Two questions to make you mad.

What you fail to understand is that " accurate" in an acoustic perceived experience way cannot always be reduced to "accurate" in an electrical way by a limited set of electrical parameters among all possible ...

Human ears are trained by evolution to identify some qualities relating to timbre experience be it speech recognition or natural sounds, or musical one etc , This timbre experience acoustic qualities may be related in some case to the various parameters and material composition belonging or beside or near the vibrating resonant source and affecting it ...

Very simple experiment :

Put a big chunk of shungite on an amplifier...

Or try a big chunk of quartz...

Then try it many times and you will feel the difference with a music piece ...

Even if your electrical measures tool set will not detect any change in the amplifier specs you will hear a more compressed sound or a more meaty one with the shungite chunk and a more "clear" or less compressed or more high frequencies oriented sound with the quartz ...This is caused by the very different composition of these minerals affecting the playback system in such a way as impeding or improving the soundfield and timbre experience for the EARS/brain not for your measuring electrical tools... 😊

The fact that shungite work always in his way and the quartz work in his own opposite  way is an OBJECTIVE fact...

If these AC cables did make the usable signal more accurate don’t you think they would use them?

There is a recording of these two magicians on Water lilly recording :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbWLAayj4Go

In love all water lilly music acoustically and musically ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKE3gDpgd2c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOE2me5we44&list=OLAK5uy_ns-KC_3fKT-W9aPJzA3Rltx_hWLHShodg

First i am not an audiophile who buy the magic of costly tweaks...

All my tweaks were homemade at low cost...

And my system /room was created with my homemade acoustic devices with basic acoustic...My system total cost is 700 bucks and optimized is the best for the price...

If you studied logic you must already know that there is no logic explaining the prime distribution... Prime distribution is a symbolic object not explained by logic at all ...

it is not my opinion here but the opinion of the greatest mathemathicians ...

I will give you an example how mathematician are puzzled by the MAGIC of primes : The primes’ preferences about the final digits of the primes ..

Read this:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-discover-prime-conspiracy-20160313/

I could have give more complex exemple but they are not simple at all ...

The Indian scientist i just cited above use the prime distribution matrix  as an invariant to analyse what we may call the universal memory cell ...he created the first non-Turing machine as a geometrical model of the brain based on the prime numbers dynamics...

Prime are like a primordial musical phenomenon observed by human when a number system is designed but primes are independant from any bases system choices ...  Primes  are not based on human convention as logic are based on discourse and speech rhetoric... multivalued logic dont change this fact...

I cannot go further in an audio thread... But i gave some links above...

Magic is everyday miracles... mathematic is God music ask Grothendieck who wrote a book i read called the "key of dreams" or ask Ramanujan... And Ask Alain Connes...

we don’t understand prime numbers are not magical in fact they are the very opposite of magic they are logic.

The next step in A.I. will be A.C. artificial consciousness and it will be based on Non- Turing machine...

These non-Turing machines are grounded in the prime numbers distribution, which distribution is a meaning transcending any universe, any actual machine or any matrix...

Then claiming as in the nineteen century that matter exist and consciousness is an unecessary random derivatives is beyond ridicule and only reveal complete ignorance about the last century discoveries in maths and physics and in philosophy ...

Dont believe me read the links in my post above ... Anirban video will be hard to grasp but go in his book or articles...

Anirban is a genius the next one in the brain understanding , not in A. I. now outclassed by a deeper mathematical research, but in A. C. artificial consciousness machines...

The fact that i am a ferocious opponent of transhumanism technocratic materialism does not means that i dont understand the " limited science" behind it and behind the limited actual A. I. ....

😁

By the way via time crystals chains, for Anirban all the universe is a musical "machine" and music is not material but meanings embodied by rythms (numbers not mere physical waves) ... Matter dont exist in the absolute meaning of the word "exist" , music exist as prime numbers exist as absolute reality for any consciousness even for God ...

Thanks for your kind appreciation and for the discussion ...

Magic and miracles are everyday life....Remember your childhood or read poetry... Spirit and consciousness does not disappear because we are able to discover physical laws... The fact that it takes sensible traces or writings dont transform the prime numbers distribution in a material fact...Music is not the written melody ,it is more... It is a meanings purely observed when some evolutive condition are reached but these evolutive conditions dont create meanings at all ...These numbers meanings transcend matter and precede it eternally even if this meaning can be embodied in a sensible form...

