Bad Science + Business Interests = Trouble
Computer geeks know lots of things. The sheer breadth of stuff that geeks have crammed in their head is impressive.
But their major mistake is often not acknowledging their own ignorance. Many have come up in a world so digitally driven that they forget they are analog animals.
They forget sound, light, smell, touch are all analog. These are things computers don’t do natively.
In fact it has taken 40+ years of digital advancement to even start competing with original (analog) methods of creation.
Most computer nerds know nothing about professional media production. They might know the basics or have clicked around a bit with an app, but they know nothing of producing high quality media for a living.
On the other hand, most producers these days have to know their computers, especially the parts critical to creating professional media. I believe some nerds don’t like the competition so they declare themselves experts on everything digital.
Experts are the people that do it for a living, not people tasked with spreading false information on the internet.
A computer programmer/nerd believes there is a digital solution to everything.
Then they build on this bad foundation the fatal flaw of believing a digital copy of something analog will somehow be superior. Many sub-measurements of that digital file might be superior to the analog, but remember to always step back and say “what is this trying to solve?”.
Music is created to get an emotional response from us and that requires as much audio data as possible.
All consumer digital music, from the CD in 1978 on, has been a compromise. When you hear analog playback you are hearing a reflection of the recording, that is, an analog copy that is slightly degraded but overall intact and whole.
The original sounds hit the microphone in analog and it will hit your ears in analog. It has not been broken up and re-assembled, and no computer decided what to keep and what to throw out.
Nature does degrade the signal to a certain extent (magnetism in a tape or physical dragging movement on vinyl), but no programmer had to determine mathematically what parts of your music to throw out.
Computer nerds trust in the computer to decide what’s important in our audio signal, more than they trust their own intuition or senses.
Computers don’t have skin, hair, ears, or emotions, so what do they know about music? Nothing. Nada.
Programmers with agendas are behind much of this nonsense, and it is all based on a total misunderstanding of how we hear, and what we actually get from music.
Familiarity is just step 1. “I can recognize that song I like!” is not the same as hearing the whole thing the way it was intended.
Check out this cool article about a guy that helped design the Pono Player.