This article is crap.
Probably the worst thing about this article is that it (intentionally) conflates so many things about digital audio.
Among other things it bounces back and forth between discussions of so many types of "digital audio."
I actually like the case he makes for the reasons why headphones aren't as subjectively exciting as speakers or a live performance.
But what the HELL is this assertion doing in an article about digital sound?
This assertion about headphones vs. other sources is completely orthogonal to the discussion of whether we're talking about live audio sources, analog audio sources, or digital audio sources.
It's like this guy has major, crippling ADHD. He bounces around between so many different concepts.
He's like one of those people who can't even finish a sentence before he cuts himself off in the middle of a sentence and starts off on a new tangent. I am shocked he managed to obtain a degree, much less a doctorate, if the fractured and damaged train of thought exhibited in this article is any indication. He starts out by comparing A to B, and then A to C, and then D to Z, and goes back to A, and then compares C to M, and at the end he says... VOILA Q.E.D.!
Probably the worst thing about this article is that it (intentionally) conflates so many things about digital audio.
Among other things it bounces back and forth between discussions of so many types of "digital audio."
- Uncompressed CD-quality digital audio
- High-quality lossily compressed digital audio
- Low-quality lossily compressed digital audio, mangled by Bluetooth protocols, and further mangled and compressed by the DSP tricks that portable speakers use to eke out sound (Most audiophiles would probably agree that listening to music this way is pretty bad)
Is there a sentence in that article which is true? It is almost completely bizzarro world applications of the ideas being knocked about. I don't know who the tech turncoat is, but I'm getting a strong impression from this article just not a positive impression. One of those Orwellian feelings that something named the fair observer is instead its very opposite.
I actually like the case he makes for the reasons why headphones aren't as subjectively exciting as speakers or a live performance.
I agree with this. You can have a great time listening to headphones, obviously! But it's certainly true: you can't feel the music in your body like you can with a great two-channel speaker system. And if we extrapolate a bit farther, it's part of the reason why recorded sound can never quite replicate live sound: you're attempting to recreate one acoustic space inside another and it's never going to quite fool the brain. And there's also a discussion to be had about whether or not this even matters anyway for music created in a studio, since so much of it consists of synthetic aural concoctions that aren't even attempting to recreate a real acoustic space in the first place.The best way to locate sounds is to use the whole body — ears, skull, skin, even guts — since the entire body contains vibration sensors. The brain’s main job is making sense of vibrations throughout the body, eyeballs to toes to eardrums, all consistent, all at once. One single vibratory image unified from skin and ears.
Headphones and earbuds fracture that unified sensory experience. Normally, your skin still absorbs vibrations from the outside, consistent with what you see. But with headphones covering them, your ears process entirely different signals injected directly into the perceptual space inside the head. That new sound image bypasses skin and eyes, while still being superimposed in front of you in space, on top of real sound sources. That physical impossibility sounds interesting, but it is the deepest kind of hack a brain can suffer, short of drugs. Consuming separate, inconsistent sensory streams that create competing maps of space violates a brain’s design.
But what the HELL is this assertion doing in an article about digital sound?
This assertion about headphones vs. other sources is completely orthogonal to the discussion of whether we're talking about live audio sources, analog audio sources, or digital audio sources.
It's like this guy has major, crippling ADHD. He bounces around between so many different concepts.
He's like one of those people who can't even finish a sentence before he cuts himself off in the middle of a sentence and starts off on a new tangent. I am shocked he managed to obtain a degree, much less a doctorate, if the fractured and damaged train of thought exhibited in this article is any indication. He starts out by comparing A to B, and then A to C, and then D to Z, and goes back to A, and then compares C to M, and at the end he says... VOILA Q.E.D.!
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