> I merely mentioned that as another example of psychoacoustic masking that > supposedly one cannot hear - yet I can. > I can also hear the difference between a digital copy and the original > sound file, and between the same generation of digital copies on different > hard drives. Holy cow. Holy freaking cow. This must be why I have such an URGE to do all my synthesis and sound prossessing and even mastering on the fly without any intermediate copies. I've been in the 'digital is interchangable' mindset for a long time now, and this is groundbreaking. Maybe this is the time to throw in a little bit of telepathy and energetic nature of the world theory. Perhaps the difference you hear between the different generations is the amount of attention (=energy) that has been focused on its hyperspace equivalent. Essentially, I think it is quite likely that actual sound (as in 'air movement') is absolutely negligable to our hearing experience. What we're really about is the energy rush we get. When we use something we recorded with some RME gear we are simply tuning into the energy rush of all the hard-working RME engineers. If they happen to be people a little like us, we like the sound. If they aren't, we think it sounds crappy and move on. I would presume that the people at Apogee are very scientific minded, perform a lot of double blind tests, and are little stiff around the edges. And Why????? Fons likes them! :) Behringer people are probably essentially lazy and a tad uncreative... So if you want make recordings for your nth generation Elvis coverband, you might actually get better results with Behringer equipment than with the 'Hi Fi' stuff. Why? The people who made your gear are lazy rip-offs, you're a lazy rip off, and your listeners will be thinking "Hey that sounds like 100% lazy rip off, just like me, it must be good." So there is no such thing as 'good gear'. There is only such a thing as 'Gear that harmonizes with you.' So you want gear you can't tell the difference with your husband with? Find some gear that people made who are a lot like your husband. Then spend enough time with that piece of gear so you get the same amount of or greater emotional connection with it as you have with your husband. (That's where the 'magic 24th bit' comes in... It's simply hard enough to get to make you spend enough time with your gear, and proably also less with your husband, and that's the only thing that can make the two not only sound, but also BE interchangable, which is when you really cannot notice the difference any more.) :) Have I come close? Carlo
