The Amazing Holographic Universe By Michael Talbot

Reply to article by: Charles D. Bohne™
Date written: Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:18:50 +0100


The Amazing
Holographic Universe
By Michael Talbot
12-23-5

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a
research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out
to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did
not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the
habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard
Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may
change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances
subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.

It isn't "communication" it is "quantum entanglement". Quantum entanglement
means the subatomic particles were not always separate entities; their
individual properties were determined by or correlated to each other at their
creation, before they took the 10 feet or 10 billion mile trip. That means if
one subatomic particle was polarized at zero degrees at its creation, the other
photon will have been polarized to ninety degrees BECAUSE EACH POLARIZATION
VALUE WAS DETERMINED BY THE OTHER'S POLARIZATION VALUE AT 'BIRTH'. So this
nonsense about "when one subatomic particle was found polarized at zero degrees,
the other subatomic particle instantly 'communicated' this to the other
subatomic particle and told it to polarize itself to ninety degrees" is utter
nonsense.

The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet
that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

There is no such problem because Einstein said no such thing. Einstein said that
nothing with PHYSICAL MASS can travel faster than the speed of light.
Information has no mass whatsoever.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes
Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that
despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a
gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

What an interesting storytale but that's all it is: a storytale. Storytales mean
nothing unless they can be proved to exist outside of the imagination of those
who believe in it. How do you know invisible pink elephants aren't the reason?
That is an interesting storytale too. Or maybe we all live in The Matrix? That
is the most interesting storytale of them all. There are thousands of storytales
that can explain thousands of mysteries but there is a big difference between
what is possible and what is actual; between what is real and what is fantasy.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed
as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a
universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and
three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors,
would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

A hologram requires three basic things to exist: the film containing the
holographic information, a laser to project the latent image through the film,
and someone to perceive the projection. Without any one of these three things, a
hologram cannot exist. You are trying to take these three things and combine
them into one. A hologram cannot create, project, and perceive itself. It
wouldn't be a hologram then, it would be another storytale.

The hologram you allude to all throughout your analogy is not actually the
hologram but just the film. If you snip off a piece of that film, the entire
image remains but it becomes degraded. But some pieces will degrade the image
more than others. That's because the latent image is not 100% everywhere within
the 'hologram', it is concentrated mostly around where the object appears and
slowly fades out from there.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the
past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that
given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into
the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the
long-forgotten past.

Now you are going off into some super-fantasyland. There is no logical
connection between pretending the Universe is a hologram and "there is no past,
present, of future". This shows a lack of understanding of what time is. Without
time there can be nothing. Energy requires time. Moving requires time.

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe
is a hologram.

Bohm never had any evidence that the Universe is a hologram. That is a lie.

Working independently in the field of brain research,
Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of
the holographic nature of reality.

And like Bohm, Karl has absolutely no evidence of the holographic nature of
reality. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. Null.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and
where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies
have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location,
memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl
Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he
was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it
had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able
to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in
every part" nature of memory storage.

That's because Karl couldn't find the right area to remove. Thousands of other
scientists have remove bits and parts of the human brain (or a person simply has
a stroke) and found that certain functions are completely erased, never to be
found again.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and
realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking
for. Pribram believes

That is the keyword: believes. There is no evidence for this assertion, it is
simply a belief...not too much unlike the Santa Claus or Jesus belief.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many
memories in so little space. It has been estimated

It's just an estimate, not a measurement. Again, no evidence exists that the
brain can remember the entire five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information
storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a
piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different
images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic
centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Where has this been "demonstrated"? Yet another storytale.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process
is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated
with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the
hologram.

Then how does that explain why humans have such poor logical thinking abilities?

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does
best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating
device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies
into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens
and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the
frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our
perceptions.

Holograms never encode or decode, they record and playback. There's a big
difference between the two.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic
principles to perform its operations.

The reality is there is absolutely no evidence.

Pribram's theory, in fact, has
gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Even if that were true (it isn't), that wouldn't prove anything. The flat Earth
theory had almost universal support 2000 years ago, but look what happened with
that theory.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the
holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the
fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their
heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli
discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Hugo Zucarelli performed no such experiment. Monoaural hearing localization has
been repeatedly studied and documented and it is vastly inferior to binaural
hearing localization and it will only work if the person can move their head
around. The monoaural Hugo did the same thing when he avoided his "near-fatal"
accident.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a
recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost
uncanny realism.

Holophonic sound is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes -- it doesn't exist
unless you pretend it exists. There is no audio device capable of recording or
transmitting "interference patterns". Your standard headphones and microphones
and cassette tapes can only record frequency and amplitude, but not spatial
components such as interference patterns.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the
brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if
the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is
"there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain
is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this
blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what
becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have
long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we
may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this
too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of
frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into
physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the
superhologram.

This whole article was a bad joke. Even the logic is laughable. Case in point:
If whole entire universe is just a hologram and therefore doesn't objectively
exist, then neither do we. We are just holograms too, remember? And for a
hologram to create itself, and project itself, and perceive itself is giving the
medium that the hologram is recorded on a mind of it's own. Which means it can't
be a hologram, it is entirely something else not even remotely related to
holograms.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible
portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely
interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic
level.

But just like a real hologram, those connections are not all 100%. The further
away you are spatially, the more tenuous the connection becomes.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in
science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to
say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many
scientists.

Just like flat Earth thinking did.

And even if it is found that the holographic model does not
provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that
seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the
very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in
London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider
radically new views of reality".

Yes, but just not the ridiculous New Age holographic one.

http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

This link tells us all we need to know about this article.

The Sage

================================================== ===========
My Home Page : http://members.cox.net/the.sage

"Careful when you cast your devil out of you lest you cast
out the best thing in you." -Nietzsche
================================================== ===========

The_Sage wrote:
Holophonic sound is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes -- it doesn't exist
unless you pretend it exists. There is no audio device capable of recording or
transmitting "interference patterns". Your standard headphones and microphones
and cassette tapes can only record frequency and amplitude, but not spatial
components such as interference patterns.

I agree with your post except for the above paragraph. Audio recording
and reproductive equipment usually contain poor minimum-phase response
integrity, and remove or reduce the stereophonic effect possible in so
doing. A system of record/playback of high integrity will in fact
reproduce the spatial components (of the concert/recording space)
precisely because they do retain correct phasing - the interference
patterns you refer to are in fact better expressed as phase changes.
Upon playback, even with a "perfect" (TINP) reproduction, the
played-back spacial information will be colored by the spacial
interferences of the playback space.

