Posts: 1523
Joined: March 31, 2010
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"a lot of people claim the digital signals are just one and zero, so cables and connectors do not matter. I assume that all in AA know that it is more complicated than that?" That would depend on what aspect of digital are we talking about. The issue with digital is that it can be viewed both as a blueprint and as a final product. Unlike in non-virtual world, where even the least educated person has no trouble distinguishing between a blueprint of a chair and a finished, physical chair one can sit on, in the world of digital that distinction is not that obvious to the uneducated. When musical performance gets recorded, the information captured on tape can be converted to a digital blueprint. This digital blueprint can then serve as a recipe that will guide the machinery on how to produce the final product -- in this case, the final product would be the weak electrical current that will be fed into a DAC. However, the digital blueprint itself can never be listened to; it can only be regarded similar to how we regard a recipe -- i.e. a piece of paper sitting in a drawer, ready to be pulled out and used when preparing a meal. But one cannot satisfy one's hunger by eating that piece of paper. In that regard, we see that indeed it all boils down to ones and zeros. This 'recipe', or music blueprint can be copied indefinitely and at will, and each subsequent copy is guaranteed to remain 100% identical to the original blueprint. However, what is NOT guaranteed is that each time this recipe is used to prepare a meal, that each meal will taste identical to the previous meal made from the identical recipe. Or, if we stay with the blueprint analogy, two different shops can use the same blueprint to build a chair, but these chairs will NOT end up being identical. In the above case, we see that it's not only about ones and zeros, and that the final product wildly varies depending on many other factors and conditions.
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