[LAU] digital voodoo: master fader should be set at 0db

[Ken Restivo]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 03:07:07PM +0100, Gwenhwyfaer wrote:
> On 13/04/2010, fons at kokkinizita.net <fons at kokkinizita.net> wrote:
> > That is true. But if some activity is less dangerous
> > than surgery or flying aircraft that doesn't justify
> > spreading crappy information about it.
> 
> Only in the sense that disinformation is never justified. Still, it's
> arguably more tolerable in a field that isn't concerned with cutting
> into people (etc), however much it sets experts' teeth on edge.
> Especially when, as you suggest yourself, it's in a pub setting rather
> than a lecture hall.
> 
> And since that was pretty much the only thing I was trying to say, and
> it perhaps didn't come over with the intended levity, I'll shut up
> now.


I've been re-trained over the last few years by a German mechanical-engineer friend to think in a very reductionist, non-magickal, deterministic, cold-hard-reality kind of way.

I've been working with computers and technology for four decades, and I know I've always been a musician first and a geek second or third. Still, I was surprised to find how much voodoo and magickal thinking had remained in my thinking about technical subjects.

After having been properly smacked upside the head enough times, nowadays I get very impatient and annoyed with any kind of "secret sauce" nonsense, black boxes, and other types of voodoo that Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science".

It's all ones and zeroes. Given the same inputs, the same output should be obtained. Acoustics is physics. And if I can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

-ken