I'd like to add my two cents on the human perceptible compression discussion.
In my experience I've seen files that could compress very well and sound virtually identical to their (far larger) lossless counterparts. On the other hand I've encountered files that did not respond well to compression and a great deal of effort went into finding settings which allowed for almost no noticeable deterioration in the signal. Feel free to simulate various compression settings in
MATLAB,
Sage, etc. and you'll see that there are times when high levels of compression lead to very little information loss and times when high levels of compression lead to massive signal corruption.
If I get around to it I'll post some examples but this thread is going to backlog my MATLAB work
Klipsch disagrees with you. Hell, only Logitech and Apple have really embraced digital. Why? Because all speakers are analog because the human ear is analog. If you have a digital decoder in your computer that is superior to those found in receivers, TVs, etc. you're going to get a richer sound sending an analog signal to the speakers than you will a digital one.
When it comes to audio, the only advantage of digital is fewer physical connections between the output device and the speakers. When it comes to actual sound quality, it depends on the quality of digital decoders and amplifiers.
Huh? Digital is just a method of storage. You're not sending digital to the speakers, the speakers are still getting analog (from the DAC on your receiver and then through an amp). A digital decoder should be able to take any input signal and send it to the DAC with the same reliability that your computer computes pi (so 1 error for every 4E20E20 computations* roughly
?).**
Obviously then you can debate the quality of the DAC and amplifiers, which is an open topic IMO. After a certain level of sophistication (and proper tuning) it just gets stupid and no one can tell the difference without some instrument (eg. SPL meter) assistance.
(IIRC) Lots of modern receivers will ADC any analog input signal, so you're still going to get sound that is only as good as the (in order). . .
-Analog input signal
-ADC
-(Optional) DSP
-DAC
-Amp
-Speakers
FFT anyone?
*The number is fluff obviously, but it should be really big anyway.
**You may also perform some DSP on the decoded signal prior to sending it to the DAC.