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pi3 sd card vs Pi4 wifi or ethernet sq
#8
(06-10-2021, 01:24 PM)WuBai Wrote: Nobody has explained the mechanism at play because nobody actually knows.  There is so much when it comes to electricity and 'sound quality' which is already a subjective thing that has not been studied at an institutional level.  Unfortunately I don't think there are multi million dollar grants made available for this stuff, because if there was some poor college kid would have to listen to Keith Don't Go ten thousand times in endless rounds of double blind tests and would probably jump off the building to end his suffering.
We don't actually need these tests to postulate on the mechanism.  To verify it perhaps, but not to develop a hypothesis which we could then test.  We could postulate that the spinning of a disc sets up resonances with the electrons in the read head that add bits to the signal that add warmth akin to vinyl, for example, then test to see if that's true.  I'm in the bits are bits camp precisely because there are no hypotheses that attempt to explain how anything in the digital signal transport can add or remove information from the signal that ultimately gets made into sound.
I have elements of my system that I believe make it sound better without proof, I'm not immune to it.  I upsample using SOX to a rate that causes my DAC to bypass its own internal upsampling because I believe that it sounds better when SOX does it.  Upsampling absolutely adds information to the digital signal, so I can see why that might have an effect.  I've no proof it does, but I have a valid hypothesis for why it might.

(06-10-2021, 01:24 PM)WuBai Wrote: Now, if I was falling for placebo and wanting to lie to myself, wouldn't my mind just magically 'hear' a difference to justify the $100 I spend on the experiment?  
Not necessarily, the $100 spend might have primed you to hear a clear and marked improvement, and even a subtle one would have disappointed your expectation enough for you to think there was no effect.

(06-10-2021, 01:24 PM)WuBai Wrote: Do I know why there was a slight difference between the sound coming from the spinning hard drive of my NAS to my router to another routher via wifi then to my dongle attacked to my Allo versus running straight from the EMMC SD card?  No.  I would assume that it is due to the transfer but have no idea why or how.
And I would add the other component in the system - your brain - into the mix and assume that the well known and documented bias in the imperfect way we hear was the cause; on account of there being plenty of hypotheses that explain how that alters perception of sound versus none for how data signal transport alters the reproduction of sound.

(06-10-2021, 01:24 PM)WuBai Wrote: While I am 100% in the bits and bits camp, I must remain open to the fact that I don't know everything and there is still much left to learn.  That is all I am saying and I think that is the essence of science, the constant discovery and experimentation.
Openness, yes.  Discovery and experimentation, yes.  But also and importantly, scepticism and Occam's razor.  While I don't doubt that you hear something when you use Wi-Fi versus SD, I will put the cause somewhere between your ears before I put it between the files and the DAC.  And there is nothing at all wrong with that.  The enjoyment of music is, by definition, subjective and so what goes on between the ears is without doubt the most important part of any Hi-Fi equipment.  Obviously listening for differences in components is part of your enjoyment, and joining in this debate with you is part of my enjoyment.  Maybe one day I'll replace a router and hear things in my music I never heard before, but even then I expect I'll attribute the better music to what I perceive rather than what is actually reproduced unless the router has a label on it that says it automatically adjusts data that flow through it. Smile
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Robert
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Messages In This Thread
pi3 sd card vs Pi4 wifi or ethernet sq - by Lacas - 05-20-2020, 08:02 AM
RE: pi3 sd card vs Pi4 wifi or ethernet sq - by the_bertrum - 06-10-2021, 02:46 PM

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