wrote in message
ps.com

"We?" Dude give me a break. The meter reader geeks on
Usenet have contributed nothing to the advancement of
audio.

That would include John Atkinson, of course, well-known for his use of test
equipment to characterize the performance of audio equipment, and long-time
poster on various Usenet audio groups.

Wow Scott, I didn't know that you had it in for John!

OTOH the heretical designers of high end equipment
have been on the cutting edge pushing the envelope.

As in receiving lots of paper cuts from pushing envelopes? ;-)

Where would we be if the meter readers had their way?

Pretty much wherever mainstream technology is today. Correct me if I'm wrong
but audio's subjectivism uber alles high priests have contributed *nothing*
to mainstream audio technology.

Maybe listening to undithered CDs mastered on first generation
A/D converters on 14 bit players.

Every card-carrying meter reader I know of believes in using dither. A CD or
two might have fallen through the cracks, but the meter-reader's rule books
say use dither or don't do digital.

AFAIK the few known examples of quantization failure on CD did not happen by
design, but by accident. They were the result of equipment that was prone to
being sensitive to adjustement and a tad drifty. Absense of dither was not
the problem.


the meter readers said right out of the gate none of that stuff mattered.

Speaks to Scott's lack of proper information about the state of digital
audio technology at the time. Does Scott know how to spell Nyquist and
Shannon? There's no evidence he has ever read their work, or has a clue
what they wrote, or when.

I shudder to think where audio would be today if the Usenet
dorks had their way.

Pretty much where it is. We abandoned vinyl as a mainstream format some
decades ago. Tubes were abandoned a decade or more before that. So much for
the parts of your listening room that you brag most about, Scott.