Why is digital audio so complicated? Where did it all go wrong?

[f1eng]

What makes it all complicated and confusing is discussions like these and the want to be able to fully understand and explain it all. No offense!

Personally I can often only understand part of it, explaining it to others is even harder. While I still would like to understand it all I accept that I, many others and often even manufacturers can't explain in all cases what's going on exactly. We can often at best hypothesize about what's going on. The result is what counts to me.

Thinking we're there and understand it all in our science (which is not the same as engineering) is naive. Again no offense. In a hundred years they'll laugh at our level of scientific understanding, another 100 years later, the same will happen to that generation etc. etc. Scientists often are, in a way, the most stupid (or even corrupt) people on earth, denying/not seeing whatever's right in front of their noses. Creative thinking 'outside the box' is something -many- (so not all) scientists of our age are unable to do, their educations made sure of that. (Unfortunately I've seen it up close/been part of it for some time)

In this hobby I personally like to learn (and thus benefit) from others who've done the painstaking work of experimentation. The good work will always find it's way to the surface, accepted science and even widely adopted engineering principles will no doubt catch up later.

Well I enjoy the hobby too but mainly just listen to music nowadays, I gave up messing around with kit much about 20 years ago after a fairly intense period to find the best sounding kit I could afford and evaluating which bits of kit mattered most by listening extensively at home..

I worked on record players in the mid '70s and nothing new has come up which I did not know then, and  funnily a lot which was well known back then seems to have been forgotten in the new resurgence of interest in LPs.

The basic science on the electrical side of a hifi system is trivial compared to things like radar and microwaves so I am intrigued what you think will be laughed at in the future. Nothing that was going on 40 years ago has turned out to laughable or ridiculous yet - though I suppose we still have 60 years to go.

My oldest recording was made in 1903, so well outside the 100 year ridiculous criterion you espouse, and nothing that they were doing then was ridiculous or laughable, it was using the current materials and knowledge quite ingeniously actually IMO. Yes it was not up to the accuracy of today but it was the best that could be done back then and they were pretty well aware of the shortcomings.

I think the same is still true today.