Holographic snicker sound is based on processing to change phasing of
some of the signal components to fool the ear into perceiving an
"enhanced" spaciality (forgive the terms). (Reducing the argument to
the absurb - think echo effects.)

There is a modicum of success at this in part because the ear is a
half-wave rectifier and in part because the brain works hard to resolve
the missing half-wave.

Check out the work of JPL's late Dr. Richard Heyser, time-delay
spectrometry - good stuff.

The Pearl

"Good tunes since 1992."

Earl Dombroski wrote:
The_Sage wrote:
Holophonic sound is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes -- it doesn't exist
unless you pretend it exists. There is no audio device capable of recording or
transmitting "interference patterns". Your standard headphones and microphones
and cassette tapes can only record frequency and amplitude, but not spatial
components such as interference patterns.

I agree with your post except for the above paragraph. Audio recording
and reproductive equipment usually contain poor minimum-phase response
integrity, and remove or reduce the stereophonic effect possible in so
doing. A system of record/playback of high integrity will in fact
reproduce the spatial components (of the concert/recording space)
precisely because they do retain correct phasing - the interference
patterns you refer to are in fact better expressed as phase changes.
Upon playback, even with a "perfect" (TINP) reproduction, the
played-back spacial information will be colored by the spacial
interferences of the playback space.

Holographic snicker sound is based on processing to change phasing of
some of the signal components to fool the ear into perceiving an
"enhanced" spaciality (forgive the terms). (Reducing the argument to
the absurb - think echo effects.)
Amazing!

See http://tinyurl.com/7bh5l and follow the thread down ...

I appologize. There is a lot of writing, there ...

Much of it pertains to phase information, aural perception, and the
engineering screwups associated with digital audio.

Briefly, humans cannot hear above ~ 16khz, yet are quite cognizant of
signal information in the hundreds of kilohertz.!

How can this apparent contradiction be resolved?

The answer resides in 'signal processing' between the eay and other
parts of the brain. Whereas humans are unable to hear above 16 to 20 or
whatever khz. ... they really have no need to do so. ... awareness of
phase information ... phase alignment is much more accurate. ...

O.K. I am at sea w.r.t. the terminology .. and theory .. and
literature ... nevertheless:

In order for a person to localize a sound ... a single conversation
within a room full of people, for example ...

... and we have that ability to pick out a very localized 'sound',
....

This requires the abitity to detect phase differences in the order of
microseconds. ( I don't have a hard reference for this. .. I wish that
I could find it! ??? .. I cannot remeber the specif number either! )

Invert 10 microseconds ~~~~ 100 khz. Voila! ... the notorious
ability to hear above 15 to 20 khz.
Impossible! ... a trait of schitzopohrenia.

Nope. ... very possible. Everyone does it, actually.

Digital audio introduces a lot of distortion in phase information
because of sampling and precise notch filters and alignment methods.

Digital hash ... fatigue, etc. is very real. ... but NOT in the
frequency .. rather the phase. ... or more specifgically, in the
distortion of information content at different scalings of phase
information.

Thus, records can and do sound clearer and more natural than CDs.
Whereas the information content is unarguably much superior with
digital recording ... in every respect ..

... except "ironically" in the one aspect which matters most of all
!!!

:

the signal to noise ratio of the assorted phase information
contents ... blah, blah, blah.

I am sorry. As with anything that I do, .. it is half baked.

Sincerely,

RL



There is a modicum of success at this in part because the ear is a
half-wave rectifier and in part because the brain works hard to resolve
the missing half-wave.

Check out the work of JPL's late Dr. Richard Heyser, time-delay
spectrometry - good stuff.

The Pearl

"Good tunes since 1992."

I think that we don't actually hear above 10-20 kHz, but we can hear
hear phase offsets in the sub-millisecond range. It's a common
misconception to mix the two. An 8 kHz signal is still an 8 kHz signal
even if it is offset in time (group delay). As I said, a common
mistake, and a well published one.

The error in digital reproduction suffers the same bad print. If you
have a smoothly curving ramp (think sine wave) then quatize (digitize
it), then ask a transitor to reproduce those points, and assume the
points are "x" in time apart (all same, as this is generally the case
in modern digital systems), then the xistor is told to go to a certain
level for a certain time, then the next level for the certain time and
so forth. In other words, instead of a smooth curve, you get a
staircase.

Most publications in the audio biz (are truly atrocious and have zero
understanding of digital signal processing) then go on to explain the
signal difference in terms of the "frequency" response.

Digital impulses equate mathematically into a non-bandlimited case,
whereas analog signals do not. Much is made of the mathematical
mistake, not usefully if other factors are controlled.

The inertia of a moving cone or other diaphram tends to far outweigh
the differences of the staircased signal - in other words, no matter
the damping factor and power (for all practical terms), even though a
staircase is input, each step puts the speaker cone in motion and the
motion doesn't track the staircase because of physical inertia. (Hope
that's clear.)

What many people complain about in their digital reproductions are
misidentifications of newly-heard distortions previously unheard. The
listeners, either because of low training in listening (the old
audiophile days are gone) or because of age (ear/brain deteriorates,
part of life's rich tapestry), tends to miss the new information
(actual sound) and "discover" problems with the digital source, when in
fact, these are really problems with speakers, amplification and wiring
that weren't driven to the problem levels before. If one had a
several-thousand dollar turntable in 1970's money (as very many claim,
but very few did), then one actually heard these same distortions and
could attack them.

In the 70's, about $50k to $100k was required to solve these
colorations in total. The same price tag, even adjusted up, exists
today for true reproduction.

It takes a very expensive (due to engineering complexity) system of
electronics, wiring, transducers (speakers) and the listening room to
expose the digital part of the problem.

Many have heard proof to the contrary. But the causality isn't what
you might necessarily think. Cheap op-amps are being used in most
digital sources, and the distortion in these tend to far outweigh the
distortions of digitization - but they don't tell you that. The new
product launch of the newer, higher digital sources are accompanied by
better electronics. As the price comes down, the component quality is
lowered, and the distortions creep back in.

Consider vacuum tubes, on another, but similar subject. Many ooh and
ahh about their great sound, but they distort to a very high percentage
- all as even harmonics, which the ear (half-wave recifier) cannot
detect. But sub-percentage distortion of a class B xistor amplifier is
nearly all odd harmonic, and the ear hears it quickly. But if one were
to ever hear a really good pure class A high-powered xistor amp, the
tubes lose immediately.

