop and I’ve got it dialed in just right. 
paul6001

Showing 1 response by desktopguy

desktopguy
397 posts
 
There’s nothing at all strange about OP’s question. We’re completely surrounded by digital information on computers, laptops, tablet, cellphones, RFID chips that track those phones in stores. The list is endless. And all that hardware seems to work pretty well; or to phrase it more accurately, it normally works, and it works normally.

But of course digital audio is vastly different. Some digital is sonically tragic; some is exalted and worth every penny. I think OP is asking a logical question that boils down to: why all the variability in digital audio?

I think the answer is tied up to a heady brew of factors, including:
  • The complexity of music (for ADA encoders to handle), compared to other, less dense content streams
  • The particularity of how music sounds--how top level audio is known to sound--and how easily that particularity is disrupted and degraded in the digital realm (and in particular, when it is converted back to analog for rendition on an audio system)
  • And the high expectations and well-developed sonic biases, expectations, and beliefs of those in this hobby. Collectively we’re very quick to gun down bad sound (regardless of how it came to be bad)
I fought with digital for years (as in, "fought to like it and find it acceptable"). That fight got way easier when I discoverd multibit & NOS DACs. Digital is more ear-friendly to me now.

But I never messed with high-end network streamers or any of that signal distribution gear others know so much about. I suspect new digital gremlins await me there, ready to pounce.

Repeat: OP asks a reasonable question. The fact that he got treated so unreasonably says way more about this site as a venue for audio information than about his question itself.
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