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
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Glad you got your scratch disks optimized.
BFDUnless you got a digi socket in your big brain digital has to be converted to to analog for your ears. That’s where most of the difference lies.
There’s plenty of chatter between chips, ladders and fpga but the analog magic are often difference makers.
If you really want to be schooled see Marge Green.
What’s the word for unnecessarily nasty remarks? Flaming? I’m not a regular on this forum but isn’t that considered bad form?

Who said anything about analog?

Physicists became happy treating light as both a particle and a wave long before the word “digital” came into being. (In the computer sense, anyway.) But why on earth are you talking about light?
Man are you ever messed up. Put down the Kool-aide! Pass the pipe, you’ve had enough. Records pre-date digital by oh like about a hundred years. When (if) the buzz wears off and the headache goes away it may dawn on your poor addled brain that analog is not digital. I know. Shocking.

Nor the universe. Is light a particle? Or a wave? This one will really blow your mind!

If it’s a particle then it is digital. But if a wave then analog. Some really clever guys figured out a couple experiments to settle this once and for all. What they came up with, shine a light through a slit. Waves behave one way, particles another, and we will see.

So what they find is, if they do the experiment to see if light is a particle then sure enough it behaves like a particle. Light is digital! But wait- remember I said this will blow your mind? Check it out- the wave experiment proves light is a wave!

Seriously. It’s a thing. You could look it up! Learned about it in high school. 1974 or 5. You really didn’t know? Seriously?

Oh and btw, NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Color. And guess what? It is analog!!!!