Thursday, March 10, 2011

Vol. I No. 9

It is possible when one is quiet to hear the sound of your own ears. It is similar to a light brushing sound. Likewise with the eyes closed, in the dark, one can see many-colored light in the eyes. This is because hearing and vision are dynamized systems. That is to say, they have a degree of tension or energization even when they are not processing any apparent stimuli.

In the development of the history of audio technology, there has been a concern for the reduction of noise, which, in the design of audio systems, is a much more obvious problem to address than the problem of the accurate tonal reproduction of the given acoustical source.

Superior freedom from noise was one of the rationales - if not the chief rationale - for creating and promoting digital recording. It is easy to imagine how this consideration became prevalent in the minds of the engineers, while the elusive, subtle, very challenging problem of accurate tonal reproduction was largely ignored.

An audiophile can be defined as one who will go to whatever lengths are within his or her means to listen to audio reproduction whose tonal richness most nearly approaches that of a live audition of the music. If we discount noiselessness as a primary virtue of an audio system, then it is very hard to think of any way whatsoever that digital audio can be regarded as preferable to analog for the audiophile.

It is hard to conceive of how it makes any sense to obsess about the reduction of noise when the 'system noise' in one's own ears is so substantial. In fact it is that system noise, produced by the dynamization of the eardrum, which makes our hearing as sensitive as it is to those nuances of acoustical colour and timbre that are entirely absent in digital reproductions.

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