Please Educate Me


If I can’t find the answer here, I won’t find it anywhere. 

Something I’ve wondered about for a long time: The whole world is digital. Some huge percentage of our lives consists of ones and zeros. 

And with the exception of hi-fi, I don’t know of a single instance in which all of this digitalia isn’t yes/no, black/white, it works or it doesn’t. No one says, “Man, Microsoft Word works great on this machine,” or “The reds in that copy of Grand Theft Auto are a tad bright.” The very nature of digital information precludes such questions. 

Not so when it comes to hi-fi. I’m extremely skeptical about much that goes on in high end audio but I’ve obviously heard the difference among digital sources. Just because something is on CD or 92/156 FLAC doesn’t mean that it’s going to sound the same on different players or streamers. 

Conceptually, logically, I don’t know why it doesn’t. I know about audiophile-type concerns like timing and flutter. But those don’t get to the underlying science of my question. 

I feel like I’m asking about ABCs but I was held back in kindergarten and the computerized world isn’t doing me any favors. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do. I’ll be using Photoshop and I’ve got it dialed in just right. 
paul6001

Showing 2 responses by noromance

@paul6001 For the record, your post made sense to me, even without a specific question, due to the subject line. Not sure why folks were somewhat rowdy tonight. I think the answer lies in the conversion from the electronic to the physical/biological transducer that is the ear and brain/mind. This is absent in the Word example as the digital stays within its electronic domain. 

Digital isn't just 1s and 0s. There is a whole bunch of processing actions at play like error correction, power supply noise, quality of chips and sampling rates etc. The better the device and the lower the amount of error-correction required, the more accurate the conversion from digital to analog. That's why a good DAC improves sound.
When you input a letter into Word, you are merely instructing a machine to manage one's and zeros. There is no specific intelligence invoked in the apparatus. The intelligence is outside of the digital space when you interpret meaning. The same with a digital audio component, it's instruction set and software (music medium) as it is 'transduced' from digits into intelligence-detecting sound waves impinging on your mind.
Word works better on some computers than others. Faster, responsive, 256 colors or 24 bit, better quality printing. Try render a PIXAR movie on a 133MHz Windows 98 machine. Everything matters. The colors are better on a gaming machine.