FUD, intellectual honesty, digital facts, and the TAS articles...

[darrenyeats]

Which is why some of these "Audio PC" solutions cache the entire track in RAM first before playback commences...

But I agree that EVERY event is electrically different froma noise perspective.

Which as you imply makes a complete mockerey of the whole thing.

Agreed Phil.

I see this as an audio engineering problem with audio engineering solutions. Loads of computers and other equipment add up to unpredictable dynamic noise - equipment needs to deal with it. I use a Touch with optical connection to Benchmark DAC, power supply grunge and RFI are the only things to contend with.

Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk

[Soulkeeper]

Just to clarify, are you saying that it is so clearly impossible for two bit-identical copies of an audio/video file stored on a computer to play differently on that computer, that absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools?

No. But I am saying that if you have two bit-identical files, it is impossible for the history of the content of these files to cause them to be play differently on any computer. And therefore absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools.

Note that I said the history of the content.

If one file is stored on an SSD disk and the other on a 5,25" floppy, that may affect the performance of the computer at playback, and thus affect the sound. But that wasn't at all what I said.

[Phil Leigh]

No. But I am saying that if you have two bit-identical files, it is impossible for the history of the content of these files to cause them to be play differently on any computer. And therefore absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools.

Note that I said the history of the content.

If one file is stored on an SSD disk and the other on a 5,25" floppy, that may affect the performance of the computer at playback, and thus affect the sound. But that wasn't at all what I said.

Indeed - because if that were true, computers simply WOULD NOT WORK AT ALL.

What the TAS idiots seem to be unable to grasp (unlike any 6 year old) is that raw data is... JUST RAW DATA! It doesn't have a history or heritage embedded within it, or a soul or any form of high conscience. It's just NUMBERS!.

[bluegaspode]

They will simply laugh.
ProTools anyone?

But ProTools is so expensive that they definitely have cared for the problem that the files they record might sound differently based on the position of the harddrive where the file is saved.

I think for the same reason ProTools only records in WAV and not FLAC. I mean everyone knows that multiple conversions would corrupt the files otherwise.


*cough*

[Phil Leigh]

But ProTools is so expensive that they definitely have cared for the problem that the files they record might sound differently based on the position of the harddrive where the file is saved.

I think for the same reason ProTools only records in WAV and not FLAC. I mean everyone knows that multiple conversions would corrupt the files otherwise.


*cough*

That's a nasty cough, Bluegaspode. I think you need some medicine...

[ncarver]

No. But I am saying that if you have two bit-identical files, it is impossible for the history of the content of these files to cause them to be play differently on any computer. And therefore absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools.

Note that I said the history of the content.

If one file is stored on an SSD disk and the other on a 5,25" floppy, that may affect the performance of the computer at playback, and thus affect the sound. But that wasn't at all what I said.

Indeed - because if that were true, computers simply WOULD NOT WORK AT ALL.

What the TAS idiots seem to be unable to grasp (unlike any 6 year old) is that raw data is... JUST RAW DATA! It doesn't have a history or heritage embedded within it, or a soul or any form of high conscience. It's just NUMBERS!.

I don't understand "history of the content." By that you mean which one came first, etc.?

So let's be more precise and say we have two bit-identical audio/video files stored within the same physical filesystem (i.e., same partition) on some type of storage device on a computer. You really want to claim that it is absolutely impossible for there to be any differences between the two files that could lead to playback differences on that computer?

Really??

I would suggest that you might want to think a bit harder, or perhaps study how large files actually get stored in filesystems. Hint: ever had to defragment a filesystem? Even if two files are bit-identical, they may not be stored in exactly the same way in the filesystem. One may be nearly contiguous, while the other may be scattered among a set of relatively small blocks.

Certainly it would be possible to store a sequence of copies of a file in a filesystem so that the successive copies are increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation could potentially cause increasing playback problems in the copies based on their generation. I myself have absolutely encountered situations where some multimedia files played fine while others--created later--did not, precisely because the filesystem (NTFS) was becoming increasingly fragmented. Defragmenting the filesystem fixed the problems (though the machine was unusable for a couple of hours!).

