It's not really surprising that the same themes keep arising around the questions of digital sound capture/transmission/decoding and sound perception. Some of the facts can seem counter-intuitive to many, and it can be a struggle to assimilate the information.
I think there are two fundamental issues here: a) the nature of digital sound encoding vs analog encoding and b) the nature and malleability of perception. These have been addressed by others more cogently than can I, but here is my perspective. It's instructive to think about the differences between telegraphs and early telephones, which can be understood as digital and analog devices respectively. A telegraph is a kind of binary device. There are dots and there are dashes (and the spaces in-between). The signal is very nearly impervious to poor transmission conditions, as the dot/dash signal can be easily picked out from very substantial background noise; when decoded, the error rate will be practically zero (assuming a trained operator) regardless of noise on the line. The resulting typescript will always be the same, regardless of operator. An early telephone, on the other hand, was very much impacted by transmission noise. The analog signal (the words being spoken at one end, and transmitted as an analog waveform) can be masked or altered substantially by line conditions, with great risk of data loss, and certainly loss of audio quality. In the case of digital sound, the data is binary in the same way that the telegraph is binary. "Noise" is largely irrelevant, the digital packets are managed in a way that information is NOT lost during transmission. An exact copy of the digitized data is made available by the transport mechanism to the DAC, regardless of transmission conditions. Of course, the sound quality is impacted by the DAC, the amplifer/preamp and the speakers, but the DAC will get the same information to work with regardless of how the digital packets are provided to it. This is not true for an analog process. Perception is a vast topic, and one that has been covered well here. I am by profession a psychologist, and familiar with (but not remotely an expert on) the literature on perception and memory, and how our experience of things like sound is very much mediated by factors other than the energy impacting our ears in the form of sound waves. Experience is CONSTRUCTED by our brains; the bottom line is that we should never trust "eyewitness" (or "earwitness") accounts of anything unless corroborated by hard data, if we're actually interested in the truth. It's why double-blind tests are essential if we are to trust anyone claiming to hear a difference between two signals. R. LMS on a dedicated music server (FitPC2) Transporter (ethernet) - main music listening, Onkyo receiver, Paradigm speakers Duet (wifi) - home theatre 5.1, Sony receiver, Energy speakers Boom 1 (wifi) - workspace Boom 2 (wifi) - various (deck, garage, etc.) Radio (wifi) - home office Touch x 2 - awaiting deployment UE Radio - awaiting deployment Control - 2 Controllers (main listening, home theatre, all others), Squeeze Remote (on Surface Pro 2), Music2Touch (BB Playbook) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=101788 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
