Pat Farrell wrote:
This tells me that one shouldn't bother to read AudioAsylum.
Your conclusion covers vastly too much ground. We have a paraphrased,
hearsay report of a statement attributed to one user of a well-populated
forum and you would judge that this somehow invalidates the statements
of the entirety of that group?
Lossless means that the data is preserved.
It is trivial to test that a lossless process is correct,
compress and uncompress and then bit compare.
All true.
Similarly, if you hear that Lossless WMA is different (more or less
accurate ) from lossless AAC is different from MLP is different from
flac, it is pure BS. The speeds, DRMs, platforms supported, etc.
are different, but being lossless is like being pregant.
You are or you are not. There are no degrees.
The problem with this is that no human can hear a bitstream.
These bits everyone is so fond of characterizing with pure perfection
are an abstraction. Information represented by physical changes in an
engineered system.
In this case, represented by the rise and fall of --analog-- voltages in
wire. Buffered and pumped into a processor for digital decoding. Sent
to an imperfect receiver into another device for D/A conversion.
Amplified and sent to an imperfect transducer and pumped into a
non-ideal acoustical space. Energy then transferred to another
transducer and converted to perception by an organic system of which we
have only the barest of understanding.
What could go wrong? Everything. "Perfect Sound Forever" was, is and
shall continue to be another case of marketing fluff.
FLAC encoder input = FLAC decoder output, certainly. But extending that
to a statement that a system processing identical bitstreams will
produce identical sound is to ignore an awful lot of real world complexity.
If you must have a rational model for expecting the observed behavior,
I'd float these as possibilities: power supply variance or noise due to
processor current consumption, RFI or other system noise due to
processor activity, difference in signal paths for PCM vs. decoded FLAC,
just to name a few.
Before attributing the strength of a mathematical proof to your
understanding of a physical system, it is best to be sure that you have
modelled the entirety of that system.
--rt
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