BTW, a word about the "half-wave rectifier" talk. Remember the ear has
the eardrum that presses against the hammer and so forth. But when the
pressure is relaxed, the eardrum doesn't pull the hammer back, that
happens as a function of the system's own relaxation. So, overpressure
pushes hammer, starts chain of events. Underpressure doesn't pull
hammer, hammer responds on it's own - so only the push part of the wave
is acted on - in other words, a half-wave rectifier.

But yes, records can sound clearer than CDs - but it depends on many
factors as to whether this is as universally true as most would have
you believe.

Sorry for length of thread, but the song as many notes as it needed to
have.

Pearl

"Amadeus, Amadeus since 1992."

Yes. Erhh, uhmm, ahhh.

... Seems as if I am getting long in the tooth and I have even made
the mistake of confusing millisecond with microsecond. ...
Ahemmm.

In reading through what you have written, it seems that we are in some
rough co-alignment, here. Perhaps, I had better stay "dense" with
respect to the technical side. Less confusing that way ...

Earl Dombroski wrote:
I think that we don't actually hear above 10-20 kHz, but we can hear
hear phase offsets in the sub-millisecond range. It's a common
misconception to mix the two. An 8 kHz signal is still an 8 kHz signal
even if it is offset in time (group delay). As I said, a common
mistake, and a well published one.
Reference ?

pretty please ?


The error in digital reproduction suffers the same bad print. ...

Confusion? ... Bad press? ... I am beginning to think, ' You have no
idea, as to how incredibly borked, all of this is ... even amongst
acoustic engineers .. or with engineers who hold PhDs and are
acknoledged exprts w.r.t. DSP and notch filters and the like. I have
tried to discuss these ideas with one such indivdual, at length. To my
exasperation, the person seemed *clueless*. ... This ' common mistake
' that you refer to seems to be an immense turkey. Many experts have
created, held, and more recently adjusted the standards for Digital
Audio. ... they still seem to uninformed. I just don't get it @#$@%.

Moreover, this lack of appreciation continues to roll over into much
more diverse application of using DSP to enhance public performances,
HDTV and the like. The same category of mistakes are made again and
again and again. Large sums of money are lost because the problem
passes unnoticed.

I shall try to provide some quick, dirty and nasty examples ...

1) The early days of digital dolby soundtracks for movies. ....

When they first started out using a digital soundtrack stripe, they
were using 10 bits to encode and pushing the bandwith (photographic
stripe) to the maximum that the technology had to offer at the time.
.... or something like that. From a psychoaccoustic sense, the sound
was maginificnet. ... Huge dynamic range. ... Multiple channels. ..
very low noise. .. clarity beyond belief !!!

.... just one problem. A huge one. I very distinctly sitting in the
cinema. Seeing the actors moving their lips, listening to the actors
saying their line with perfect clarity ... YET, being quite unable to
understand what they were saying. ... It was so utterly weird. .. It
was as if my ability to comprened the sound I was hearing was lost. I
couldn't identify or make sense of the words that seemed so very clear.

The purpose of introducing the Digital dolby was to make the movie
going experience more enjoyable. It strongly had very much the opposite
effect for me. ... Where was the understanding, here?

2) HDTV standard. As with the digital audio 44.1 khz standard, the
HDTV requirement is for a linear encoding of the picture. ... most of
that linear interpolation is wasted. ... The eye is insensitive to it.
... Yet in a rather narrow range of color/luminescence values ( ...
however it is done ) ... the eye is much more sensitive. ... It's
easy to see color quatitization bandings ... Some putz of an engineer
simply assumes that it doesn't matter. ... I can assure you that it
does. ... Just doesn't register immediately and up front. I am
willing to bet that our visual system does lots of DSP too! .. a big
topic with much research. ... I Haven't considered it, myself.

3) Sound augmentation in live thearter/musical performances.

O.K. the realities are that one needs a larger audience to make a live
performance feasible from a fiscal standpoint. ...

Given the large audience, it becomes more difficult to hear the
performers. .. and/or the opportunity now exists to use technological
solutions to improve the 'listening' quality. ... The rational is ...
if it sounds better and clearer, everyone wins ...

No problem, there.

The problem again is that 'sounding clearer' isn't the only thing that
is going on. By introducing artificial amplication and DSP in the
augmentation, .. all sorts of 'unexpected' Hell breaks loose. ...
this seems to pass unrecognized. Those who make money by putting on
public performances of theatre wonder why the public has stopped
attending ( ... assuming this is what does happen. ... and in a sense,
... in the margins, it probably does)

To back up what I am proposing, I need to sensitize/point you toward
some of that unseen/implicit "Hell". I do it crudely by suggesting the
following plausibility ( I leave the DSP issuses aside for now )

Listening to actors/singers strutting their lines in a performing hall
is hard at the best of times. .. one has to use one's brain to focus
in of some performer in the distance and listen to what is being
said/sung. .. We can do this. ... No problem. .. pushes our innate
ability to do so. .. that's how it's been done, down through the ages.

O.K. Halls get bigger. ... the actors are further away. etc.

Let's amplify thier voices so that the audience can hear better (
ignore the DSP. here)

... good idea! ... Bad idea!

In providing artifical amplification, the performers voice is
dislocated in space from where the eye tells the viewer that the
performer is located. I am sitting there watching a show looking a a
performer in one location, yet what I hear emmanating from that actor
is arriving to me from another point in space.

O.K. .. we have the ability to re-intergrate. ... Like watching TV or
going to the movies. ... but with TV or cinema we are woring with a
foggy, fuzzy 2D image.

A performer on stage is a much clearer target, ... much better signal
to noise in the visual sense in some aspects. ... and the disembodied
sound part of the signal is *now* much more sharply .. or abruptly ...
or violently disconnected and redirected from where the eye says it
ought to be.

Yes, we compensate ... but not as easily as when watching TV or a
movie ... which have POORER signals, actually.

Moreover, the theatre spectacle is all razzle dazzle, ... the senses
being bombarded with rich eye/ear candy coming at the viewer from
everywhere.

... and the summed effect of all this is to make the background part
of our brain work very, very, very hard to try to integrate a
deliberately 'fractured' whole image.

Hard work. ... produces a headache. ... no longer able to just sit
and enjoy. ... even if the listener can follow and re-integrate
everything.

