[Rdr. Seraphim]

Ethan, bandwidth is very inexpensive today, as is storage. CD's are just too limiting, and time consuming to manage. The cost/time issue for downloads is a non-issue for many folks. Where I live, with fiber to our homes, 25Mbps (up and down) is pretty standard. Besides, I don't send my music around via e-mail as that invites piracy and the like. However, it's pretty easy to drag my portable hard disk full of FLAC files to my friends house! 

 

[Rdr. Seraphim]

Peripherally related, here's an interesting article from the NYT's on dissecting music, the brain and the interpretation of musicality: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19brain.html

 

[maverickronin]

Quote:

Ethan, bandwidth is very inexpensive today, as is storage. CD's are just too limiting, and time consuming to manage. The cost/time issue for downloads is a non-issue for many folks. Where I live, with fiber to our homes, 25Mbps (up and down) is pretty standard. Besides, I don't send my music around via e-mail as that invites piracy and the like. However, it's pretty easy to drag my portable hard disk full of FLAC files to my friends house! 

Unless you have a commercial/business account you'll get cut off real fast if you try to actually use it all...

 

[khaos974]

Quote:

Unless you have a commercial/business account you'll get cut off real fast if you try to actually use it all...

 
Depends on where you live, in France for example, all DSL connexions have had unlimited data transfer up and down since the earliest 512K ones. Of course, for an 25Mbps down, you usually get a 5Mbps up (though symmetrical up/down is getting more popular these days), but the amount of data you transfer is still unlimited.
 
 

 

[Rdr. Seraphim]

Use it every day, obviously. It's a residential account. No problems. 
 
If we were to saturate the line over a long period of time, it might look suspicious, but we're not talking data center quality of service. There might be bursts, but downloading hi-rez material is not an issues. These new lines are designed with hi-bandwidth requirements for streaming movies, music, etc. They also support telephony services. 
 
Quote:

Unless you have a commercial/business account you'll get cut off real fast if you try to actually use it all...

 

 

[eucariote]

 
Quote:

Well, how specific phenomena such as depth of soundstage and brilliancy are measured and registered is what I'm trying to understand, but I can see that you're not going to explain it in detail here. In any case, areas of compression and rarefaction (air movement) is basically what a sound wave is. But a sound wave is not something on a graph. 

 
Here is a decent introduction to the construction of space & soundstage from interaural time, spectral and delay information, all contained in sound waves.  We really don't have to make it up from scratch (and lack of knowledge about something does not mean that it is unknowable/unknown). 

 

[maverickronin]

Quote:

Use it every day, obviously. It's a residential account. No problems. 
 
If we were to saturate the line over a long period of time, it might look suspicious, but we're not talking data center quality of service. There might be bursts, but downloading hi-rez material is not an issues. These new lines are designed with hi-bandwidth requirements for streaming movies, music, etc. They also support telephony services. 
 

As far as I'm concerned, that's considered actually using it.

 

[Heidegger]

Quote:

You continue to set the bar higher and higher.  Or is that lower and lower?  I can't even tell anymore.
 

Here's what I'm driving at: appeals to science, even in audio, while powerful, are not always conclusive, even in areas where the physics is thought to be thoroughly understood and determined. Take the belief that nothing can move faster than light. This tenet was held to be inviolable up until thirty years ago, but it was wrong. In the 1980s scientists discovered that there is something that can indeed move faster than light, and that thing is space. Hence inflation, the incredibly rapid exponential expansion of the universe after the big bang. Space itself expanded faster then the speed of light, and did so without violating relativity, which says that particles can't travel through space faster than light. No one dreamed that the expansion of space itself could outstrip light. During inflation, space grew at a faster rate than light can travel.
 
"At the end of the 19th c.  a number of famous physicists claimed that we knew everything. There was supposedly nothing else to be learned. Everything else was just a detail -- engineering, in a sense. Then along came quantum mechanics and general relativity and special relativity and changed the world. We shouldn't think that we know it all." - Alex Filippenko
 
"There are many things that physicists and astronomers are doing now which twenty years ago would have been thought impossible." - A. F.
 
"Look at the history of physics. We've often thought we know how things work, and we were wrong." - A. F.
 
So when anybody says to me, "That's physically impossible," I always leave open the possibility that it might be possible after all.
 
 
 

 

[Heidegger]

Quote:

1. I have explained this many times already in this thread. Depth of sound stage etc is a psychoacoustic phenomenon that is unrelated to "measuring" the fidelity of audio gear. Since the main discussion has been about burn-in, and cables, and other things that affect the performance of gear, how humans perceive depth and width etc is totally unrelated.
 
2. As for why we don't want to waste bandwidth, that's very simple. If a normal CD can hold up to 80 minutes of music, you'd get only about 30 minutes at 24/96. All your Wave or FLAC files would also be 2.5 times larger, and would take 2.5 times longer to download or email to friends. It seems to me that waste is waste, no matter how low the cost.
 
