"Sonnova" wrote in message
I was just watching "Wired Science" on PBS. They just did
a "shoot-out" between digital and analog sound. I'm not
going to argue with the result, because they so
screwed-up the way that they explained what they were
doing to the TV audience as to make the entire thing
worthless.
Ah, the shoe is on the other foot. Do you want to comment on the scientice
behind this article:
Wired Magazine article:
http://301url.com/dbk
First they introduced a recording engineer who's Chicago
studio is all analog. He maintains that analog is better
than digital (without defining WHAT he means by
"digital").
No doubt, he didn't explain what he meant by better, either!
Then they interviewed a recording engineer
that thought that digital was better than analog (again
without explaining WHAT kind of digital: 16/44.1, 24/96,
DSD, MP3 whatever).
Probably 16/44.
Then they thoroughly confused the
issue by interchangeably using the terms MP3 and digital
recording- as if they were one and the same.
MP3 is a subset of digital.
Then they
picked two other recording engineers and two musicians to
listen to a cut from those same musicians' latest
recording. Sometimes they were listening to analog,
sometimes digital, and they held up paddles with the
words "digital" and "analog" written on them, to show
whenever they thought they heard a difference. The cut
they played was contiguous with no breaks to indicate
when or if the media had changed (how did they do THAT
without editing the two together onto the same
medium??!).
Good question. Not hard to do in the digital domain, but I've done similar
things with analog, and it takes a lot more skill and work.
In the end, the two musicians chose correctly
53% of the time, and the two recording engineers chose
correctly 55% of the time. In other words, essentially,
statistically, no better than blind chance. The
conclusion that the TV show producers came to was that
digital is indistinguishable from analog.
Good digital and good analog are indistinguishable, so no surprise.
This "test" basically just confuses the issue. They say
that they were testing the widely held belief that analog
sounds better than digital.
It's not a widely held belief.
But what they don't
differentiate between is PCM digital CD vs MP3.
Good MP3 outperforms LP and analog tape.
The impression that I was left with is that they were saying
that an analog master is statistically indistinguishable
from an MP3 digital simply because they made no effort to
differentiate between MP3 and RedBook PCM and never said
what the listening "panel" was actually listening too, or
the circumstances under which the "listening test" was
conducted. "Wired Science"? Bogus science is more like it.
Compared to the article in Wired, it was really pretty good. ;-)