Add DSP to this mess of confusion .. ... and it becomes the srtraw
whicvh breaks the cammel's back.

In each of the last 3 or 4 times that I went to a large big budget
performence, I got burned.

I refuse to go and see a musical, anymore. ... even if someone would
give me a free ticket. For myself, it has become an unenjoyable
experience. ... Yuk.

4) People have stopped bying records/CDs ... The trend is toward
mp3.

Why? No more records. .. even if there were, most receivers now have
DSP processing ... meaning that what is heard is A to D sampled and
then D to A reconstituted, anyhow ...

CDs are clear and convenient. ... just aren't as easy going and
enjoyable as they used to be. ...

I was a late adopter for DAT recorders. ... Used records were cheap.
.... so I was stuck there.

When I got my first DAT recorder ( .. as if many people ever owned one!
), it was as a remaindered item. ... paid $200 for it, *new* or
something like that. ... Up to this time I also had very little
experience with CDs.

DAT has the choice of LP record or standard 44.1 khz.

.. the first thing that I did was say wow, wow, wow! ... this is
wonderful. ... perfect clarity! .. etc. .. and it really was that
way.

And, of course, the very next thing was to decide do I record in
LongPlay or StandardPlay. ... In LP, it's half the cost for the tape.
... So what is the downside?

I would go back and forth ... A/B ing LP and SP recordings. ... I was
tickled pink ... I couln't really tell any difference. The first times
I did it, the half speed non-linear encoding sounded exactly the same
as the more costly 44.1 khz.

Over the space of a few days, I became sensitized to the difference in
sound. ... It was very, very subtle. Actually, I don't think that I
can either rememer or describe the difference, now.

Some audiphile nut; an earely adopter of CDs; mentioned to me the
phenomeneon of 'CD fatigue' ... "BNull ****", I thought. ... wishfull
thinking.

After a few months of enjoying my DAT tapes of some of my records, ...
I came to realize that I just wasn't enjoying it as much anymore.
Sounded great. .. just not turning my crank the way it used to do ...
when I listend to records. .. or cassete tapes of the records


So, I went and A/B'd the digital LP ( ...I was still sensitized to the
LP versus SP difference at that time ..) against the record. This
wasn't easy. The receiver amplifier that I was using had the accursed
DSP feature hard wired into it.

Anyhow, somehow I managed to A/B records versus LP DAT ... and after
doing this for a while, I became further sensitized tomthat 'Digital'
sound. I also discovered that whereas records were terrible. All the
ugly things that I remembered and hated about them. ( I tended to tape
records and listen to the tape ... ) were still there.

The thing was, listening tom records was fun. It was soothing, easy
going. ... natural.

.... along with all the pain and irritation of changing the records and
the dust .. and scratches ... and having to be careful in handling
them .. and *knowing* that I was degrading them as I played them, etc
....

Frankly, the whole experience peeved me sorely.
I had a choice. ... this queer sort of 'cold, unejoyable' feeling that
went along with 'Digital' ... or the PITA factor and/or lousy fidelity
of the record/tape format.

Not the *best* of both worlds ... rather the worst of both worlds.
Yuk.

So what's with the popularity of the degraded mp3 format?

With the addition of some pychoaccoustic nonlinear compression ...
crappier signal - higher noise ... it really doesn't sound so bad.
.... better, in fact when played back on low-fi equipment.

The advent of the CD spelled the death of Hi-Fi equipment. ... CD's
sounded all the worse on the high end stuff. More to the point. ....
Listening to music, seriously ... or as a background whilst doing
something else. ... no longer was as enjoyable. Too much work. .. just
not fun ... not soothing. ... not enjoyable.

Lost interest ...

Yeah, I have experience with the $50k to $100k ( pre-used) audio
equipment route.
A progressive learning experience. Another story ... I know what you
are saying, here.

My last set of speakers? ... Wilson Watt puppies 5.? a few years ago.

How, those speaker ever became a commerical success, I will never know.
They are so sensitive that they are just plain *unpleasant* with most
(as in 90% + ) of the stuff that's put behind them. Utterly brutal. A
person needs to be very deliberate and commited to experimentation to
find a viable configuration of equipment with them.

Given the atitude of the audiophile consumer, I don't see it happening
that often. Either they seem too stuck within 'specifications' and flat
line zero distortion ...

... or in cloud cukoo land with shiatke stones and laquered finishes.

Only minority of those audiofool crazies seem to have sufficient hard
nosed objectivity to "trust" what they hear over what they are told ..
or what they would like to imagine.

Audiophile equipment is an interesting thing. ( And I say all this 5
years out of date. ...)

The hard science doesn't exist .. or is wrong/misleading/misdconstrued
....
The subjective aspect can lead one, very, very seriously astray ...

In the main one has to experience, experiment, decide and 'listen' for
one's self .. to make tangible progress in the topic.

More specifics concerning phase information, later ...


RL

... If you
have a smoothly curving ramp (think sine wave) then quatize (digitize
it), then ask a transitor to reproduce those points, and assume the
points are "x" in time apart (all same, as this is generally the case
in modern digital systems), then the xistor is told to go to a certain
level for a certain time, then the next level for the certain time and
so forth. In other words, instead of a smooth curve, you get a
staircase.

Most publications in the audio biz (are truly atrocious and have zero
understanding of digital signal processing) then go on to explain the
signal difference in terms of the "frequency" response.

Digital impulses equate mathematically into a non-bandlimited case,
whereas analog signals do not. Much is made of the mathematical
mistake, not usefully if other factors are controlled.

The inertia of a moving cone or other diaphram tends to far outweigh
the differences of the staircased signal - in other words, no matter
the damping factor and power (for all practical terms), even though a
staircase is input, each step puts the speaker cone in motion and the
motion doesn't track the staircase because of physical inertia. (Hope
that's clear.)

What many people complain about in their digital reproductions are
misidentifications of newly-heard distortions previously unheard. The
listeners, either because of low training in listening (the old
audiophile days are gone) or because of age (ear/brain deteriorates,
part of life's rich tapestry), tends to miss the new information
(actual sound) and "discover" problems with the digital source, when in
fact, these are really problems with speakers, amplification and wiring
that weren't driven to the problem levels before. If one had a
several-thousand dollar turntable in 1970's money (as very many claim,
but very few did), then one actually heard these same distortions and
could attack them.

