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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: ALL of that feeling was created in YOUR head

"differences we hear, where there should be none, between computers, files, players, etc."

Come on. If you don't know better, you should. I can see that you don't grasp electronics or computers to any depth, just where does your expertise lie? Actually the question is largely rhetorical because if you actually do understand ANYTHING well, be it a product, process, person..., then you are surely aware that you are aware of many factors affecting it's performance, however it's established, and nuances of it's performance that are likely lost on the casual observer.

With effort instances of computers, files and players can be optimized to produce results sufficiently identical to each to other to obscure identification by a single observer. If the best observer is available or an entire population then it can be extended to the population. Once the maximum error is well below the thermal noise floor then they can be considered identical for the application. Naturally using techniques to reduce the bandwidth will allow further differentiation but that shouldn't be detectable in actual operation.

Pragmatically NO two components are identical off the line (but they both meet specs). No two instances of the same media are identical. No two people are identical and neither are any two environments, even if the difference is only temporal.

The name of the game is to get differences between instances of a product small enough that most people don't care. It's NOT to get them small enough that an astute user can not sense a difference under any condition.

I mentally cringe when I read posters saying that they did a test using two IDENTICAL (fill in the blank)s. One that I recall from years ago was when someone was doing a test and bought two, brand new CD's and unwrapped each one right before conducting the test to insure that they were identical. As you can see from the above, that indicates not a high level of care, but rather an extreme level of incompetence. I stopped right there because anything further would be literally incredible.

I reckon that horse is beat enough. Your 'should' is wishful thinking trying to masquerade as reason.

Regards, Rick

PS: If, as sometimes happens, my computer eats this rather than sending it, the odds that I'll be able to faithfully recreate it are low, very low. However, I can do one of generally the same ilk...


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