What do we hear when we change the direction of a wire?

@millercarbon my apologies. English isn't my first language, I'll correct this next time. The context is, his assertions come from a surface level abstraction of a more complex thing. Every physical manifestation of what we call as a bit, is a set of charges occupying a specific location, within a certain "threshold".

"We have no errors while copying and playing back files, therefore the noises, the charges etc. are within normal limits." - normal limits for a digital read/write circuit. There is no bit error anywhere here, if that's what you're wondering, even at the dac input interface. But that's not the only way to create sound change. The transistors and other analog components in the amplifier and the dac (dac also has lots of gates) can be easily influenced by noise in the data, clock and especially ground lines and here we are looking at the output in a continuous spectrum and not merely threshold conditions. No simple way to correct these errors, actually no simple way to fully characterize and analyse these errors even. Arbitrary signal generation and fidelity is a very complex area.

"Another question - can you explain how the file sound optimizer can affect the noise, charge or any other ANALOG properties of a HDD for the better?" - it's hard to say how this tool exactly does that since the developer doesn't want to leak much details. To go into exact details of the modes in which the write environment affects the access noise profile, it'll require a deeper understanding into the actual physical characterization of the floating gate cells used (and most of this is proprietary and not visible to general consumers, includes me). I had a few links regarding just how much noise an sd card can pump out into the ground lines, and the swap of an sd card changing reducing it by a large margin. This is because the phy layer design, choice of fabrication methods, read/write circuit design, power design and also the firmware for controlling all these (including throttling and power saving profiles) are all different. Unfortunately the links don't seem to be available now: https://forums.terraonion.com/viewtopic.php?t=1217 . I'll check if I can find the video.

@djones-

     "If these new models don't agree with your preconceptions and biases you'll dismiss them as well."

     Do you mean: the way the scientifically uninformed, "dismiss" and scoff at such established truths as Quantum Entanglement; as they incessantly have, though the facts have been in for the past five decades?

      If the world's best inventors, throughout human history, hadn't ignored, "scientists", naysayers and scoffers (such as you): we'd still be living in a relative Stone Age, with respect to technology.

       ie: When the steam locomotive was invented: the day's best, "scientists" claimed man couldn't survive speeds in excess of 20 MPH!

        Interesting, that most of the electrical theories your ilk espouses, came from the same century (the 1800's).

@djones (et al)-

         ps:  Would you scoff, were I to tell you that certain birds actually navigate their migratory routes from Scandinavia to Africa and back, every year, via receptors in their eyes, that detect the Earth's (very weak) magnetic field?

        How about: your nose doesn't, "smell" anything, but: actually LISTENS to frequencies generated by molecular bonds?

         ie: the frequencies generated by the chemical bonds of Almonds and Cyanide are identical and that's why they smell the same, though their molecules/chemistry are vastly different.

         btw: Both of those scientific/biological facts were established though the studies of Quantum Mechanics.

                                    https://phys.org/news/2011-01-quantum-robins.html

                                    https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5084270                                       


                                                    Higher Education is your friend!

@millercarbon - Your quote "Simple and basic reasoning is how we understand something as complicated as human DNA. Simple and basic reasoning is how we understand something as complicated as how we came to have DNA at all."

Either you have no clue about what you have just said (and just assuming the only top level abstraction you are aware of to be the entirety of the domain), or you somehow find the amount of structural and chemical (thermal/energy related as well) complexities in the process of replication and repair of DNA, something that took ages to be understood to a decent level, with still areas that we don’t fully understand yet, and something that students study for years together, to be trivial.

@manueljenkin

The transistors and other analog components in the amplifier and the dac (dac also has lots of gates) can be easily influenced by noise in the data, clock and especially ground lines and here we are looking at the output in a continuous spectrum and not merely threshold conditions. No simple way to correct these errors, actually no simple way to fully characterize and analyse these errors even. Arbitrary signal generation and fidelity is a very complex area.

You tend to complicate things, and with this approach it is almost impossible to understand the problem, because, as you correctly noted, we have a lot of areas in the computer where we can suspect problems. However, you forget that we can logically exclude the vast majority of these suspicions.

daс can be easily influenced by noise in the data, clock and especially ground lines

When we compare the sound of two identical files recorded on the same medium, when the player switches from one file to another, none of the above interference in the computer changes, that is, these interferences do not prevent us from making the correct conclusion about the sound of the compared files,  all other thing being equal.

On the other hand, we can easily make sure that the intended noises do not affect the sound the way we hear it in our audio examples. To do this, it is enough during listening, for example, to insert and remove a USB flash drive from the computer, connect/disconnect the PSU in the laptop, start background hi-res video playback via Internet or any power consuming software, etc. If desired, you can come up with a lot of actions that will simulate serious changes in the level of noise and interference of the computer and conduct a simple but effective study of how your DAC reacts to heavy changes in the level and spectrum of interference emitted by it. Have you conducted such experiments?

To go into exact details of the modes in which the write environment affects the access noise profile, it'll require a deeper understanding into the actual physical characterization of the floating gate cells used (and most of this is proprietary and not visible to general consumers, includes me)

Here again, it is enough to simply analyze the situation, and not go into deep technical details. What do we have - the program loads a file into memory, presumably does something with it (in fact, nothing physically happens with the data) and writes the file back to disk. At the same time:
- This program does not work "at low level", that is, it cannot select a certain "low-noise" place on the disk and write the improved copy of the file to this place, since the physical location of files and folders on the disk is completely determined by OS.
- There is no code in the program that would analyze the disk surface for noise or anything else.
- Suppose different cells of the disk "sound" differently, then it is still unclear how the program, when repeatedly overwriting a file, makes similar changes in the sound (improvements or deterioration-it does not matter) for each copy.  In theory, we should get an unpredictable result with each rewrite - either an improvement or a deterioration or non at all, and as a result, something indefinite in the end.

In my opinion, it is quite enough to stop clogging your head with noises and charges and start thinking of something else.