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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Enough Computer Audio Mythology

People have reported hearing differences that are "impossible", where I have put quotes to indicate that perhaps these people don't know what they are talking about. I assume if many people report hearing "impossible" differences that at least some of them did hear real differences. I am not a BS "objectivist" who claims that this must be impossible and therefore people making these reports must be liars or fools.

My objection is not with the people making listening reports. My objection is with the people claiming that what they heard was "impossible". From all I can tell, the people claiming that theses differences are "impossible" have little or no clue regarding the inner workings of computer hardware and software as relates to audio playback. This is easily deduced from reading their posts.

I have yet to see a computer program that worked perfectly, except those that I wrote myself, of course. And in one case, I went so far as to make a bet at 10,000 to 1 odds there were no bugs, but nobody took me up on the bet. :-) They would have lost. See link.

Lots of audiophiles prefer distorted playback. It may be because their goal is just to hear what they like without reference to what was actually recorded, possibly because they have no clue as to how the recording was supposed to sound. This is the usual situation for studio recordings that are highly processed. For live recordings of acoustic music, music lovers with frequent concert experiences have a much better chance of a reference, but even here it can be dodgy. IMO, the only way to get a solid handle on this issue is to make and playback recordings of live performances. If one is focusing on digital distortions, one can also do tape - amp - speaker vs. tape - digital; digital - amp -speaker tests and use the tape playback as the reference. However, if differences are found there won't be a way of distinguishing whether the differences come from the ADC, the file format, or the DAC. More complex tests will be needed to isolate the cause(s) of differences, and these won't be easy or definitive.


Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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