doing slightly better than previously tested because of a change in the testing conditions themselves, it's not out of question. 0dB SPL was defined as the threshold of audibility for a single tone in the midrange. turns out many kids can perceive below that. but about 10dB below, the margin of error was pretty much always allowing for people to ear things at that level(so long as they're in an anechoic chamber and no other louder sound is played!!!!).
things are constantly made more accurate of course, including tests. but it won't be discovered that we can jump up 500meters at sea level gravity with only the help of our legs. no test is going to discover that we can in fact see the mouse moving in the grass on the mountain a few kilometers away with the naked eye. and no test is going to confirm that we can notice changes 300dB below music(that would be more than superman level of hearing). there is a difference between keeping an open mind, and accepting impossible stuff as being facts. magnitudes here are very relevant and a log unit perhaps fail to convey the true enormity of a number like 300dB. just the idea of having music playing at the same time renders the possibility of noticing 0dB SPL pretty difficult and borderline wishful because of masking, because of the increased damping of the ear in presence of louder sounds(making it lose some sensitivity). and stepping out of the anechoic chamber and into the real world, is also going to make our hearing much less impressive that what it may look like under nominal conditions. so consider for a second 300dB below music. even if we push the music to 120dB where it may start to be painful and damaging for the ear, we're still talking -180dB SPL ^_^. we don't have anything with the ability to resolve that accurately in a playback chain. thermal noise from components is going to be often be louder than that. we can have some fun in the digital domain at 64bit, but it's back to fantasy magnitudes once we're back to the analog domain with real gear. I mean no DAC I know of, resolves full 24bit, so I don't feel like what I'm saying is anything new here. this is all pretty much the consensus on the matter AFAIK.
as for believing something because of who said it, we all do that at various levels, but of course a fact doesn't care about who's saying it. the quality of the demonstration and the repeatability of the results should be what makes it relevant. no the guy saying it.
as for having fun about pixels and sampling, again, context. I was answering about the relevance of a specific analogy and considering real life application. while my new best friend decided that the only relevant story was about repeating "pIXelS AreN't SquAReS!" in loop to pretend that I didn't even have the ability to understand that, even after being told a few times. also he cherry picking an isolated situation with totally specific conditions nobody uses in photography, just to support yet another captain obvious point, that sampled data follow sampling theory. well what can I say, he's right both times obviously. bravo captain obvious. but at no point that makes the analogy relevant. you don't make an analogy relevant by disregarding the 10 stuff that are different just for the sake of saying that we can apply the same math on 2 sets of sampled data. which again I wasn't trying to contest.
if it makes everybody happy to think that I'm an idiot, good for you all, but there are enough situations where I'm saying stupid stuff on my own, not to need to force fake ideas into my mouth.
I wrote something stupid and admitted it, I'm not sure why I wrote that in the first place but hey! I still did it. then he got in my head and to make things worst I formulated something poorly again in the next post. and again I admitted it. so maybe if I insist on something else, there is a reason beyond my ego? I took the care of saying that I was trying to make a specific point and that it wasn't necessary to mention the 20 ways sampled data could be captured and processed following sampling theory(to no avail, obviously as it's all he talked about, that and pixels aren't squares. and it absolutely got in my head. I very much lost it and my posts don't come close to portray how pissed I was reading that crap repeated like a broken record. I'm not proud but it's true. which led me to dig my own grave and even end up writing "pixel size" instead of photosite, resolution or whatever concept of paired lines per millimeter(the autocorrect didn't want photosite and at the time I was way too mad to stop and go google to make sure it's also used in English). so once more I proved my ability to fail, by posting a reply while angry, which is by far the dumbest thing I've done on this topic.
so really if the deep desire of someone is to point a finger at me and say "ah ah!", the opportunities are everywhere. and if you follow my posts, I humiliate myself pretty much on a weekly basis(it's fun because it's true). does it mean that the analogy between resizing a picture and oversampling audio is a valid one? no it's not! which was really the only thing I was trying to defend all along.
