This item first appeared in 2004 on Dvorak Uncensored. It’s being reprised.
Apparently this is healthier to listen to
The Diamond Center: Digital stress
According to fabled audio design engineer, Richard Burwen, John Diamond is the primary proponent claiming this syndrome exists. Diamond would probably get more traction for his ideas if there wasn’t an air of wackiness regarding his overall view of things. I only mention this because I was at a meeting the other day with one of the most famous audio engineers in the world who demonstrated the effects purported by Diamond. It was pretty amazing to watch.
My question: is it possible that some disruptive component is introduced into any audio stream that is coded or decoded via a PCM methodology? If so, what is it? It has to be something identifiable, otherwise all this makes no sense.
Finally, about two years ago, I was contacted by several of the major recording and electronic companies who said that they never forgot my address to the Audio Engineering Society in 1980. They said they knew then that I was right with what I had presented about the negative effects of the digital process, but unfortunately it was released anyhow. They asked me to help in finding a solution to what they were now calling digital fatigue. Over the years I have tried many methods but all without success — until now.
Back then in 1980, I had only digitally recorded and/or mastered vinyl LPs to test. The arrival of CDs a few years later increased the problem. As with LPs, but more so, the stress leads after a certain time (different for each individual) to a reversal of their usual ethical and medical standards of belief. The effects of this profound change that I have now investigated for some twenty years are I believe a very important etiological factor in the increase in childhood and adolescent disturbances, (witness the soaring rate of Ritalin prescribing), and in the escalating violence in our society.
Especially when we recall that the digital process is no longer confined to recorded music but is now affecting us nearly all day: TV, radio, telephones etc. It is we who have become digitalized!
With the advent of Direct Stream Digital (DSD) recording, it is now possible to conclude that the negative effects I have stated above are due not to the digital process per se but to the mode of achieving it, Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). For DSD recordings do not have these negative effects.
I think the crackpot aspect, which I mentioned, may be creating a smokescreen for a real problem. As for D to A that doesn’t mean dissonant noise hasn’t been introduced to the sound.
A long standing criticism of digital audio is that it *lacks* noise, so final mixes sometimes have analog tape hiss added to make them sound “natural”. If there were some other dissonant noise introduced by PCM, it would have been seen in spectrum analysis long ago and reported in the literature of the field of audio engineering. Even if such subtle noise does exist, considering the psycho acoustic effect of masking, it would be irrelevant. It may also be worth considering that the “theraputic effect” observed could be due to noise from the vinyl playback, and/or the “untheraputic” effect was due to some subtle communication from therapist to patient. As it is reported, it’s just quackery.
My bull!@#$ detector makes think this is complete balony. It sounds like the arguments that spiffy expensive monster cables make a audible difference.
I suppose it is possible that something is being lost when converting from Digital to Analog (and back of course) and that difference is detectable to the human ear. It just sounds highly improbable, especially when based on something as vacuous as “life energy.” Until someone comes up with scientific evidence of such a difference, it gets relegated to pure speculation.
Dr. John Diamond talks about using “Applied Kinesiology,” which is supposed to be muscle testing to show things that the body accepts/likes vs. what the body rejects/doesn’t like (in a nutshell – I’m oversimplifying here).
Applied Kinesiology is, at best, a pseudo-science, and at worst, dangerous. A quick overview can be found at Quackwatch.org. Overall, it sounds to me like Dr. Diamond is just trying to sell his pills. One of the ingredients listed in the Life Energy Plus supplements is Angelica sinesis – known to be a laxitive and a sedative. Other ingredients are vitamin E and vitamin B12 – not that he’s going to spell that out for you.
Bottom line – the only digital fatigue I can tell really exists is me getting tired of folks pushing their bogus pseudoscience onto the unsuspecting public.
This reminds me of the idea that the best lies have a percentage of truth about them.
His claims regarding the effects seem utter crap; but when CDs were first introduced, there was alot of contention about how well they reproduced music – with complaints that is was “cold & sterile”, while analog was “warm & rich”. (Similar complaints abound about digital synthesizers not having the “fat” sound of analog synths)
Analog recording had a strong following, with labels like Sheffield Lab doing direct-to-disc recording – so they even bypassed the tape-hiss issue of analog recording. There were also some companies doing direct metal masters (DMM) – which I don’t remember the details of.
Some/most of the early CD-players used one digital-to-analog (D/A) converter – which switched between the left and right tracks – leaving the filters with a very choppy signal to smooth-out as the voltage-output went to zero, on one track, while the converter was switched to the other track.
Advances in digital filtering, and the eventual use of dual D/A-converters, have eliminated the early problems with sound quality.
But, I remember standing in a listening room – back in the day – with two copies of a CD to do A/B comparisons between CD-players. And there was an audible difference in sound quality between players, even to my non-Golden ears.