In the 70's, about $50k to $100k was required to solve these
colorations in total. The same price tag, even adjusted up, exists
today for true reproduction.

It takes a very expensive (due to engineering complexity) system of
electronics, wiring, transducers (speakers) and the listening room to
expose the digital part of the problem.

Many have heard proof to the contrary. But the causality isn't what
you might necessarily think. Cheap op-amps are being used in most
digital sources, and the distortion in these tend to far outweigh the
distortions of digitization - but they don't tell you that. The new
product launch of the newer, higher digital sources are accompanied by
better electronics. As the price comes down, the component quality is
lowered, and the distortions creep back in.

Consider vacuum tubes, on another, but similar subject. Many ooh and
ahh about their great sound, but they distort to a very high percentage
- all as even harmonics, which the ear (half-wave recifier) cannot
detect. But sub-percentage distortion of a class B xistor amplifier is
nearly all odd harmonic, and the ear hears it quickly. But if one were
to ever hear a really good pure class A high-powered xistor amp, the
tubes lose immediately.

BTW, a word about the "half-wave rectifier" talk. Remember the ear has
the eardrum that presses against the hammer and so forth. But when the
pressure is relaxed, the eardrum doesn't pull the hammer back, that
happens as a function of the system's own relaxation. So, overpressure
pushes hammer, starts chain of events. Underpressure doesn't pull
hammer, hammer responds on it's own - so only the push part of the wave
is acted on - in other words, a half-wave rectifier.

But yes, records can sound clearer than CDs - but it depends on many
factors as to whether this is as universally true as most would have
you believe.

Sorry for length of thread, but the song as many notes as it needed to
have.

Pearl

"Amadeus, Amadeus since 1992."

Hi RL,

Slow down, big fella, yer off to the races and I wasn't. :-)

Raving Loonie wrote:
Yes. Erhh, uhmm, ahhh.

... Seems as if I am getting long in the tooth and I have even made
the mistake of confusing millisecond with microsecond. ...
Ahemmm.

Not true - 10 us is .01 ms, hence, submillisecond.

In reading through what you have written, it seems that we are in some
rough co-alignment, here. Perhaps, I had better stay "dense" with
respect to the technical side. Less confusing that way ...

Earl Dombroski wrote:
I think that we don't actually hear above 10-20 kHz, but we can hear
hear phase offsets in the sub-millisecond range. It's a common
misconception to mix the two. An 8 kHz signal is still an 8 kHz signal
even if it is offset in time (group delay). As I said, a common
mistake, and a well published one.
Reference ?

pretty please ?

Razzlesnats! OK, now I have to hunt. Twenty-plus years ago I was in
the audio biz. Info cited comes from journals of the Audio Engineering
Society. We took the Audio Review's Grand Award for Engineering
Achievement with computer-assisted engineering for phase-correct
crossovers the year that Sony came in second place for the Hi-Fi Beta
Recorder. IOW, I'm substituting credentials while trying to figure out
how to bring correct references forward. ;-)

(Before I moved on to govt work, where I was recognized for DSP work
(see Applied Computational Electromagnetic Society 5th Annual
Proceedings, Rediscovering the Significance of Langzos' Sigma
Factors).)

The error in digital reproduction suffers the same bad print. ...

Confusion? ... Bad press? ... I am beginning to think, ' You have no
idea, as to how incredibly borked, all of this is ... even amongst
acoustic engineers .. or with engineers who hold PhDs and are
acknoledged exprts w.r.t. DSP and notch filters and the like. I have
tried to discuss these ideas with one such indivdual, at length. To my
exasperation, the person seemed *clueless*. ... This ' common mistake
' that you refer to seems to be an immense turkey. Many experts have
created, held, and more recently adjusted the standards for Digital
Audio. ... they still seem to uninformed. I just don't get it @#$@%.

Ah, but I'm with you - I do know how incredibly borked all of this is.
There's even an application note floating around from the old HP where
just about everything Nyquist said was misquoted, misapplied, and flat
freaking wrong. And engineers buy the equipment, use the ap notes and
come to bad conclusions, bad implementations and bad products.

It's like any other field. I'd meet some jerk with "fifteen years
experience" and it turned out he has 1 year of experience, 15 times.
(Hence the smiley when I presented credentials.)

Moreover, this lack of appreciation continues to roll over into much
more diverse application of using DSP to enhance public performances,
HDTV and the like. The same category of mistakes are made again and
again and again. Large sums of money are lost because the problem
passes unnoticed.

I shall try to provide some quick, dirty and nasty examples ...

No need, I experienced the same, agree the same with you on those
points.

snip

To back up what I am proposing, I need to sensitize/point you toward
some of that unseen/implicit "Hell". I do it crudely by suggesting the
following plausibility ( I leave the DSP issuses aside for now )

Listening to actors/singers strutting their lines in a performing hall
is hard at the best of times. .. one has to use one's brain to focus
in of some performer in the distance and listen to what is being
said/sung. .. We can do this. ... No problem. .. pushes our innate
ability to do so. .. that's how it's been done, down through the ages.

O.K. Halls get bigger. ... the actors are further away. etc.

In a good hall, things should actually improve. What passes as "Great
halls" just aren't.

Let's amplify thier voices so that the audience can hear better (
ignore the DSP. here)

... good idea! ... Bad idea!

In providing artifical amplification, the performers voice is
dislocated in space from where the eye tells the viewer that the
performer is located. I am sitting there watching a show looking a a
performer in one location, yet what I hear emmanating from that actor
is arriving to me from another point in space.

Correct. Instead of a live performance, you're seeing a simile of it
while merely listening to reproduced sound. (Regardless that they call
it reinforced sound.) And given that *not everywhere* can be optimized
for sound reproduction, you can't expect to have an enjoyable
experience with luck of the draw tickets. Given that they try to
"optimize" for the entire space, there's usually no optimal location.

A few years back, for Sting's first Jazzfest appearance, I spent a
whole day field mapping the entire area to know where to be for that
performance. There were two - exactly two - sweet spots, one very
close to the stage, one far away. We took the one far away a few shows
ahead of time. As we drew friends into the space, their eyes lit up -
the difference of being a few meters in/out of the spot was
astonishing.

Yes, we compensate ... but not as easily as when watching TV or a
movie ... which have POORER signals, actually.

Yep, we somehow preferentially seem to be willing to overprocess visual
data mentally. Probably something tied to evolution. If you think
about the structure of the eye - cones for color, rods for brightness,
it takes a whole lot of signal processing in the brain to make as much
visual sense of the world as we have.