I shouldn't have gotten mad, I should have looked for the proper translation of technical terms instead of reformulating my sentences on the fly with what felt "close enough, I don't give a F anyway". I shouldn't have posted anything while mad. that's really all this is about.
it just happened to hit really too close to home to leave me unaffected. because treating me like a 5year old who never thought about pixels, sampling theory, digital cameras or processing, when you've had my life, it's really maddening. as a teen I was a nolife gamer for a few years obsessed with specs and tech and how to get that one extra frame, pixel, ms. to the point where I ended modo of the tech section in the main French forum of Enemy Territory( FPS game where I wasted too many hours). I was the nolife geek people would query on IRC about monitors and video configurations(and mice and DLLs to change the USB refresh rate and the quake engine and...). not something where it would have ever occurred to me to think about pixels, aliasing or anything of the sort, right? and I was just a teen at the time. at school I was on a math and physic curriculum until I was 20, why would I have ever hear of sampling theory, Fourier transform and all the fun of considering sampled data as sums of sines? I mean it not like I learned that at school... oh wait! but you want the real funny part? at 20 I abandoned all that for my passion, photography...
I got in a photo school full time for 3 years, and you've guessed it, why would we ever learn or discussed anything about digital processing... oh wait! after that I spent about 10 years trying to become the geekiest geek at photoshop, to the point where I once ended up telling the guy doing the demo on the latest version in Paris, which shortcuts to use so he would stop wasting everybody's time with the old stuff and stayed with him for the rest of the demo.
and I don't say all that to brag, I'm not sure I ever mentioned those aspects of my life on Headfi before, and I'm not convinced it's anything to be proud of(at best I was a photo and post processing nerd). I'm saying all this hoping that you can put yourself in my shoes when a random dude on the web started talking to me like my all life didn't happen, and like he knew what I was thinking better that I did. oh the fury!
well now I'm passed it and see how silly and futile it's been. I'm not even mad at Jawed, as for anything he did, I went and reacted to it like a dumbass.
years have passed since school(too many for my taste), and I certainly forgot a great deal about a great deal of things. the other day I had to think hard for about 20seconds on how to do a long division by hand^_^. but not enough to ever think that pixels are squares or that sampled data isn't sampled data. there isn't even any need for any actual knowledge to get that captain obvious level of argument.
so yes we can take a digital picture and oversample the data if we like, then go back to the previous dimensions(if I say "pixel dimensions", you think he'll come back to say that pixels aren't square?), and really not lose much of anything. the same way we can do it with an audio signal. but of course pretty much nobody nowadays actually uses that to interpolate a picture. the judicious occasions to increase the image size and then reduce it again are really limited outside of some automation in filters. and the opposite like jawed assumed as his default situation for the sake making a strawman point about perfect reconstruction, is something no average photograph would do to his workflow because it would mean losing information for no reason. once again, context. it should have mattered.
then there is the little detail where a picture will have to be considered as having more dimensions than sound(not really an issue with Fourier, we just go with spacial frequency or whatever term is used in English). or we could even make yet another fake situation and consider all the pixels lined up one rank after the other. the problem here is that the oversampling, if anybody cared to do it, would occur only horizontally, or only vertically. so even while trying to find circumstances to make it work, the logical conclusion is that the analogy is wrong.
also how the sum of sines showing the function of sampled audio, happens to be the analog audio signal itself. that's not a small detail. something you can't transpose to the censor of a camera, where the analog voltage of each cell is already pretty much the sampled data, and as such we don't really have anything to "reconstruct" anything, just get a RGB value for the areas where the pixels(pixels aren't squares!!!) are.
then there is the issue of having specific photosite layout per color channel, so any forced analogy should at least limit the context to one color channel at a time.
then of course we have to disregard all the cosmetic choices taking precedence over objective fidelity in photography. including for interpolation! it's been many years since the most used option stopped being basic oversampling. the interpolations typically used are very much destructive like I said at the beginning of that photography mess. and it's logical because nobody cares about having a reversible operation at this point, people who change the dimension of their pictures, do it with subjective visual result as number one priority. the best options to increase size, often aren't the best to decrease image size(pixels aren't squares!).
I'm most likely forgetting a few other reasons why making an analogy between audio oversampling and enlarging a picture is a very bad idea, but as I got dragged into this once again (when I though I was out, they pull me back in!), I hope I've given enough, not to keep saying that it's a valid analogy. TBH analogies in science and engineering are almost always a bad idea. I can never understand why people feel the need to hang on to them once various flaws and limitations have clearly been exposed.