So if it fools most of the people ?

E: Why Does It Matter: Does it? The Basics, The Numbers

Well for most of us, it may not seem to at all. Most of the population, about 80%, cannot hear the difference between older recording formats and the newer digital sampling formats. Only around 20% of the population can hear that there is something "off" about the digital sample. Around half of those people (10%) can tell you that there is something missing from the digital sample. Less than 5% of the population will be able to tell you exactly what is wrong with the sound of the digital sample and sometimes even identify the format of the specific Computer Music File. The rest of us, well, we just do not know, we can not tell that we are being fooled.

So if it fools most of the people, most of the time, what is wrong with it? Well for most of the corporate entities involved, nothing is wrong, it is faster, cheaper, there is greater control over the product, it is much more profitable, less user friendly, for them it is just great. For everyone else, well let us take a deeper look.

What is a computer music file? It is a digital representation of a sample of reality, like a series of snapshots of the audio domain. However many times per second, sixteen bits out of all that is occurring in the sound is sampled. The amount and complexity of intonation that can really be occurring, at any fraction of a second ranges from naught to the Terra byte range. It is not possible to model all the frequencies and their amplitudes and their harmonics and colors of reflection, refraction, echo and decay with a binary impression accurately for such a large, dynamic and variable set of data.

So we take a sample. Sixteen bits of amplitude and frequency information out of the reality domain of sound and keep doing it, tens or hundreds of thousands of times per second. These samples are then sequenced and run through an algorithm that discards data according to the psychoacoustic model (whatever the model posits we will not miss) that type of music file uses, and digitally compresses the remaining according to the extensions' packing rate for file size.

Digital compression rates for different file types vary quite a bit. The most commonly used one is mp3 which is actually Motion Pictures Expert Group type 1, 3rd layer, which is an obsolete format for sound on a film. Mp3 rates can vary from 22:1 @ 64kHz to 4:1 @320kHz which means at worst for every 22 bits sampled, 21 are discarded and one bit gets to stay as representative and at best for every 4 bits sampled, 3 are discarded and one stays.

The reason for all the complexities is simple, our computers cannot handle the file sizes needed to actually fully represent music in it's full range and all it's harmonics and color. Our computers are nowhere near fast enough nor do they have enough memory. It is all just software programming tricks to synthesize an approximation of reality. Perhaps one day we will have ones good enough to handle real music but it will probably not be a binary device, likely something better than base two. So we have to make even the small samples into much smaller files that our computers can handle.

Now if sound and vision were actually analogous (directly similar) to each other, or reality analogous with digital, we could actually fool our senses with a much lower bit rate and vastly lower number of frames. After all we can fool our sense of sight with only 35mm film at 24-30 frames per second. However hearing is very much an older and deeper and more direct sense of perception and sound is much more fundamental to the basis of the nature of the universe. A computer music file (aiff, mpg, flac, ogg, rm, pca, w64, au, wma, ra8, wav, mp3,) has only a statistical relationship to a algorithmic sample of a musical reality domain.

So even beyond 24 bit depth at 256KHz sampling (ripping 3X8 bits 256,000 times per second) rates computer music files cannot fool us into responding as if it were actually hearing music, beyond placebo effects. UNLESS digital samples are all you've ever heard, then you might be deceived into thinking you were having a physical and emotional response to some bits of binary digital code. As if you were actually responding to music in the full reality of the audio domain.

PEACE ! ©02010 ©02011 Cee Are & CkaS

Note this is a section from an earlier post "Regaining Your Rights"