This embodiement is not his negation as a transcendant fact but his manifestation his revelation as meaning not randomness or meaninglessness ...You go beside my point completely not even grasping it... How could you deny its value ?😊

I spoke about MEANINGS given to a consciousness... For sure this meanings which is immaterial is associated to a material written word or letters or musical tonal chords... But the poetic, or prosaic meanings or the melody cannot be explained by the material embodiment of the meanings or by his material reproduction... The fact that Beethoven remembered music and used his hands to sense vibration and then "hear" music anew dont negate the transcendant content of the meanings toward which his quartet content strive ......Music is not sound waves but with and through sound waves as fire is not air but with air as his medium... Consciousness must exist to perceive meanings as a transcendant order over randomness and distinguishing the two states as revealed and to distinguish between wood, air and fire as distinct phases.....

Materialism is the dogmatic claims that meanings are related first to "matter" not to consciousness which is for materialism a secondary almost unnecessary by chance product ...I suggest you listen to the physicist and mathematician Wolfgang Smith or read his books about quantum mechanics ... ...Or the physicist Henri Bortoft about science method in Goethe...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M_uFQNDlvI

If you dont like the fact that Smith is a christian then pick agnostic Penrose or the french mathematician Alain Connes about the meanings of prime numbers distribution ..

or try Anirban bandyopadhyay the genius who designe actually the mathematics of the first artificial brain .. Read his book and be ready to stumble from your chair as i did... 😁

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SDcUA84Nlw

Think about the distribution of prime numbers which is the ground of arithmetic, this distribution cannot exist without a consciousness to OBSERVE IT because this distribution not only has a MEANING but is meaning itself manifested and not because it is written on a sheet of paper but because it takes a consciousness to perceive it in the suprasensible sky so to speak ... This distribution exist out and without this universe for any POSSIBLE consciousness ... This distribution is a given meaning to be observed even for any possible god...No god can nullify this meaning or decide it will loose his meanings... It is an absolute immaterial fact as the value of Pi is....We dont need a material SPECIFIC cosmos to observe these mathematical facts but we need a consciousness... They are the grounding of any universe possible into POTENTIAL and ACTUAL meanings...

By the way, it is not consciousness which is an unattainable format , it is "matter" as conceived before quantum dynamics which does not exist as independant of consciousness, consciousness is the ultimate reality...

Music is meanings for a consciousness through waves which are organized sounds given to a consciousness which organize matter in a way to make matter the conveyor of this immaterial meanings...

But meanings can be perceived through matter in the morphogenesis of all mammals bodies variations for example if we by creative imaginative perception relate all details of the forms to the metabolic dynamics under the appearance...But this does not makes meanings a trivial material facts...We need a consciousness to make the RELATION manifested as meaningful...

https://www.amazon.com/Threefoldness-Humans-Mammals-Toward-Biology/dp/0932776647/ref=sr_1_4?qid=1697982946&refinements=p_27%3AWolfgang+Schad&s=books&sr=1-4

@mahgister

i understand and appreciate your thought. Using consciousness as an unattainable format doesn’t help it’s not magic whatever it is we know it’s not magic because it is within everyone. I’m being very literal here and I understand that just because the thousands of dollars I’ve spent on my signal cables in my playback system don’t mean that just because those cables measure sometimes worse than regular cables the difference is magic. Take out the waves in sound and you don’t have music Beethoven remembered his experience when he could hear and he did use his hands to feel the waves of the music, even if he wouldn’t have he still used a mechanical instrument to achieve his goal not a magical one the harpsichord or his experience .

When Beethoven wrote his last quartets completely deaf, i doubt that he would have been convinced by this sentence :

Music is not magic it’s talented people making nice pressure waves in the the air and electronically stored in 1s and 0s or waves and magnetic fields.

Sound waves need an ears/brain to be interpreted or created as meaningful sound by the listener... Sound must be LEARNED...

But meaning is suprasensible phenomenon given to a consciousness or created by it , meaning while often perceived through material arrangement is not reducible to material arrangement in any way ...

For example the drawing of an undulated line can be interpreted as a "wave" by a sailor, a vibration by a physicist, or the curve indicating to the Sculptor Michel-Angelo the way to sculpt his Madona folding robe, or it can be a passing cloud in the dream of a poet... It can be anything because it is a symbolic form also not a mere material arrangement in analog or digital form and it is a symbolic form offered to our interpretation as any natural phenomena are ...

Meanings are not only mere facts, nor sensible manifested forms, they are FELT modification of our consciousness...

Then Beethoven wrote with his soul a music which was written by a deaf man to be understood as a soul event , a meaning, and not only heard by the ears in playback or live...

Then our soul was ignited in fire way before Edison... Technology does not ignite our soul , meanings did...

