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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Playback noise may be beneficial in some cases

My objection to tubes is one of the annoyance factor and instability of many of these devices. It's a case of "been there, done that".

It may be that the low level noise masks "baddies" on recordings and in one's system. In this case, the noise may be perceived as beneficial so long as it remains sufficiently low. One of the differences between digital playback and analog playback is that the digital playback chain may have little or no noise and each time a recording is played one hears the same noise and other warts of the recording. These artifacts may be nothing more than a pattern of air molecules hitting a microphone diaphram. They will repeat over and over the same way each time the recording is played. However, with an analog playback any repeat may be masked by noise in the tape or phono preamplifier.

Listen to a very long recording of white noise. Now take a short loop of the same recording and play it continuously. It may still seem random the second time the loop is played, but if the loop is short enough then it won't be long before the looping becomes noticeable. If one plays records only once or listens to streaming services this theory wouldn't apply. But note that any repeated play of a recording is not going to sound natural, even if the record-playback fidelity is perfect. Real musicians playing the same song twice won't play it the same way.






Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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