Add DSP to this mess of confusion .. ... and it becomes the srtraw
whicvh breaks the cammel's back.

YMMV. It can hurt or help, depends.

Anyhow, somehow I managed to A/B records versus LP DAT ... and after
doing this for a while, I became further sensitized tomthat 'Digital'
sound. I also discovered that whereas records were terrible. All the
ugly things that I remembered and hated about them. ( I tended to tape
records and listen to the tape ... ) were still there.

The thing was, listening tom records was fun. It was soothing, easy
going. ... natural.

Yep, wasn't trying to portray absolutely that this isn't so - just that
there are a lot of factors that may make this true or not for various
individuals and Madison Avenue is the typical evil coachman here,
that's all I meant.

So what's with the popularity of the degraded mp3 format?

I'd guess expediency over quality. We live in a time-compressed age.
Nothing's ever good enough - deliver at the speed of hitting "Send" is
the new mantra.

With the addition of some pychoaccoustic nonlinear compression ...
crappier signal - higher noise ... it really doesn't sound so bad.
... better, in fact when played back on low-fi equipment.

The advent of the CD spelled the death of Hi-Fi equipment. ... CD's
sounded all the worse on the high end stuff. More to the point. ....
Listening to music, seriously ... or as a background whilst doing
something else. ... no longer was as enjoyable. Too much work. .. just
not fun ... not soothing. ... not enjoyable.

I wonder about cause and effect there. The advent of the CD was also
the advent of the mass-popular PCs and the shift in how we trained
engineers, what the "hot" field(s) were and where the talent went.

Given the atitude of the audiophile consumer, I don't see it happening
that often. Either they seem too stuck within 'specifications' and flat
line zero distortion ...

... or in cloud cukoo land with shiatke stones and laquered finishes.

Only minority of those audiofool crazies seem to have sufficient hard
nosed objectivity to "trust" what they hear over what they are told ..
or what they would like to imagine.

Audiophile equipment is an interesting thing. ( And I say all this 5
years out of date. ...)

The hard science doesn't exist .. or is wrong/misleading/misdconstrued
...
The subjective aspect can lead one, very, very seriously astray ...

In the main one has to experience, experiment, decide and 'listen' for
one's self .. to make tangible progress in the topic.

You couldn't be more right - then or now.

Pearl

"My brother-in-law's speakers are really tall, so they sound great
since 1992."

Reply to article by: "Earl Dombroski"
Date written: 23 Dec 2005 13:41:04 -0800
groups.com

I think that we don't actually hear above 10-20 kHz, but we can hear
hear phase offsets in the sub-millisecond range. It's a common
misconception to mix the two. An 8 kHz signal is still an 8 kHz signal
even if it is offset in time (group delay). As I said, a common
mistake, and a well published one.

Due to the relative size of the human head, the ear is only somewhat accurate
for detecting phase differences of a sound in the range of 200Hz to 1.5kHz. A
typical value would be 500uS at 1kHz. At lower and higher frequencies, the ear
relies on intensity differences or frequency colorization to localize sound.
See http://www-ece.rice.edu/~crozell/cou...tro/intro.html

The error in digital reproduction suffers the same bad print. If you
have a smoothly curving ramp (think sine wave) then quatize (digitize
it), then ask a transitor to reproduce those points, and assume the
points are "x" in time apart (all same, as this is generally the case
in modern digital systems), then the xistor is told to go to a certain
level for a certain time, then the next level for the certain time and
so forth. In other words, instead of a smooth curve, you get a
staircase.

The quantinized and amplified signal is then filtered to remove all the "steps",
so as to become indistinguishable from a "smooth" sine-wave. This makes the
following explanation irrelevant...

BEGIN

Most publications in the audio biz (are truly atrocious and have zero
understanding of digital signal processing) then go on to explain the
signal difference in terms of the "frequency" response.

Digital impulses equate mathematically into a non-bandlimited case,
whereas analog signals do not. Much is made of the mathematical
mistake, not usefully if other factors are controlled.

The inertia of a moving cone or other diaphram tends to far outweigh
the differences of the staircased signal - in other words, no matter
the damping factor and power (for all practical terms), even though a
staircase is input, each step puts the speaker cone in motion and the
motion doesn't track the staircase because of physical inertia. (Hope
that's clear.)

What many people complain about in their digital reproductions are
misidentifications of newly-heard distortions previously unheard. The
listeners, either because of low training in listening (the old
audiophile days are gone) or because of age (ear/brain deteriorates,
part of life's rich tapestry), tends to miss the new information
(actual sound) and "discover" problems with the digital source, when in
fact, these are really problems with speakers, amplification and wiring
that weren't driven to the problem levels before. If one had a
several-thousand dollar turntable in 1970's money (as very many claim,
but very few did), then one actually heard these same distortions and
could attack them.

In the 70's, about $50k to $100k was required to solve these
colorations in total. The same price tag, even adjusted up, exists
today for true reproduction.

END

It takes a very expensive (due to engineering complexity) system of
electronics, wiring, transducers (speakers) and the listening room to
expose the digital part of the problem.

Many have heard proof to the contrary. But the causality isn't what
you might necessarily think. Cheap op-amps are being used in most
digital sources, and the distortion in these tend to far outweigh the
distortions of digitization - but they don't tell you that. The new
product launch of the newer, higher digital sources are accompanied by
better electronics. As the price comes down, the component quality is
lowered, and the distortions creep back in.

The ear is incapable of hearing distortions below 1% at best. With increasing
sound intensity, the threshold of detecting distortion goes way up, since the
ear is non-linear and creates distortions of its own. Most modern power amps
have distortion figures well below 1%. So this is really only an issue with
loudspeakers, since a typical loudspeaker has about 5% distortion. A very high
quality speaker has about 1% distortion.

Consider vacuum tubes, on another, but similar subject. Many ooh and
ahh about their great sound, but they distort to a very high percentage
- all as even harmonics, which the ear (half-wave recifier) cannot
detect.

The ear is capable of detecting all distortion, regardless of the harmonic
content. The difference is that even harmonic sounds are tolerated better
because the sound more pleasant than odd harmonics do. When a transitor
amplifier clips audio peaks, it does so very cleanly, whereas a tube amplifier
gently rounds off the peaks. The difference between a clean clip more
approximates a square wave -- which consists of predominently odd harmonics.
Another way of putting this is that a tube amp will have greater dynamic range
than an equivalent transistor amp.

