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Let the deconstruction begin!

Posted by Analog Scott (A) on November 7, 2017 at 19:44:15

In Reply to: RE: The philosophy of "higher fidelity" in audiophilia is B.S. posted by stehno on November 7, 2017 at 14:09:56:

"But I see striving for fidelity to the music info embedded into a given recording medium as the best alternative and one that should be entirely within our scope - either actually or at least potentially and therefore entirely attainable."

What actually is embedded into a given recording medium is in fact a recording of an electrical signal or in the case of stereo or multichannel a group of electrical signals. Fidelity to those electrical signals gives you a copy of those electrical signals. It doesn't give you sound or music. To get sound or music those electrical signals need to be fed to transducers. Transducers that had no part in the original creation of the music that was the source of the recording. It is not "fidelity to music" whatever that actually is. Fidelity to the original source of music, that being musicians playing musical instruments and/or singing is completely lost. The original waveforms that existed in the room where the music took place is not literally copied in those electrical signals. Those signals that come off the mics are 1 dimensional electrical waves induced by 3 dimensional sound waves from some point in space subjectively picked out by a recording engineer based on what he or she heard over some sort of monitoring system that has in and of itself it's own set of distortions and limitations of representing what little information is being collected by those microphones. You claim this is the best alternative. What makes it the best? The best by what measure? Certainly not any reasonable notion of accuracy to the original acoustic event. That was lost.




"In other words, from our own experiences with computer backups and restores, we can be pretty certain that reading digital information is pretty close to 100% accuracy unless a piece of hardware has failed."

It is true that we can be sure that a digital file can be accurately copied. That's great for the purpose of transfering and storing files. That isn't all there is to sound and music.



"If reading close to 100% of the music info is true,"


False assumption. It is not "music info." It is recording of an electrical signal info. They are not interchangable. No recording captures an original 3d sound waveform. That is lost. Maintaining accuracy of those electrical signals does not restore all the real musical info that was never captured and could never be captured int he firts place.




"then it's really just a matter of minimizing distortions such that the vast majority of music info read and processed remains audible above a given playback system's noise floor, rather than below the noise floor where it is inaudible."

But that isn't what is being transfered. It isn't music info. It's electrical signal info that was produced by highly colored microphones each of which were in one spot in a room where the actual music took place. It is not a literal and accurate capture of the sound that came from any instrument or voice. It is a distorted capture from a point somewhere away from the source. Positions that were subjectively chosen by a recording engineer. The waveform that was the original music in that physical space is lost.



"Hence, this option should at least theoretically be above reproach such that one like yourself would be hard-pressed to "deconstruct and destroy.""

The option you offer makes incorrect assumptions aout the very nature of the data that is being accurately transfered. Deconstruction accomplished




"Anything beyond that target is simply outside of our scope and therefore seemingly pointless or nebulous for a target."


"Pointless?" OK this is a big part of this. What really is the point of concern over sound quality of audio recording and playback? This is absolutely key here.



"In other words, at some point we have to trust others e.g. sound and mastering engineers, etc, to perform due diligence."

That is simply the reality of audio. It has no bearing on the argument.

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