While I too doubt TAS' claims--and the mere fact of some files being "copies" of others is irrelevant--it is definitely NOT IMPOSSIBLE that one might experience increasing playback issues with successive copies made on a fragmented filesystem. While I think it UNLIKELY that the scenario I laid out is what happened to TAS, rebutting their claims was worthy of a bit more than simply sniggering at their stupidity and calling them names.

[Wombat]

With HD playback is is not as you move bits from HD to the player like S/PDIF during the whole song in a stream.
An average song with 50MB needs 2 seconds of HD access somewhere during its lets say 4 minutes. Depending on the player this access can even happen only in the beginning to the buffer or otherwise. In these 2 seconds there may these differences occure, and even then it is very unlikely. If so it should be questioned if direct PC playback should be used at all.

[EricBergan]

So let's be more precise and say we have two bit-identical audio/video files stored within the same physical filesystem (i.e., same partition) on some type of storage device on a computer. You really want to claim that it is absolutely impossible for there to be any differences between the two files that could lead to playback differences on that computer?

Really??

Yes. It's called buffering (and caching on the disk controller). You don't stream bytes from the disk to the DAC. You read sectors (or more likely blocks) into memory. If there was a severe problem (disk is failing, for instance) you would get silent gaps between blocks, but not a degradation of the sound that does play.

eric

[totoro]

I don't understand "history of the content." By that you mean which one came first, etc.?

So let's be more precise and say we have two bit-identical audio/video files stored within the same physical filesystem (i.e., same partition) on some type of storage device on a computer. You really want to claim that it is absolutely impossible for there to be any differences between the two files that could lead to playback differences on that computer?

Really??

I would suggest that you might want to think a bit harder, or perhaps study how large files actually get stored in filesystems. Hint: ever had to defragment a filesystem? Even if two files are bit-identical, they may not be stored in exactly the same way in the filesystem. One may be nearly contiguous, while the other may be scattered among a set of relatively small blocks.

Certainly it would be possible to store a sequence of copies of a file in a filesystem so that the successive copies are increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation could potentially cause increasing playback problems in the copies based on their generation. I myself have absolutely encountered situations where some multimedia files played fine while others--created later--did not, precisely because the filesystem (NTFS) was becoming increasingly fragmented. Defragmenting the filesystem fixed the problems (though the machine was unusable for a couple of hours!).

While I too doubt TAS' claims--and the mere fact of some files being "copies" of others is irrelevant--it is definitely NOT IMPOSSIBLE that one might experience increasing playback issues with successive copies made on a fragmented filesystem. While I think it UNLIKELY that the scenario I laid out is what happened to TAS, rebutting their claims was worthy of a bit more than simply sniggering at their stupidity and calling them names.

Have you actually read this thread? Please do so before making any more comments of this ilk, because this ground has already been covered.

I will cover at least part of it again briefly. The positions of the file on disc are entirely independent of which program was used to rip them. The state of the filesystem, which filesystem is in use, the fullness of the hard drive, the fragmentation of the hard drive, and which rip occurred first will all have more influence on all of these things than which program is used to rip the files. On top of that, simply doing a "mv file newlocation" will completely change all of this.

What is at issue is whether two identical rips ripped by different programs will sound different _based on the program that was used to rip them_. This claim is, in fact, utterly foolish, has already been hashed out a fair amount in this thread, and really should be put to bed.

Please read the rest of this thread before continuing down this path. At this point, the person who is guilty of sloppiness is you, not your interlocutors in this discussion. In fact, the TAS claims are only worth sniggering at, at least on this issue, and several posters on this thread have pointed out why.

[Mnyb]

TAS copying argument is actually even more silly, they basically imply that you have to rerip a new WAV file after it has been transcoded to FLAC and back to WAV and implies that this is an irrecoverable generational loss which is completely impossible . That no moving around or defrag or reformatting would ever fix this ?

If it where down to some noise induced by reading different sectors on a HD , then other things like moving the same file to another folder or altering a tag or maybe loading other files to the same drive or the OS migth have... Etc in absurdum.
If this is a mechanism that could make the playback sound different it is random and not predictable.

And actually the copy could very likely sound better !

Name calling ? I like Dillbert here, let's call these people " induhviduals " so they don't get offended .

"The TAS writer is a very prominent induhvidual"