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In Reply to: RE: All CD players sound alike. One can send a signal through a series of electronic transfers, including sampling posted by tinear on September 19, 2014 at 15:31:23
It doesn't have anything to do with whether CD players sound different. (They do!) Your original argument however, in answer to my contention that both the original digital file and the digital copy are bit-for-bit the same, was, if I may quote, "Not that simple. All processing involves degradation. Extra steps aren't free."
Let's try a little thought experiment to test whether your assertions are true or not. Let's say you've created a complex Microsoft Word document (.doc), and then you make a copy of it. And then you make a copy of the copy, And then another copy of the copy. And then more copies of the most recent copies still. Let's say you eventually get to the fifteenth (or hundredth for that matter) generation copy. Now, let's say you open that fiftenth (or hundredth) generation copy with the Microsoft Word application. What will happen? Will the file open at all? Will the fonts have changed? Will some of the characters now be nonsense? I trust you can answer those questions correctly. Now suppose that instead of a .doc file, you copy an .aiff file instead. Is there any reason to suppose that the results of multi-generation copying will be any different from what happened (or didn't happen!) with the .doc file?
The computer software business DEPENDS on the reliability of digital file copies, and to argue that "Extra steps aren't free" is either disingenuous or just reflects a lack of basic knowledge as to how computers work.
Follow Ups:
Would that it be so simple. A friend sent a Word document to an associate, he got back an edited version. Unfortunately some of the words ran together without spaces. It might be different versions of Word. It might be a font problem. It might ... Similarly, if you copy a digital audio file with a "lossless" compression such as FLAC and then expand it you get back the "same" file, except that it may not be the same. They headers may differ due to software issues. Do they sound different? Maybe. If so, try different software and then they might sound the same, or not.And let's say you take a file on one hard drive and copy it to another, this time bit perfect. Do the two files sound the same when you play them? That's the theory, but if you listen carefully you may just find that practice doesn't always accord with theory. These are all real differences that I and others have observed. In some cases it was possible to trace down the ultimate cause of differences. In others it wasn't.
A dogmatic attitude is not productive to uncovering the truth.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 09/19/14
I do not disagree with you about a copied file, even though it may be bit for bit identical, sounding different. In fact, that was one of the main points I made in my OP, where the copied files now sound better than they did on the CD's - not because of the files themselves, but because of the different processing chain now involved. What tin was contending is that there must necessarily be a DETERIORATION in the copied file, and I still vigorously deny this. If you want to call that dogmatic, so be it.But then you bring all these other items from out of left field - compression, decompression, FLAC - which do not even apply to the case at hand. I was doing a straight copy from a CD to a hard disc. No compression was involved at any stage. Forget FLAC.
Also, your example of the Microsoft Word document does not involve straight copies (as I was trying to show in my example) if there was editing or other processing going on with possibly different versions of Microsoft Word. Of course changes in the file are possible after that! Duh!
All we should be discussing here is the equivalency of a straight copied file to the original. And I say again, that the computer industry would not exist today if there were a problem with this.
Edits: 09/19/14 09/20/14
profile has enhanced the sound. That is as close to impossible as could be. What is possible is the placebo effect; you're fooling yourself after spending all that time and effort. And copies of copies can change, per Tony's example.
If all your discs sound better, you should be asking yourself some other questions.
Actually, if you change the bits (audio samples) in the file you may improve the sound quality, particularly if it was a bad recording to start with, but also possibly to compensate for some quirk in your playback. :-) This works best if you are prepared to keep a 24 bit file and play that as the conversion from 16 bits to floating point and back to 16 bits adds dither noise.
As to true copies of files (e.g. done by an operating system file copy), a copy may sound the same, better or worse than the original, depending on the quirks of your system. If there is any difference at all and the copies have the same bits in them then it is an indictment of the quality of your playback chain. I routinely copy files from hard drive to RAM disk before playback, because I don't like to hear any seek "clunks" from the 4 TB drive that holds my music library. This is definitely a problem with my system which sits too close to my listening position, but it is easily fixed by a copy.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
You take a file, copy it (with no loss to the integrity of the file), then run the copy through a different processing chain for playback, and different (in this case, improved) sound results. The original file's "digital profile" (as you call it) has not been changed.Get it?
Edits: 09/20/14 09/21/14
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