[want2know]

The same is true for digital audio.

We are so used to see the visual presentation of samples that look like a bar diagram, that a lot of people think analog sounds better because the curves are smoother.

Chris Montgomery has a great talk about this.

[mhh__]

https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml The talk

https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM <-- Youtube backup in case it doesn't work (YMMV)

I wish I could force any audiophiles to watch it before they waste their money on snake oil. I think a similar point can be made about analogue synthesis, e.g. You pay Moog £1500 for what is ultimately a fancy box for a relatively simple analogue circuit.

[sjwright]

The problem is that most audiophile behaviour is driven by emotion and psychology, not by facts and evidence. In that respect it's perfectly analogous to religion—and we know how futile it is to challenge religious thinking with facts and evidence.

The underlying frustration is that objective (measurable) and subjective (unmeasurable) improvements in sound quality could ever be placed on equal footing with each other. It just wrecks my brain that people would ever spend a dollar on improvements that has an unmeasurable or negligibly measurable impact on the when there's still so much opportunity for substantial, measurable improvements.

If you want to improve your audio, focus on speakers, speaker placement, room acoustics, bass management and in-room calibration. Most everything else is relatively marginal (e.g. fancy amps, fancy DACs) or negligible/unmeasurable (e.g. fancy wires).

For most people with mid+ range audio gear, the number one upgrade they can perform is almost always to add targeted sound absorption to their room, not to change any of the electronics.

[mhh__]

I try to explain that to people. Even just the basics like fiddling with your EQ to your liking.

A lot of this analogue woo applies to synthesisers, as mentioned previously. For £500ish you can buy a million core, trillion transistor monster but for £1500 you get a box with some op amps and a (gasp) digital signal path in some cases.

[nothis]

>We are so used to see the visual presentation of samples that look like a bar diagram, that a lot of people think analog sounds better because the curves are smoother.

Except for a philosophical debate about continuity, isn't that true?

[arundelo]

http://productionadvice.co.uk/no-stair-steps-in-digital-audi...

The “stair-steps” you see in your DAW when you zoom up on a digital waveform only exist inside the computer. [...] When digital audio is played back in the Real World, the reconstruction filter doesn’t reproduce those stair-steps – and the audio becomes truly analogue again.

[tzakrajs]

Yeah, it's strange people are thinking the display of a spectrum analyzer is somehow 1:1 with the underlying thing which they are measuring. As if a digital clock with only the hour and minutes displayed implies that seconds don't exist.

[planteen]

No, you put a low pass filter on the other side of the DAC and it looks equally smooth. Those stair steps are high frequency. This is the filter is called the image rejection or reconstruction filter. Once you learn about the frequency domain, you realize how silly most digital versus analog debates are and how very few really understand what is going on.