Paul McGowan writes:
My friend Andy sent me this link to the new Samsung 2TB solid state drive that’s smaller than a business card, launched this morning at CES. That’s amazing. A sold state drive capable of storing well over 2000 complete albums–and it’s smaller than a business card.
Bit banging. It’s a term used by programmers to describe how data is thrown around, and I have been thinking of it as of late–and how it might apply to the sound of digital audio.
The last few days of posts have looked at ripping and sparked much controversy. Do rips of data sound different? And if they do, why?
We know, intellectually, that once data is lifted from an optical disc and transferred to a hard drive, solid state or mechanical, the data is identical to what was formerly on the optical disc. Many studies have shown bit perfect matches exist. And if the data are identical, and there is no timing information attached to that stored data (and there isn’t), how could that data sound different?
It’s a good Sherlock Holmes problem. Right?
I think the answer is that the data, if identical, cannot be different. Therefore, we are looking in the wrong place for our answers.
