the metaphysics of analog vs digital & gramophones

[Dakota]

I suspect that when audio is happening in an analog medium, it's carrying an un-collapsed quantum eigenstate of all the possible variations of how it "could be", and when it's converted to digital media, that collapses it to one observed and fixed state, which shears off the sense of wide possibility. Much less information rich.

I think we experience wide bundles of variations of possibility as more pleasurable than fully observed and fixed single outcomes.

This may be the hidden factor that keeps people arguing about the perceptual merits of digital vs. analog media, both in audio and video/photography. Any digital stage would bottleneck the cloud of quantum system variations.

[Gregg Juke]

>>>>Our own psychology, for which measurement is kinda silly.<<<<

Hold on there, cowboy. Pschoacoustics may tell us a lot more than what we think we know now; certainly more than you're waving-off in one sentence fragment. Maybe Cognitive Musicology could help establish general preferences, and then maybe the "why." Perhaps Ethnomusicology could quantify certain listening preferences/perceptions along cultural lines (in the same way that minor scales are "sad" to many of us, but in other cultures they are not, or the way many African cultures have developed listening styles that highly favor very discrete differences in timbre, such as found in "non-pitched" percussion instruments).

We like to play "science says!", but like the use of statistics, we may not always be matching the right answers up with the right questions.

Many people like the sound of analog better than digital. Others don't care. I like what I like, and you like what you like; but if we're going to search beyond that, I think we need to be very careful in applying "science demonstrably says" types of proclamations, until all of the facts are in, and we really know what science demonstrably says. Otherwise, appeals to "hard scientific facts" notwithstanding, we are all operatiing out of the subjective.

GJ

[Gregg Juke]

Dakota-- You're freaking me out, man...

GJ

[ubertar]

Schr?dinger's was a hep cat (apparently).

[fossiltooth]

>>>>Our own psychology, for which measurement is kinda silly.<<<<

Hold on there, cowboy. Pschoacoustics may tell us a lot more than what we think we know now; certainly more than you're waving-off in one sentence fragment. Maybe Cognitive Musicology could help establish general preferences, and then maybe the "why." Perhaps Ethnomusicology could quantify certain listening preferences/perceptions along cultural lines (in the same way that minor scales are "sad" to many of us, but in other cultures they are not, or the way many African cultures have developed listening styles that highly favor very discrete differences in timbre, such as found in "non-pitched" percussion instruments).

We like to play "science says!", but like the use of statistics, we may not always be matching the right answers up with the right questions.

Many people like the sound of analog better than digital. Others don't care. I like what I like, and you like what you like; but if we're going to search beyond that, I think we need to be very careful in applying "science demonstrably says" types of proclamations, until all of the facts are in, and we really know what science demonstrably says. Otherwise, appeals to "hard scientific facts" notwithstanding, we are all operatiing out of the subjective.

GJ

I'm not sure that we're actually disagreeing here.

My point is that we can measure (or more specifically, quantify) only certain things -- Such as "accuracy to the original sound."

There are other things that we can not "measure" or truly "quantify" -- Such as preference, opinion, and taste.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't discuss or explore questions about both. It just means that we should be able to tell the two apart.

When it comes to the quantifiable, we should respect the data. When it comes to opinions, we should respect the people that have them. Whenever we confuse the two -- that's when conversations really start to go haywire.

[ubertar]

I think it would be possible to do experiments to tease out what factors go into what people are perceiving as "mojo" or "soul" or whatever through a series of listening surveys where an array of parameters are modified. It may not turn out to be not quite so subjective after all.

[dfuruta]

My point is that we can measure (or more specifically, quantify) only certain things -- Such as "accuracy to the original sound."

I'd be curious to hear about the procedure for measuring a recording's accuracy to the acoustic event being recorded. I'm sure there's an easy way to do this, but it's not occuring to me.

[ubertar]

I think it would be possible to do experiments to tease out what factors go into what people are perceiving as "mojo" or "soul" or whatever through a series of listening surveys where an array of parameters are modified. It may not turn out to be not quite so subjective after all.

Maybe something along the lines of what these guys are doing:
http://messageboard.tapeop.com/viewtopic.php?t=82873

[fossiltooth]

My point is that we can measure (or more specifically, quantify) only certain things -- Such as "accuracy to the original sound."

I'd be curious to hear about the procedure for measuring a recording's accuracy to the acoustic event being recorded. I'm sure there's an easy way to do this, but it's not occuring to me.

