Re: [LAD] Xiph.org - Video:Digital Show and Tell - No difference between analog and digitally processed sound.

This is an interesting video, and for their stated purpose (to dispel the idea that the output of a D/A converter is a stairstep) it's great. But, to be fair, he's only addressing one part of the process (the conversion from analog to digital and back). Arguments about "analog" and "digital" in recording tend to include such things as tape saturation, transformers, vinyl cutting technique, floating-point error, plugin aliasing, etc which are separate issues from A/D and D/A and are as much about what "sounds good" as about whether a sampled signal can be perfectly reconstructed. Also, the demonstrations with the oscilloscope are illuminating regarding the math behind digital audio, but those aren't exactly precision measurements. There are real effects due to clock jitter on both the A/D and D/A end that can cause small but measurable distortions. "Ideal" sampling and reconstruction requires "ideal" hardware, which (as you might guess) doesn't exist! The amount of "non-ideal" behavior may not bother you, for any particular value of "you", but then again it may. Thanks, Bill Gribble On Wed, 2013-05-22 at 15:08 +0100, Barney Holmes wrote: