| I didn't look at the Innersense article until after I had written what I have below, but a quick skim shows the vendor/author is a complete digital audio enthusiast. I like both digital and analog. But there's always some analog distortion in your recording and playback process. It's worth looking at the ocilloscope to compare the type of distortion that square waves give which does not appear from sine waves having the same amplitude. The ideal thing about digital is the recording can be very accurately reproduced, vastly more so than analog media, and can be duplicated without degradation. While being recorded with significant analog distortion (like intentional fuzz guitar or the occasional unintentional mic overload) or not, the signal is digitized as good as the ADC can accomplish. But when you've got a bit of analog square wave coming in to the ADC to begin with, the overshoots are too narrow to be accurately captured by mere 44.1Khz sampling. People who can tell the difference between different playback DAC's can also figure they could probably tell the difference between different recording ADC's if they were involved with the recording process. While all of these digital electronics of course meets or exceeds Nyquist margins and Shannon's minimums. But some people hear the difference between them anyway. Isn't that supposed to be theoretically impossible? Some really clean, high-fidelity, wide-dynamic-range digital recordings (ideally material that is espcially _easy_ to record) can be good reference tracks for comparing systems. So beautiful. Then take not-so-clean but excellent sounding reference material having the same functional amplitude going into a particular DAC. Sounds a bit worse as expected but in different ways than the pure analog _analog_ of this type listening test. Because analog components like transistors are not perfect, but that's what ADC's & DAC's consist of anyway. Lots & lots more transistors in the signal path compared to simple pure analog gear. It has always helped to carefully select vacuum tubes and audio transistors too when they came along. Looks like the tradititon continues with different audiophiles preferring to carefullly scrutinize the DAC chips they have today. Also, anybody else ever see audible subharmonics on the scope resulting from the beat notes generated by two different frequencies above the range of human hearing? One of the frequencies which is sometimes 44.1Khz. |