Easy: You just split the signal out to two separate recorders. For instance, you could send bus 1-2 to a tape machine and bus 3-4 to a digital recorder, and bus 5-6 out to a lathe, wax cylinder, or wire recorder.

You could also use a pre-recorded acoustic event. Something that you can play through a speaker and compare results to. What you're testing for here is the relative amount of change from this original recording.

I think it would be possible to do experiments to tease out what factors go into what people are perceiving as "mojo" or "soul" or whatever through a series of listening surveys where an array of parameters are modified. It may not turn out to be not quite so subjective after all.

Well, I think it'll be both. Part is definitely objective: Distortion and noise and EQ skewing can definitely give mojo. I use them on purpose all the time. And then part of it is psychological or subjective for sure. For one, we tend to prefer equipment that sounds "familiar", and for two: as sensitive as our ears can be, our minds are far more powerful.

What we think about a sound absolutely changes not only the way we feel about it, but also how it sounds -- to us. I mean this in the most literal sense possible -- In a "hook you up to a brain scan and measure your pleasure centers kind of way."

But in addition to that? Yes, some things definitely sound different from one another. Does 1/4" tape at 15 ips sound different than a good converter? Absolutely. Can this be confirmed through both measurement and blind listening? Definitely. Is it "more accurate" or "closer to reality"? Absolutely not.

That's the only part that's not up for debate. We have the data. Much like evolution, the argument is long, long over. Now we're just still waiting for the understanding of that to fully permeate the culture. Sometimes it takes a while. I mean, just look at Galileo. : ) Trying to explain to people that science confirms some of their intuitions are wrong.... well, that's an uphill battle.

That said: If you like using tape (or wax cylinder for that matter -- I'm serious) and you like the results? Keep using it! Why would you stop?

[Gregg Juke]

Ubertar said it so much more succinctly and eloquently than I did (see above), but yeah, that's what I meant. There is probably a lot more objectivity than we realize in the commonly held "subjective" experiences.

GJ

[fossiltooth]

Sure. Objectivity and subjectivity are complementary, really. And yeah -- there can definitely be objective reasons (or at least explanations) for a lot of subjective preferences. I guess all I was really trying to get across was that old line: "We're all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts."

[dfuruta]

Easy: You just split the signal out to two separate recorders. For instance, you could send bus 1-2 to a tape machine and bus 3-4 to a digital recorder, and bus 5-6 out to a lathe, wax cylinder, or wire recorder.

You could also use a pre-recorded acoustic event. Something that you can play through a speaker and compare results to. What you're testing for here is the relative amount of change from this original recording.

Yes, but this is assuming a priori that your reference recording isn't losing anything from the original acoustic event, which is in fact the question, isn't it? I mean, you can certainly use this method to learn how two different technologies emphasize different things, but I fail to see how this helps with comparison to Real Life, unless you're able to assume that some reference format is Close Enough, in which case you've already won.

[Nick Sevilla]

You all could read this:

Experiment and Logic: The Science of Interpretational Physics [Hardcover]
Dante S. Cusi (Author)

But, good luck finding it. It's been out of print for years. I'm hopeful that someone will eventually make a digital version.

[ubertar]

Easy: You just split the signal out to two separate recorders. For instance, you could send bus 1-2 to a tape machine and bus 3-4 to a digital recorder, and bus 5-6 out to a lathe, wax cylinder, or wire recorder.

You could also use a pre-recorded acoustic event. Something that you can play through a speaker and compare results to. What you're testing for here is the relative amount of change from this original recording.

Yes, but this is assuming a priori that your reference recording isn't losing anything from the original acoustic event, which is in fact the question, isn't it? I mean, you can certainly use this method to learn how two different technologies emphasize different things, but I fail to see how this helps with comparison to Real Life, unless you're able to assume that some reference format is Close Enough, in which case you've already won.

The way you're setting things up, there's no way to compare anything. Two listeners hearing the same "Real Life" sounds are going to perceive them differently. No "Real Life" sound can be repeated exactly the same, so this becomes a "tree falling in the forest" navel-gazing exercise.

[dfuruta]

I don't personally think that real life is the standard for recordings, and I also think that what reasonably decent digital spits out is indiscernible from what goes in. But that's neither here nor there; I'm just pointing out that fossiltooth's claim about objectively being able to determine fidelity to an acoustic source isn't so easy as he seems to suggest.

Of course you can compare some things. For example, it's relatively simple to determine what changes when an analog tape is digitized. But, I don't think it's simple to objectively compare a recording and the event being recorded. Just because it becomes a navel-gazing exercise otherwise (which I agree, it is) doesn't mean you can make shit up and call it science.