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From: morris@utah-cs.UUCP (Richard Morris)
Newsgroups: net.audio
Subject: Analog vs. Digital Challenge
Message-ID: <2427@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 27-Jan-84 23:58:23 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.2427
Posted: Fri Jan 27 23:58:23 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 31-Jan-84 04:06:10 EST
Lines: 39


I am amazed at the people who say that they can hear great problems with
high quality digital audio, especially considering the kinds and types
of distortion that either a good analog recorder, or the cutting stylus and
associated drive equiment in the case of direct to disk, introduces; which,
these "golden ears" have more or less given their seal of approval to,
by saying they sound so much better than their digital counterparts.

I am of the opinion that those most offended by digital audio are those
who have a financial interest in analog music like some of the direct to
disk companies, or someone with a small fortune tied up in esoteric audio
equipment; or merely someone with a distorted view of the real world.

I wonder if anyone has done a double blind test, as described below, to
determine if those people with "golden ears" who claim to hear such
atrocities with digital audio really hear such things, or just have an
overly active imagination.  I propose taking a high quality analog recording
either on analog tape or audiophile disc, and recording it with a HIGH QUALITY
digital recording system.  Then play the two back seperately and in an
A/B comparison situation.  Since the record noise and/or the tape hiss and
other analog recording troubles present in the analog original will also be
present in the digital recording, these won't be available as clues for the
"golden ears" to distinguish between the two recordings.  I strongly suspect
that under such conditions ANYONE would be hard pressed to correctly identify
which recording was which, by the supposed problems digital music critics
claim to hear; especially if the digital test system uses digital filtering
and gradual slope low pass filters.

If one looks at the signal processing theory of the analog-to-digital-to-analog
conversion process, there is NO information loss if the rules are followed,
just some noise introduced as a result of the quantization.

Until the above experiment is tried several times under controlled
conditions with conclusive results, I will continue to be unconvinced
at the claims of the opponents of digital audio.

Comments anyone?

!harpo!utah-cs!morris