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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 hilde45

hilde45's avatar
hilde45
4,857 posts
 
Hi Paul,
Welcome to the forum. I’ve been educating myself pretty intensively in audio questions such as yours for about a year. What I’ve found helpful is to watch videos on Youtube, especially by Paul McGowan, Tarun, Darko, Audioholics, Hans Beekhyzen, and watching older seminars at the RMAF. I picked up a book by Robert Harley, too. Those are all good ways to get the basics. These forums are helpful for checking in on people’s experiences with various combinations of gear, with trouble shooting, and with other questions. Often, a more comprehensive explanation emerges in a discussion, and I’ve learned a lot from those. But because these questions have been addressed many times (buried in various past discussion), it's hard to get a thread going with a general (i.e., "encyclopedic") style question. For that, check the kinds of sources I mention.
FWIW.
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