Digital audio storage is lossless yet still requires analogue transducers at the human interface

Evidence

Historically, the bottleneck in audio quality has been the storing and transmission systems, such as gramophones, vinyl players, and cassette decks. The concept of high fidelity was developed to measure and minimize different deviations from perfect responses, such as linear and non-linear distortions. Nowadays, digital transmission has practically removed such problems, and currently the biggest bottlenecks are the microphones and loudspeakers. However, new challenges have emerged with perceptually based lossy audio codecs. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2360 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Digital audio’s only advantage is storage efficiency and robustness; Audio quality bottlenecks shifted from storage to transducers — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2360; Practical audio devices rest on underlying acoustics principles (+3 more)

Related

• Digital audio’s only advantage is storage efficiency and robustness (similarity 0.96)
• Audio quality bottlenecks shifted from storage to transducers (similarity 0.93)
• 16-bit CD resolution suffices for most delivery despite 24-bit studio benefits (similarity 0.89)
• Transducers dominate perceived sound quality more than other chain components (similarity 0.89)
• Sound storage digitized fully but human ears force analog endpoints (similarity 0.86)
• Discrete quadraphonic LP technology improved conventional two-channel record quality. (similarity 0.85)
• Most audio reproduction chain components are now perceptually flawless (similarity 0.83)
• Loudspeakers and room acoustics remain the weak link in audio quality (similarity 0.80)
• Loudspeaker-room interactions remain the weak link in audio reproduction chains (similarity 0.80)
• Lossy audio codecs improve encoder-side while keeping decoder standards fixed (similarity 0.80)
• Required audio fidelity scales with the application’s communicative demands (similarity 0.79)
• Perceptual coders exploit masking to cut audio storage and bandwidth (similarity 0.79)
• Digital sound gains only storage efficiency, since perception needs analog output (similarity 0.79)
• Digital audio’s rise made auditory perception knowledge essential to engineers (similarity 0.79)
• Audio compression maximizes information by encoding only unpredictable signal parts (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Audio quality bottlenecks shifted from storage to transducers #expands (0.90) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2360
• Transducers dominate perceived sound quality more than other chain components #expands (0.85)
• Practical audio devices rest on underlying acoustics principles #complicates (0.72)