But sub-percentage distortion of a class B xistor amplifier is
nearly all odd harmonic, and the ear hears it quickly.

At lower power levels, most of the distortion from a class-B amp is the same in
both amps due crossover distortion.

But if one were
to ever hear a really good pure class A high-powered xistor amp, the
tubes lose immediately.

A really good pure class-A tube amp would produce predominently even harmonics
whereas a really good pure class-A transistor amp would produce predominently
odd harmonics...and as pointed out previously, the even harmonics would be more
easily tolderated therefore the tube amp would win out over the transistor amp.

BTW, a word about the "half-wave rectifier" talk. Remember the ear has
the eardrum that presses against the hammer and so forth. But when the
pressure is relaxed, the eardrum doesn't pull the hammer back, that
happens as a function of the system's own relaxation. So, overpressure
pushes hammer, starts chain of events. Underpressure doesn't pull
hammer, hammer responds on it's own - so only the push part of the wave
is acted on - in other words, a half-wave rectifier.

But yes, records can sound clearer than CDs - but it depends on many
factors as to whether this is as universally true as most would have
you believe.

Show me a record that sounds cleaner than any CD.

Sorry for length of thread, but the song as many notes as it needed to
have.

It wasn't long enough. Case in point: holophonic sound. Holophonic sound is not
simply exaggerated phase separation. That is an old trick and does not sound
"more real" anyway. Holophonic sound claims to be be holographic by reproducing
the *INTERFERENCE* patterns of the sound at the recording location. This is not
simply a case of reproducing phase and intensity differences as typical stereo
recordings would have. It implies that if I record two pure tone sources using
two microphones, all separated from each other by ten feet to form a ten foot
square, when I playback the recording using two speakers separated from each
other by ten feet, that at a distance from ten feet perpindicular from one
speaker I would perdominently hear only one of those pure tones again, and not
the two tone broadcast that a typical system would record and playback. No such
thing exists nor has any such thing ever been reproduced for testing purposes
even.

The Sage

================================================== ===========
My Home Page : http://members.cox.net/the.sage

"Careful when you cast your devil out of you lest you cast
out the best thing in you." -Nietzsche
================================================== ===========

The_Sage wrote:
Reply to article by: "Earl Dombroski"
Date written: 23 Dec 2005 13:41:04 -0800
groups.com

I think that we don't actually hear above 10-20 kHz, but we can hear
hear phase offsets in the sub-millisecond range. It's a common
misconception to mix the two. An 8 kHz signal is still an 8 kHz signal
even if it is offset in time (group delay). As I said, a common
mistake, and a well published one.

Due to the relative size of the human head, the ear is only somewhat accurate
for detecting phase differences of a sound in the range of 200Hz to 1.5kHz. A
typical value would be 500uS at 1kHz. At lower and higher frequencies, the ear
relies on intensity differences or frequency colorization to localize sound.
See http://www-ece.rice.edu/~crozell/cou...tro/intro.html

The error in digital reproduction suffers the same bad print. If you
have a smoothly curving ramp (think sine wave) then quatize (digitize
it), then ask a transitor to reproduce those points, and assume the
points are "x" in time apart (all same, as this is generally the case
in modern digital systems), then the xistor is told to go to a certain
level for a certain time, then the next level for the certain time and
so forth. In other words, instead of a smooth curve, you get a
staircase.

The quantinized and amplified signal is then filtered to remove all the "steps",
so as to become indistinguishable from a "smooth" sine-wave. This makes the
following explanation irrelevant...

BEGIN

Most publications in the audio biz (are truly atrocious and have zero
understanding of digital signal processing) then go on to explain the
signal difference in terms of the "frequency" response.

Digital impulses equate mathematically into a non-bandlimited case,
whereas analog signals do not. Much is made of the mathematical
mistake, not usefully if other factors are controlled.

The inertia of a moving cone or other diaphram tends to far outweigh
the differences of the staircased signal - in other words, no matter
the damping factor and power (for all practical terms), even though a
staircase is input, each step puts the speaker cone in motion and the
motion doesn't track the staircase because of physical inertia. (Hope
that's clear.)

What many people complain about in their digital reproductions are
misidentifications of newly-heard distortions previously unheard. The
listeners, either because of low training in listening (the old
audiophile days are gone) or because of age (ear/brain deteriorates,
part of life's rich tapestry), tends to miss the new information
(actual sound) and "discover" problems with the digital source, when in
fact, these are really problems with speakers, amplification and wiring
that weren't driven to the problem levels before. If one had a
several-thousand dollar turntable in 1970's money (as very many claim,
but very few did), then one actually heard these same distortions and
could attack them.

In the 70's, about $50k to $100k was required to solve these
colorations in total. The same price tag, even adjusted up, exists
today for true reproduction.

END

It takes a very expensive (due to engineering complexity) system of
electronics, wiring, transducers (speakers) and the listening room to
expose the digital part of the problem.

Many have heard proof to the contrary. But the causality isn't what
you might necessarily think. Cheap op-amps are being used in most
digital sources, and the distortion in these tend to far outweigh the
distortions of digitization - but they don't tell you that. The new
product launch of the newer, higher digital sources are accompanied by
better electronics. As the price comes down, the component quality is
lowered, and the distortions creep back in.

The ear is incapable of hearing distortions below 1% at best. With increasing
sound intensity, the threshold of detecting distortion goes way up, sincethe
ear is non-linear and creates distortions of its own. Most modern power amps
have distortion figures well below 1%. So this is really only an issue with
loudspeakers, since a typical loudspeaker has about 5% distortion. A veryhigh
quality speaker has about 1% distortion.

Consider vacuum tubes, on another, but similar subject. Many ooh and
ahh about their great sound, but they distort to a very high percentage
- all as even harmonics, which the ear (half-wave recifier) cannot
detect.

The ear is capable of detecting all distortion, regardless of the harmonic
content. The difference is that even harmonic sounds are tolerated better
because the sound more pleasant than odd harmonics do. When a transitor
amplifier clips audio peaks, it does so very cleanly, whereas a tube amplifier
gently rounds off the peaks. The difference between a clean clip more
approximates a square wave -- which consists of predominently odd harmonics.
Another way of putting this is that a tube amp will have greater dynamic range
than an equivalent transistor amp.

But sub-percentage distortion of a class B xistor amplifier is
nearly all odd harmonic, and the ear hears it quickly.

