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

There is a lot of mysthicism among sound engineers, guitarist or audio manufacturers, especially when there is analog gear involved. Sometimes there is a tiny justification behind this voodoo cult. But most of the times it comes from a misinterpretation of technical matters. This misinterpretation is conforted by an analogical reasoning. If it works with A, then it works with B. It sounds logical but that's a false reasoning. You can find a lot a smart peoples falling in this kind of arguments. The internet is full of peoples who thinks they are right. I read a lot of forum threads arguing about how 192kHz is better or how vinyl is better than CD. You will find 3 kinds of people there. Peoples who think they are right, peoples throwing their knwoledge to each others face and peoples that just want to know the truth. But only a few among them are actually right. As a computer programmer, i can fall in any of this categories, but as a musician, i seriously dont care. Why bother about 144dB of dynamics when recording with a 200$ microphone in the same room of your noisy computer. Audio professionals dont want to ask themselves if any piece of gear is better than the other or if analog is better than digital. They end up buying expensive material to avoid spending time to question themselves. That is the price of the tranquility of mind. They can spend time to actually do their job. As a standard musician i dont want to spend too much time arguing and i just want to play music. There is a lot of TV commercial trying to sell you a wider and sharper screen. It shows a tv screen and make it appears more sharp and wider than your own, but your tv screen cant reproduce a bigger and sharper screen but your brain fell for it. Because there is pshychology involved. This is the same with audio. You can easily prove that a red cable sounds better than a black one, even if it is unplugged. The problem is that you dont always have the technical knowledge to keep apart a real technical issue and a psychoacoustic process. Audiophile manufacturers are well aware about that. Awkwardly, Sound Engineers don't. Further more most of the actual engineers studied using analog gear. Most of what they been taught sint true anymore. They still use the same methodology because they still hear the difference, even if there is none. You can spend your life time to understand how things realy works. Just do what you think is best and anything else doesnt matter. Guillaume Meurisse