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
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@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. 

Suppose you send the same digital picture file to two printers. One printer kicks up ink residue and drips on the paper, the other doesn’t. The resulting output will be better on one printer than the other— even though they were both fed the exact same ones and zeros.

In the audio world, the ink residue  is analogous to noise that results in distortion on the final product, the output signal. The degree of dIstortion is what sets apart digital audio components.


Does Microsoft still own HDCD standard (or whatever that is called)? They would know the difference between Word and CD.