Of course it all happens in the "analog" world, but I am addressing the original question: does any possible slope on the digital pulse have meaning in digital audio. No, it doesn't. The rise and fall of the voltage signal is effectively instantaneous and the slope (if there is one) of the pulse is meaningless in digital audio data transmission, especially when compared to other effects such as sync and timing.
I disagree. In the digital world, the risetime of a state transition is far from instantaneous, and the slope IS meaningful. If you scope a modern high speed digital circuit, you will not see square waves, you will see more trapezoidal waveforms. This is in fact one of the sources of jitter. as the receiving circuit does not necessarily interpret the state transition from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 at exactly the same voltage every time.
I disagree. In the digital world, the risetime of a state transition is far from instantaneous, and the slope IS meaningful. If you scope a modern high speed digital circuit, you will not see square waves, you will see more trapezoidal waveforms. This is in fact one of the sources of jitter. as the receiving circuit does not necessarily interpret the state transition from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0 at exactly the same voltage every time.
I had come across information of this vein which started my little rat brain spinning in it's jittery little hamster wheel. When Mike started releasing his teasers it jittered more.
Over the years timing and jitter layman-wise has been presented by these nice square wave illustrations, etc. It gets the basics across. And yet designers are still wrestling with it 30 years later. No matter really if Mike can get us something better. I look forward to what he will name the cable. As far as a CD transport is concerned is there a Norse equivalent of TARDIS? And will it interface only with the little silver discs?
Interesting and illuminating stuff.
Ablelza, did you collect CD's at a similar rate to LP's and are most of them gone now? I'm thinking most of us don't keep a lot around.
That's because bandwidth is not unlimited.
It is what determines how squarish a wave can remain given a transmission rate.
Speed of light is irrelevant here. The bandwidth of the transmission line vs. the data rate is what matters (Shannon theory). It may look instantaneous to the naked eye, but not to a scope and definitely not to an IC.
Of course it all happens in the "analog" world, but I am addressing the original question: does any possible slope on the digital pulse have meaning in digital audio. No, it doesn't. The rise and fall of the voltage signal is effectively instantaneous and the slope (if there is one) of the pulse is meaningless in digital audio data transmission, especially when compared to other effects such as sync and timing.
It is kind of refreshing to see you techno people struggle/toggle with values that seem to influence the quality of music perception out of a few metal boxes.
In medical science we already know for a long time that stacking, multiplying and dividing values and numbers against and in a defined domain doesn't always give the mathematical expected sum.
For Instance. We roughly estimate the human hearing capable between 20Hz and 20kHz and in this way techs try to understand, build and criticize their audio handy work.
In medical science we know (not understand fully mind you) that the human body as a whole "hears" far beyond that values. And that's only the quantities.
Quality is perceived in far more domains that can be measured by techies.
Now.. how could anybody but try to come to the ultimate sound.
It's impossible. You can even state that "we", the Schiit fans" are heavily predisposed to certain characteristics (sound, feeling, vision etc.) and even a bond we feel exists between us and the makers.
If we figure out all the quantifiable variants to "musical perception of sound out of a metal box", we're not halfway there.
So Mike... Sign me up as a tester for the MP and I'll tell you all about the dreams that'll weave trough my music perception. (haha).
It is my "not knowing the in and outs of audio electronics" that gives me the ability to really listen.
Not think. Really listen.
Not computing the odds of what I should hear that is.
And believe me. I have exceptional good hearing.
Who is the judge of that? I am.
Do I have references to make that claim stick? Of course not.
Do I need any? NO!
For Instance. We roughly estimate the human hearing capable between 20Hz and 20kHz and in this way techs try to understand, build and criticize their audio handy work.
In medical science we know (not understand fully mind you) that the human body as a whole "hears" far beyond that values. And that's only the quantities.
Please don't generalize about "techies" with respect to their understanding of human hearing. For a wonderful history and scientific account of what is known, which involved many great engineers especially from Bell Labs in their heyday, I recommend the recent "Human and Machine Hearing" by the amazingly erudite Richard Lyon. Yes, lots of math in it, but even if you skip the equations there's a lot to learn there, for instance about the subtleties of pitch perception and about the way nonlinearities in the hearing system enable the detection of extremely small timing differences. BTW, another amazing feature of human hearing is that it appears to maintain an accurate time-domain representation of the last 200ms heard (if I recall correctly from a recent conversation with another erudite source), which coincides with the upper bound of speech phoneme duration.
TL; DR As in medicine, there's a huge difference between the real experts and those who play expert on the internet.
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