We mastered our tools till yesterday... Never before our tools has been proposed to became our masters before A. I. and our corporate powers domination ...

Technology is useful , nothing more; our freedom and meanings are completely out of the technology domain... It is our creativity and search for meanings and our freedom who stole the fire not A.I. ...

By the way on a pure scientific standpoint, music is not only magic as meanings but may stay magic as a sensible phenomenon for long ; because not only is it a transcendant meaning over and through the sensible wold, but we have not understood yet the psycho-acoustics behind hearing musical and speech sound... We have yet many hearing competing theories in science ...This science as other science investigate an open field not a closed garden yet... The cosmos is a mystery, not yet mere things waiting to be sold or patented as the corporate technocratic power wanted it to be...

Excellent post...

But i differ a bit about these three "goals"...

Using measurements specs of a single component even verified to determined if the sound experience will be good, is an "objectivist" beliefs which some want to impose on all audiophiles, this tactic is from some kind of misplaced attitude in electrical design which cannot replace anyway psycho-acoustic goals and methods ... The last revolution in listening come from psycho-acoustics not from electronic design of components even if a new DSP will come from this knowledge ( See Edgar Choueiri BACCH )

"Subjectivists" use their "tasting" ears only to define with most of the time highly costlier components as upgrades and imposing this through marketing and forums as true audiophile experience some branded names, this is a marketing tactic not psycho-acoustic goals and methods ...They forgot that hearing must be trained in acoustics not by listening amplifier or dac tasting...

Measures must includes acoustics and psycho-acoustics measures , not mere specs of each component; and ears must be trained by acoustic concepts and experiments including music basics...These are the ONLY goal....And we dont need new word, the basis of audiophile experience is determined by psycho-acoustics... The word psycho-acoustics exist already and the science connected to it... Audiophiles then love sound and experiment and use psycho-acoustics basic to determine for themselves a good sound experience... they are neither subjectivist nor objectivist... The subject cannot be separated once for all from the object in psycho-acoustics save for specific controlled experiments ...

I will add my personal experience with mechanical, electrical and acoustical system embeddings controls which matter as much as mere specs of separate component if synergy is there to begin with, then measured specs are insufficient, and embeddings controls matter more than costlier upgrades which are often unnecessary anyway...

For A. I. we have a long road to go, and i concur with tvrgeek , but this long road will be travel in a shorter time than we think.... I absolutely reject all transhumanists thinking ideology not because they are delusional about artificial intelligence, they are, but not as much and not in the way most people think... And anyway the beginning of Artificial consciousness with a mathematic way over the statistical tool used in neural network is already here... i pointed out by whom and which maths in a post above...

Transhumanism is way more erroneous and delusional and dangerous, and actually in dominance everywhere, it is for sure a more lethal ideology than audiophiles sectarism and ignorance of psycho-acoustics which is hilarious...😁

I dont think though that A.I. is hilarious now.... because it is a spiritual battle... ( i am not religious at all here)

I think we need a new terms in our hobby for three different goals. "Audiophile" is not a good word. Once upon a time, maybe we could say it was someone who appreciates music reproduction enough to sit and listen, and the hobby that represents. Not sure we are still there. Kind of like the early computer days. "Hacker" was someone who dug into the OS and figured how it worked, made it better and learned. I was a proud hacker in disassembling the BIOS and changing the CAS/RAS timing to run a Z80B in my Kaypro. I wrote a Greek character PROM to match a Diablo daisy wheel. That was hacking. Then it became a bad word for people doing bad things to other peoples computers. The term "cracker" never took off. We do have a problem with words being stolen. Female dog, Person in a happy mood, etc. Context seems to not matter, just the word. One term would be for the pure measurement objective only who thinks traditional static measurements are perfect and everyone else is wrong. All DACs are the same. All amps the same as they are below the "scientific .1% level. Their pursuit is for some level of perfection if it passes by our limited set of measurements, it must be right. And yes, ALL cables, analog and digital, are the same. The opposite far end are the ones with unlimited funds and who believe in magic if it costs enough. To them, any system not costing as much as a house is "not resolving enough" and science is wrong. Somehow a power plug can unmask spatial details that were not recorded in the first place and believe only their hearing is 100% objective and if they hear it it must be real as they are immune to the placebo effect. Then the rest who just want the best musical experience we can afford. Objective measures are only one data point as we understand they are limited. We also use our hearing. It is not objective, but it is what we think and our experience is what matters. Price is a matter of if it is worth it, some having a higher threshold than others, not what our friends think or a justification for being right because you paid more. It’s about if the music is enjoyable to us. Even if we fall for placebo effects. Three different goals.   Computer Science comment: AI is based on data sets making an average assumption based on history training. Then newest technologies are "learning systems" in that good and bad guesses continually get logged to improve the data set. By the current technology, it may mimic a population, but not an individual. I prefer Turner to Rembrandt, Picasso to Warhol. What would some AI engine think? AI is a bad phrase. The earlier pre-press coined to be dramatic for headlines catch phrase" is "Expert System" and that is a far more accurate term. If anyone thinks AI is super advanced, they should look into the effort Kodak did to determine which way was up in a digital photograph. Hilarious actually.

