Lies about vinyl vs digital

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, esldude said:

With swiping you put a finger on the first letter and slide your finger to touch all the rest of the letters in a word.  Lightly lift and do the same for the next word.  Sounds much more awkward than it is.  With a little practice just like whole words become something of one coordinated action from your fingers, a swiping pattern becomes one pattern for one finger.  You can soon with not much thinking about swiping instead translate your thoughts via swiping more similar to typing. 

And just how do you differentiate between, say, soon and son?

[mansr]

1 minute ago, esldude said:

Of course there is always dictating to phones.  If you are somewhere it doesn't bother anyone, that works pretty well too.  Just learn the punctuation, and it goes along nicely. 

Like this?

 

[mansr]

57 minutes ago, esldude said:

I've a similar story.  My Mom said I was taking typing.  I had no choice.  And boy am I glad she did. 

 

Now her insistence I learn to be a keypunch operator didn't turn out quite as well.  She said they always need keypunch operators.  Not a lot of money, but a good job part time while in college.  She had me take it at a local community school before 11th grade.  I was the fastest in the class too.  13,000 strokes per hour clean. At that time a whole page in the local paper had such jobs.  By my second year in college those were pretty much not around anymore.  I did use it as college computer classes still programmed main frames that way.  I earned a few bucks putting the programs of others on the keypunch cards.  So her suggestion did earn me more than the class cost I suppose. 

When I was 13, typing lessons were obligatory at my school. Electric typewriters. It was rather dull, but it was only 45 minutes once a week, so not that bad either. In the years since, being able to touch type has no doubt saved me far more time than I spent learning it.

[mansr]

3 hours ago, lucretius said:

You can use ID3 tags for WAV (at least in Windows).  Never had a problem, although I prefer FLAC.

That's non-standard, and support varies between applications.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, STC said:

The whole purpose of stereo is to generate the instrument/vocal in space. 

I thought it was to sell twice as many speakers.

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, AVphile said:

Isn't it time to end these humorless jabs?  I recently joined this site, so perhaps bickering is the common practice here, but I was hoping that discourse, regardless of whether one concurred or disagreed, would be civil -- and constructive.

It is for the most part. You'll soon learn who to ignore.

[mansr]

22 minutes ago, The_K-Man said:

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

something scrapping across rusty strands of metal, luckily it was only on for a short time.

Sounds like a bow across the strings of a violin to me!

Are you sure it wasn't a harpsichord?

[mansr]

9 hours ago, lucretius said:

You got a lot going on there. Let me enumerate it:

1. Music files created on different equipment
2. Files played from different storage media (internal or external SSD, HDD or USB memory)
3. Linear vs SMPS PSUs
4. Different operating systems

5. Different ripping software

6. Ripped from internal vs. external optical drives
   
   You left out different playback software, so let's add that:
    
7. Different playback software

The "bits is bits brigade" is saying bit perfect files (delivered that way to the DAC) sound identical (same DAC, amp, speakers, room, etc.) even if 1,2,4,5,6,7 are the case.  I remember that #2 has been discussed and although there can indeed be different levels of noise generated from these different storage media, it is generally inaudible/negligible.  As for #3, any different power supply (it's not just linear vs SMPS) may pollute the output of the DAC; however, this is not always the case and I would hope that for a "good" DAC, the effect is inaudible -- yes, there are some really bad SMPS PSU's that should never be used, while many others will have no audible effect on a good DAC.

Remember that Alex claims an SMPS used while ripping a CD (or more generally writing a file to storage) will poison that file such that it can be heard when played back regardless of what power supply is used then. I think most half-way reasonable people would disagree with that.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

There are two mechanisms where the idea of SMPS problems could manifest -- not likely significant nowadays...  The only way that the file could be poisoned would be if there was an analog *electronics* stage (that is, a true analog signal) in the process.  In some cases, that MIGHT be true, but very unlikely in today's equipment.  (I am thinking of a case where an external CDrom burner with analog input might be used to copy a previous digital signal, therefore allowing some encroachment of noise.)  There is one other possiblity that the naturally analog process of burning the CDrom (the lowest levels ARE analog) might have a disruption which increases the likelihood of errors in signal recovery -- also unlikely significance nowadays.

 

Sometimes, when an overly strong or unqualified claim is made, then it is sometimes a good thing for a little thought experiment to figure out those edge conditions where the claimed situation might occur.   Sometimes, those claimed situations might be unlikely, and the cause might not be exactly as claimed (e.g. the SMPS might have had problems causing the voltage to be out of tolerance, or have poor regulation.)  The source of the information might be making a 'true' statement from their standpoint, but the entire context of the claim might be missing, and confusion or disagreement might ensue.   Egos don't help either.

There are many ways that noise can corrupt a digital data transfer. That's not the issue here. Alex claims there is "something" different in the files even when they have been verified to be bit for bit identical, i.e. no errors occurred during the transfer.

[mansr]

1 minute ago, marce said:

Digital man, what is a digital man, is he someone who has fallen to Bits, due to reading some peoples responses?

Or is it a man who has fingers and toes as opposed to paws or tentacles?

[mansr]

30 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

I find it to be amazing that someone else hasn't figure it out -- but it is true.  feralA is real, and on most CDs from at least before 1994.   Some CDs, believe it or not, have raw DolbyA (NENA, 99 Red Balloons.)

The Nena sample you posted a while back should be enough to convince anyone.