At lower power levels, most of the distortion from a class-B amp is the same in
both amps due crossover distortion.

But if one were
to ever hear a really good pure class A high-powered xistor amp, the
tubes lose immediately.

A really good pure class-A tube amp would produce predominently even harmonics
whereas a really good pure class-A transistor amp would produce predominently
odd harmonics...and as pointed out previously, the even harmonics would be more
easily tolderated therefore the tube amp would win out over the transistor amp.

BTW, a word about the "half-wave rectifier" talk. Remember the ear has
the eardrum that presses against the hammer and so forth. But when the
pressure is relaxed, the eardrum doesn't pull the hammer back, that
happens as a function of the system's own relaxation. So, overpressure
pushes hammer, starts chain of events. Underpressure doesn't pull
hammer, hammer responds on it's own - so only the push part of the wave
is acted on - in other words, a half-wave rectifier.

But yes, records can sound clearer than CDs - but it depends on many
factors as to whether this is as universally true as most would have
you believe.

Show me a record that sounds cleaner than any CD.

Sorry for length of thread, but the song as many notes as it needed to
have.

It wasn't long enough. Case in point: holophonic sound. Holophonic sound is not
simply exaggerated phase separation. That is an old trick and does not sound
"more real" anyway. Holophonic sound claims to be be holographic by reproducing
the *INTERFERENCE* patterns of the sound at the recording location. This is not
simply a case of reproducing phase and intensity differences as typical stereo
recordings would have. It implies that if I record two pure tone sources using
two microphones, all separated from each other by ten feet to form a ten foot
square, when I playback the recording using two speakers separated from each
other by ten feet, that at a distance from ten feet perpindicular from one
speaker I would perdominently hear only one of those pure tones again, and not
the two tone broadcast that a typical system would record and playback. No such
thing exists nor has any such thing ever been reproduced for testing purposes
even.

The Sage
Brilliant!

... Thank you.

I am going to be careless and impatient, here ...

I'll stick to being 'dense' about the science. ... and simply request
that you respect my capacity to be objective concerning the subjective
experience, itself.

1) IIRC, from what I heard a decade or two about this topic ... we have
the ability to detect phase differences of ~ 5 uS ??? ... one to two
orders better then you assert.

2) The German X-Gerät navigation system which forms the basis of
VORTAC, today was considered to be theoretically, impossible!

BEGIN
.... Due to the nature of radio, this allowed its two beams to be
pointed much more accurately from a similarly sized antenna, the
equi-signal area being only about 100 yards wide at 200 miles from the
antenna. The beams were so narrow that a lower power set of beams with
a much wider pattern was used to allow the bombers to find the main
beam. ...

....Stopping X-Gerät proved to be more difficult than with Knickebein.
The frequency at which the system operated was unknown until an
X-Gerät equipped Heinkel He 111 ditched on the English coast. ...

END
( It was considered to be IMPOSSIBLE! see R.V. Jones, Most Secret War
for further details ... these are my, "RL"'s comments on the
Wikipedia article )

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_beams for source and
more

3) Upon considering what Earl anmd Bill Sheppard posted in reply,
yesterday ...
I circumspectually reconsidered the whole issue and realized the
following paradox:

How can I or anyone hear above 16 Khz, if I am unable to do so using
my/their own ears. ... The Zen argument. ... If one has never known
what it sounds like, how can one know what one is hearing?

Thus, let me step back a bit and say .... that ultrasonic perception is
a quality which seems to involves my own ears and kicks in wherein my
hearing cuts out as the frequency appears to go up. ... I might or
might NOT be perceiving ultrasonic sound ... or it's artifact ...
Honestly, I cannot say one way or the other, yet. ... I still assert
that the perceived effect is quite real ... and that others experience
it ... and that others also interpret such as being 'ultrasonic'.

Having said all this, things begin top fall into place ... There is
another aspect to all of this audiophile, ultrasonic, records seem more
real than CDs, aural perception stuff that I haven't gotten arpoundf to
mentioning, yet ...

Given my hasty and cursory reading of your response and the reference,
therein ...

.. this seems to be unconsidered. See 4) below:

4) First order and higher reflections of sound.

Without elaborating as to "why" it may be so ...

.... We seem to care more about first, second or higher order
reflections of the primary sound source ... then the primary signal,
itself!

.... We seem to care about the coloration, the harmonic overtones to
sound .. than the fundamental harmonic.

You stated ...

At lower and higher frequencies, the ear
relies on intensity differences or frequency colorization to localize sound.

... meaning, higer order reflections, harmonic overtone structures

I might be wrong ...
.. but my guess is that these features are not limited in precision
by the mechanisms which you propose. They represent fine structure
details which are encoded by convolution into a noisy ( excuse the very
real and ironic pun! ) carrier.

That which I am suggesting might seem far fetched, yet it could hardly
be closer to the cold, hard truth of pragmatic reality, itself. Simply
consider what is really happening:

... There isn't information in absolute amplitude or exact frequency
or high frequency

Wind. ear wax, reflections, humidity, interference from other sound
sources, inconsistent and changing ear structure, the many distortions
that are built into our auditory organs, etc, etc ...

... serve to degrade the utility of the primary signal.

More to the point! .. who cares about the primary signal? ... the
valuable stuff is the higher order, integrated interpretation which is
extracted from it. ... I.E. reducing the high bandwidth signal to the
really useful few bits of worthwhile value.

Hearing is NOT so much about the source input. ... it's more about the
processed signal.

Sincerely,

RL

BTW - many of us are bothered by subsonic and ultrasonic frequencies.
For example, just because we can't hear ultrasonically doesn't mean
that for some of us, the eardrum isn't supple enough to respond and
create an irritation against the rest of the ear works.

Pearl

"Owwwie, owwwie, owwwie Dr. Forrester since 1992."

By Earl D.:

BTW - many of us are bothered by
subsonic and ultrasonic frequencies. For
example, just because we can't hear
ultrasonically doesn't mean that for some of us, the eardrum isn't
supple enough to respond and create an irritation against
the rest of the ear works.

..And don't forget the heterodyne or 'beat' frequencies produced by
ultrasonic interactions, as some of these 'beat' artifacts do fall
within the human aural spectrum.
The artifacts aren't recorded in pure analog systems
which roll off sharply above 20 khz. But they can appear in high
sampling-rate digital recordings that go well into the ultrasonic, and
contribute to the nondescript "digital sound".
oc