 

To perceive a sound as meaningful the brain must interpret it , A.I. will be designed mathematically to interpret it as our brain does, not in the same manner and ways but designed to give results that will fool us...

Music is a meaningful sound which is way more than just linear Fourier acoustic maps because the brain dont work linearly and work in his own time domain but A. I. will emulate it... The problem is human creativity is expressive in an esthetical and spiritual sense , this will be trade for the easier indifferent and neutral creativity of the machine and humans will lose something...

Then we will used by conditioning to gave ourself to the machine...Nothing absolutely bad with that , but we will lose something and we will be in the obligation to compensate for this lost part of the soul in education ..

If not A. I. will cause as in medieval times an immuration of the soul....

I don’t see how AI will impact how we hear music?

I am of the same opinion as you...

But there is also a price to pay for A.I. domination as tool becoming more than a tool...

We will see soon ...

@mahgister 
Thanks for your note, I had a feeling you'd have some interesting thoughts. I think A I will change everything in sound one of the interesting things that will change soon will be the meaningless ideas that we pay so much for today that will be totally missing from future systems. A I won't understand fluff or aesthetics or marketing hype. A I may finally give the end user a standard for acoustics then after that we can modify the sound to suit our taste. A I will need quantum computers to really change things but that is just around the corner as well.

@mahgister

I’d love to hear your view on where AI (Artificial Intelligence) will lead recording and playback in music and movies.

I think A.I. will take the cake...😁

Commercially for money reason A. I. will be used to create music and process it...

We have a soul... But we will bargain it for money...

It is all already written in any S.F. litterature...😁

I am not a luddite by the way but A.I. will be under criminal corporation control for a while as it is already ... After that it will become A. C. or artificial consciousness...Here it will be more like a "Blade Runner" movie ...

The difference between neural network mathematic or A. I. and the new mathematic of A. C. is that it is self learning in the real world as a human or animal body do it is not a language model ... This new mathematics is already written in an astounding book by an Indian not so well known genius because it superseed ALL any other models paradigm of the brain on neuron basis ... There is the same quantitative complexities in one neuron inside with his grid of microtubules as the overall  sum  of all neuron network of all the brain... ...

One of the best book i read in the last decades or more....It change everything... Totally new concepts nowhere else to be read... Better than any thriller but hard science... It is like "fractal geometry" the book that had changed our geometric intuition ...I read it in his first edition in french in 1976... here is a book that change our intuition about everything or almost... And this scientist has proven 15 years ago the quantum properties in microtubules...He just discovered how to read them few months ago...

https://twitter.com/anirbanbandyo?lang=en

The main lie by omission in audio is that we ( the industry and consumers) for OUR convenience forgot to say even to ourselves that the acoustic and psycho-acoustic knowledge value exceed the gear pricing....

Then going after cables or pointing to the difference between live event versus recording one , is missing the main point ...And this mislead people putting them in two groups : subjectivist and objectivist, the two groups focussing on the gear / measuring tools components instead of the psycho-acoustic event which need to be controlled ...

Anyway all these old quarrels  in audio will soon disapear in a psycho-acoustic revolution  which is already here...

Audiophiles, subjectivists as objectivists  suffer from only one disease : psycho-acoustic basics knowledge ignorance and then gear and/or tools  fetichism... The gear fetichism of the subjectivists  cannot be explained if we do not point to their acoustic and psycho-acoustic ignorance... This ignorance is a well shared ignorance in general anyway among objectivist  as well as among  subjectivist audiophiles...

This why there exist so much threads as this one attacking one group or the other...Ignorance...

i concur with this short answer...

Anyway mine would have been too long and boring to read ... 😊

#1 The Twinscan is just a really fancy printer and reproducing sound is a   
      completely different matter.

#2 It's because our ears can distinguish it. It's why I ultimately trust my ears and not
      just measurements.

#3 Much ado about nothing.

All the best,
Nonoise