Thanks to Millercarbon for his very lucid account of the physics of audio transmission. I’d add a brief philosophical remark. The talk of “forces,” “fields,” and so on in physics is very useful for calculating and predicting outcomes, but it does not even raise the question of what “forces” and “fields,” etc., actually are. As Niels Bohr wrote, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” That is, physics stops at the observable phenomena, which are external to our own minds, and “knowable” only by virtue of our minds and bodies. If we were different kinds of animals (mantis shrimp, for instance, which have 17 color receptors as compared to our 3, or bats that “hear” what we see, or dogs that smell what we have no access to at all), we would “know” a very different world. To say “force moves…” is pretty much the same thing as to say that sleeping pills induce sleep because of their somnolent properties. We can describe these properties with remarkable precision, thanks in part to the importation of mathematics into physics in the early modern period (Newton, Descartes, et at.). But our descriptions merely presuppose the observable phenomena and the structures of mind that make observation of them possible. The forces themselves remain occult qualities. If our physical and mathematical descriptions were equal to the phenomena they describe, then the real meaning of existence could ultimately be expressed in a formula—as Douglas Adams parodies this point, the meaning of life might be “42”!
So: what are the phenomena Millercarbon so succinctly describes?
Ah, there’s the rub! There are many “answers,” but none of them are definitive. And this fact is itself instructive. The “reality” we presume to “understand” in physics is, in itself, necessarily beyond our grasp. To take Shakespeare out of context, there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your philosophy—or science.
And so, there remains room for speculation, mystery, and the many emotive features we, as audiophiles, are so thrilled by that we’re willing to part with large sums of money to achieve it.