I believe those days are long gone. Today, you would probably have to campare CD to SACD in order to hear the same kind of quality difference you used to be able to hear between CD-players.
Funny to read post #5 and catch myself thinking: “I wrote that?”
“a reversal of their usual ethical and medical standards of belief.”
I think this comes from the music rather than the PCM. I’d love to know that the subjects that he studied were listening to!
Really,… Ritalin?, adolecent disturbances? Escalating Violence? Solve it all with this new process and everything will be groovy! Bah!
I have worked with audio for a long time and totally agree. PCM audio can be easier to listen to if it had a higher resolution 48 kHz helps but 88.2 and 96 kHz are probably closer to the sweet spot. There is a noticeable smoothing that occurs to sound and makes a hugh difference on the high but also on the low end.
“For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer’s connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren’t in place.” Uncle Dave post.
Eideard had an interesting piece on the Microsoft Zune yesterday. What is causing the fatique, as far as I can determine, is the fact that users are losing control and being jerked around with DRM and other security measures. Imagine if they build FM radios and if you taped a song the radio stopped working. They’ll stop copying with Zapster for Zune. With HD FM, you get digital quality with analog equipment. You can’t beat wireless. Digital rights are a myth. We could have HD AM Stereo within 5 years. This is being studied.
Even though the music is STORED digital, aren’t we listening to it analog?
Loudspeaker (or headphone, etc) design remains analogue and is essentially the same from what Bell invented way-back-when.
So, it’s kind of hard to imagine how digital music would mess up the brain. (OK, hip-hop withstanding)
The ear isn’t digital and the brain isn’t digital, so we just convert the digital back to analog. That conversion causes fatique, which is why I still listen to analog media. Digital is fine if you need encryption for your rock & roll, which most users don’t. The brain messes up digital, digital can’t mess up the brain though. It does take longer for the brain to process digital input because the brain has no digital areas. Human brains don’t store information digitally. They want to put chips in your head now, so you can be DRM compatible. It’s a solution looking for a problem. There’s a big ‘solutions’ business out there.
Footnote 6 on the linked article:
“Note that after a certain period of exposure to the digital signal, the subject will be so reversed that there will be a paradoxical false pseudo-positive response. This can totally invalidate the results of the untrained tester.”
…paradoxical false pseudo-positive response…
He’s pegging my bullshit detector with that one. 🙂
I still prefer the sound from vinyl records. Decades ago, Neil Young said that the digital CD sound wasn’t as good for you as analog music. This month, Bob Dylan said the digital sound is horrible and nobody he knows has made a good sounding CD for 20 years.
what about running digital sound through tubes,
like the audiophile CD players with tube audio
section. Theres got to be a way to recover the
good sound, I think MS wmf players do something
like that….smooth out the sound.
Would this effect include recordings which have been compressed with perceptual-encoding techniques, or just linear recordings? Enqurirng minds want to know.
Just to throw my two cents in. There is a difference in sound that we expect to hear. If it is a “live recording” then we don’t expect to hear perfect harmonies or balance. That is what makes the sound what it is. With a studio version, we expect a much cleared sound with perfect pitch and balance. And if hiss, scratches, and other noise is what you expect to hear, then go for vinyl or tapes. If you enjoy the perfect sound then stick with Cds.
BTW, most music today is cleaned up before being released. That could be one reason the sound is so different. Ritalin sales were climbing years before digital music came along.
Uncle Jim, please tell me that you are joking with your number 11 post!?!?
If you honestly believe what you wrote, then our science education is failing even more than I thought.
Mike T
This is hilarious stuff. Even better is the strong idea that some folks actually believe what they’re writing.
Dvorak said, “I only mention this because I was at a meeting the other day with one of the most famous audio engineers in the world who demonstrated the effects purported by Diamond. It was pretty amazing to watch.”
Could you provide some details?
I am interested because there is a lot of debate in the audiophile world about whether DSD sounds better than PCM. Also, I don’t know what to make of this Diamond guy, but in his little rant about the evils of PCM, he did make a tiny reference to DSD (the digital audio encoding system used for SACD), and he said–like quite a few people in the sound engineering and audiophile world say–that a well done DSD recording can be free of this digital fatigue burden.
So, JCD, what did you gain from this meeting with “one of the most famous audio engineers in the world”? I am very interested.
The meeting was a closed meeting where people were trying to do some deals. The demonstration was kind of a sideshow done my Mark Levinson. I actually talked with Dick Burwen about this a week or two later as he developed some filtering mechanisms to destroy this effect. He said he’d seen Mark do this trick himself and thought it was interesting but not convinced it meant anything. I personally thought the whole thing was creepy so I wrote it up. You can take it or leave it.