On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 15:18:12 -0800, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):
"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
So. Vinyl is on the upswing. Lots of people like it. I enjoy a good LP
myself. At their best, they sound damn musical.
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.
No clue?!! Really? They are not, however one and the same thing. All MP3
might be digital but not all digital is MP3. Not by a long shot. So, what's
your point? Further obfuscation?
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.
That's kinda my point. Either way they are diluting the test to the point of
meaninglessness.
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.
Again, not the point. The point is that this test, conducted as it was,
proved no point at all. The producers of the show claiming victory for
digital on the basis of this outcome is hollow and less than meaningless.
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.
Actually, it is. Lots of people believe it, that makes it "widely held". It
doesn't need to be a ubiquitous belief to be a widely held one.
But what they don't
differentiate between is PCM digital CD vs MP3.
Good MP3 outperforms LP and analog tape.
Irrelevant, immaterial, and also mostly untrue. I've never heard an LP or a
good analog tape, for that matter make the kind of distorted mess that MP3s
can make of music. MP3s made at a high data rate can sound OK, but I'd rather
listen to an LP or especially a good recent CD of the same performance.
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. ;-)
The article was someone's opinion a test is supposed to be unbiased.