--Ethan

1. Thank you for the straightforward answer.
 
2. None of that is a problem with SACD.
 
 

 

[Prog Rock Man]

Quote:

Here's what I'm driving at: appeals to science, even in audio, while powerful, are not always conclusive, even in areas where the physics is thought to be thoroughly understood and determined. Take the belief that nothing can move faster than light. This tenet was held to be inviolable up until thirty years ago, but it was wrong. In the 1980s scientists discovered that there is something that can indeed move faster than light, and that thing is space. Hence inflation, the incredibly rapid exponential expansion of the universe after the big bang. Space itself expanded faster then the speed of light, and did so without violating relativity, which says that particles can't travel through space faster than light. No one dreamed that the expansion of space itself could outstrip light. During inflation, space grew at a faster rate than light can travel.
 
"At the end of the 19th c.  a number of famous physicists claimed that we knew everything. There was supposedly nothing else to be learned. Everything else was just a detail -- engineering, in a sense. Then along came quantum mechanics and general relativity and special relativity and changed the world. We shouldn't think that we know it all." - Alex Filippenko
 
"There are many things that physicists and astronomers are doing now which twenty years ago would have been thought impossible." - A. F.
 
"Look at the history of physics. We've often thought we know how things work, and we were wrong." - A. F.
 
So when anybody says to me, "That's physically impossible," I always leave open the possibility that it might be possible after all.
 
 
 

Here is what we are driving at. It is so unlikely that there is a special audiophile electrical property, so far unknown to science that causes the likes of cables to sound different, that to believe there is one needs the suspension of reasonable belief. Now before you go on and say, yes and so there can still be such a property consider that ABX testing has repeatedly shown people cannot make out differences in sound. So, even if this highly unlikely property does exist, it is not audible.
 
Furthermore, sighted and blind listening shows that knowing what you are listening to has a major influence on sound. So there is a lot of evidence to show it is the senses and not the hifi that causes the differences so many report, but wrongly attribute to cables etc.
 
 

 

[EthanWiner]

Quote:

It is so unlikely that there is a special audiophile electrical property, so far unknown to science that causes the likes of cables to sound different, that to believe there is one needs the suspension of reasonable belief.

 
Yes, especially since a null test would reveal any "special / previously unknown" properties. As I've explained at least a dozen times already in this thread.
 
--Ethan

 

[inarc]

Take the belief that nothing can move faster than light. This tenet was held to be inviolable up until thirty years ago, but it was wrong. In the 1980s scientists discovered that there is something that can indeed move faster than light, and that thing is space. Hence inflation, the incredibly rapid exponential expansion of the universe after the big bang. Space itself expanded faster then the speed of light, and did so without violating relativity, which says that particles can't travel through space faster than light. No one dreamed that the expansion of space itself could outstrip light.

You contradict yourself with this example. The belief that nothing can move faster than light has not been disproven by the expansion of space because the expansion of space is not vectorial movement and hence space doesn't "move" (in which medium could it possibly move?). You seem to have misrepresented the theory of relativity or rather the scientific understanding thereof in the first two sentences and then corrected yourself in the following ones.
And even if some currently upheld scientific model turns out to be wrong in the future, this does not mean that anyone can just claim anything with the sole fallacious argument that science isn't omniscient or infallible. The burden of scientific proof rests on those who make unconventional claims.

 

[maverickronin]

Quote:

Here's what I'm driving at: appeals to science, even in audio, while powerful, are not always conclusive, even in areas where the physics is thought to be thoroughly understood and determined. Take the belief that nothing can move faster than light. This tenet was held to be inviolable up until thirty years ago, but it was wrong. In the 1980s scientists discovered that there is something that can indeed move faster than light, and that thing is space. Hence inflation, the incredibly rapid exponential expansion of the universe after the big bang. Space itself expanded faster then the speed of light, and did so without violating relativity, which says that particles can't travel through space faster than light. No one dreamed that the expansion of space itself could outstrip light. During inflation, space grew at a faster rate than light can travel.
 
"At the end of the 19th c.  a number of famous physicists claimed that we knew everything. There was supposedly nothing else to be learned. Everything else was just a detail -- engineering, in a sense. Then along came quantum mechanics and general relativity and special relativity and changed the world. We shouldn't think that we know it all." - Alex Filippenko
 
"There are many things that physicists and astronomers are doing now which twenty years ago would have been thought impossible." - A. F.
 
"Look at the history of physics. We've often thought we know how things work, and we were wrong." - A. F.
 
So when anybody says to me, "That's physically impossible," I always leave open the possibility that it might be possible after all.

 
Putting aside the fact that you have no idea what you are actually talking about, appeals to stupidity, insanity, and faith are demonstrably less useful than the scientific method.
 

 

[Antony6555]

Quote:

Here's what I'm driving at: appeals to science, even in audio, while powerful, are not always conclusive,
 
 

A dbt is not so much an appeal to science so much as an appeal to common sense. It is not based on quantitative measurements, all it tests is whether you can personally hear a difference
 

 

[Heidegger]

Quote:

(in which medium could it possibly move?).

In hyperspace. I understand your objection, but the point is that there's a physical process that happens at a faster rate than light can move. Of course, the big bang theory (and hence inflation as well) is being challenged by brane theory, which says that what we call the big bang wasn't the origin of the universe at all, that it was actually a collision between two parts of the multiverse. Another article of faith of the scientific community -- the big bang -- might be on its way out.