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

[NickB]

So, I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the past months, following topics all over the place on various forums etc - including here obviously -  as well as from my own experimentation.

Lets just get this out there first - I'm not sure how factually correct any of this, it just one persons opinion - but as far as I can tell, CD was invented about 30 years ago(?) and it bought digital audio to the masses, but many still argue to this day that it takes an ultra-expensive player to make CD sound 'good', and that's still miles from being as good as vinyl, or at least from sounding 'realistic' or 'pleasing' (read natural I suppose).  Computer based audio followed, and it seems like only an uber expensive computer based setup can sound as good as an uber expensive CD player, and in most cases the sounds is still only just believable as being 'real' and 'natural' in many cases, although some say high-end digital is now equal or better than vinyl, so it seems it can be done.

In my mind, the theory's simple - digital data is sent from A and received at B, where it is converted to analogue for output.  If dropouts aren't occurring, then we assume the data arrived unharmed, but that's not quite good enough apparently.  (OK, there are a lot of things in the chain like DACs, amps and speakers but lets ignore those for now and assume they're perfect.).  The bit I'm talking about is this getting the digital data from source to destination, and the related problems that are bounded around.  Jitter, EM interference, Signal Integrity, clock bending, power supply noise, ground noise, galvanic isolation, atomic clocking, digital cable boundary effects, cable impedance, reflections, the list goes on I'm sure - but all seem to contribute in some way towards making this specific audio version of digital, somehow prone to lots of issues, and there is no length you can't go to extract a bit more just by making this digital data 'better'.

Now, we've been to the moon, and are planning to go to Mars, we're starting to get a much deeper understanding of the universe and how it was formed, we've made radical advances in medicine and science - many of us carry computers in our pockets that are more powerful than the early supercomputers.  There's a whole swathe of other things too many to mention here obviously.  (OK so we're not so smart because we've also f'ed up a lot of the planet and caused untold suffering at the same time…but technology-wise we seem to know what we're doing).

So what went wrong with digital audio?  Why has something that in this day and age should be so easy, turned out to be so complicated?  Are the problems all real, or  part real, or is the actual problem just not really understood? Or are there a lot of people taking advantage of the fact that its hard for humans to make decisions about what they hear so are deliberately misinforming or making it more complicated than it needs to be? Or a combination of?

I've done a fair bit of tweaking - albeit nothing compared to some - and think I'm open-minded, but often at the end of it I start to question myself, and wonder whether those that say it's just the brain playing tricks might be right (at least in part).

Be keen to hear what others think….

Like most things in life it only gets complicated when someone can make lots of money by confusing you. A bit like cables, power supplies, different file types, DVDa, DSD etc etc.

Set up a Raspberry Pi with Hifiberry+ run coax or optical in to Devialet connect to it with Roon and enjoy.

Don't listen to me though I am just an old cynic