 

As for incompetence, I'm not the least bit surprised. The recording industry is notoriously bad at keeping accurate records (the irony). Whoever was tasked with preparing the CD release likely had, at best, some illegible notes scrawled on a used napkin from which to decide how to best process the tapes. The same person likely wasn't paid enough to make any effort beyond the minimum required to put silver discs on the store shelves. It's sad but true.

[mansr]

40 minutes ago, sandyk said:

I doubt that your precious Checksums are anywhere near as precise as you claim, otherwise they would show the differences that I hear

Why do you keep banging on about checksums? If you don't trust a checksum to detect a file difference, you can simply compare them one bit/byte/whatever at a time.

[mansr]

1 minute ago, sandyk said:

I keep banging on about them because so many think they are infallible . They are NOT infallible any more infallible than you believe you are in all matters electronic. 

Let's talk about checksums for a bit then. The simplest checksum is a single parity bit indicating whether the number of ones in the message is even or odd. This is guaranteed to detect a single-bit error, but it fails if there are two errors. As such, it is only suitable for very short messages. A common application is per-byte parity in RS-232 communication. To reliably detect multi-bit errors, a more complex method must be used, a popular choice for moderate message sizes being some CRC32 variant. With messages of up to a few kilobytes transmitted over a reasonably good link, the vast majority of errors will be caught. Ethernet uses a per-frame CRC32 for this reason. For large files, cryptographic hashes such as SHA-256 are often used.

 

Regardless of how it is calculated, a checksum shorter than the message can never detect all errors. This follows trivially from the fact that there are more possible messages than there are possible values for the checksum (the pigeon-hole principle). The goal when choosing a checksum is to make likely errors unlikely to result in collisions.

 

To determine whether two files in local storage contain the same data, the most efficient and most reliable method is to compare them a byte (or a few bytes) at a time. The only way this can produce a false match is if a random errors within the computer (e.g. in reading the file from disk) happen to change one file such that it perfectly matches the other. The probability of this happening in an otherwise working system is vanishingly small. The probability of it happening every time the comparison program is used while not affecting the audio player is as close to zero as one cares to imagine.

 

To sum up, if two files compare equal, they are equal. If two files produce the same SHA256 hash, the chance of them actually being different is 1 in 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (that's 2^128). The chance of two audio files with the same SHA256 hash being different yet sounding almost the same is unimaginably small.

 

If you regularly find hash collisions in your data, you should probably check for the presence of an infinite improbability drive in your vicinity.

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Yea -- from what I heard, it is live perf where they make money...  I'd suspect that the recordings, from the standpoint of the artist are 'marketing material' more than big money making.   (That is, at least what I have heard.)

For major artists, this is true. Less known bands/artists, so they've told me, make significant money licensing tracks for commercial use (advertising). Then again, nobody cares about quality there.

[mansr]

Didn't Dolby already patent the thing back when they invented it?

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

Remasters of most albums are created because the record labels know that music lovers will always buy yet another version of an album that they love.

The only times I've bought another version of something I already owned have been getting older used CDs to escape the loudness-compressed remasters.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, The_K-Man said:

Very simple: The instruments in the songs on Rumours SOUND like INSTRUMENTS. And the songs tell stories.

 

Now answer my question: How was I "setting myself up" by stating that material of Rumours' caliber and era were in my playlist?

SJK apparently thinks he can prove his sophistication by slagging off that album. I didn't realise that was a thing. My advice is to ignore him and keep enjoying Rumours. I quite like it myself.

[mansr]

1 minute ago, lucretius said:

It hasn't been in modern usage at all until Trump:

https://www.lexico.com/definition/bigly

One might say he embiggened its popularity.

[mansr]

8 hours ago, kumakuma said:

You appear to be confused about the difference between languages and dialects.

A language is a dialect with an army.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

The feralA decoder configuration will NOT be commercial, and will be a useful subset of the professional DolbyA DHNRDS decoder.  Still have to work out the logistical details.

 

Anytime there is interesting music, music that you love (anyone reading this), and you think that it is feralA -- just let me know, and maybe I can do something with it for you. (That is do a decode for you.)   Later on, the decoder will be more practical to use, and less of a science project to use it.  At that time, then the audiophile can give it a try themselves.  I'll probably be around for a long time to 'give a hand' if needed though.

What I'd like to see, eventually, is a freely available decoder and a website where people could submit good settings for various albums. No, I'm not volunteering to run that site.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Hmmm...  Yea -- mega CPU usage for sure.  I never said that the DHNRDS didn't suck up every last bit of my 4 core Haswell :-).

One criterion was that at the highest quality level (or nearly the highest quality level), that the program run in real-time on my 4 core Haswell....   Today, the way that it is written, and the available modes, it can run between 3X faster than realtime to 2X slower than realtime.  Of course, the 2X slower is an experimental mode to find asymtotically the highest quality that can be achived using the current techniques.   The slowest practical mode is about 1.2X slower than realtime, but most of the time I play and run tests at realtime while listening.  (So I decode while listening, just like it was a compressor or expander that can run in realtime.)

 

It is very easy to make the decoder run perhaps 4X faster than realtime, but at that quality level it would be roughly equivalent to a true DolbyA (probably squeeze in a few quality improving features at that speed.)

 

Providing a service like that, if it ever became popular (unlikely), it would be good to modify the program to run in the cloud :-).

I meant people would run the decoder on their own computers. The website would only collect settings that have been found to give good results.