Thoughts on the future of HiFi

[theaudiohobby]

If you read what I said clearly, there was a exhibit that went along with the paper. You were allowed into to dedicated listen rooms(just as I described), and the test was administered just as the white paper test was. The conclusions done in the booth were exactly the same as the white paper described, and you could see the measurements taken of the brain activity right after the test was done. It correlated exactly to the measurements outlined in the white paper. It was peer reviewed, which establishes its legitimacy. There has been nothing to dispute this since it was submitted. So it was probably forgotten is nothing more than your theory. It hasn't been challenged is more accurate.

Without the paper, all this is simply handwaving, Accepted theory that establishes a connection between digital encoding and agitation in test subjects would not be hidden away in a single AES paper.

Let's start with the waveform. Once a analog signal is encoded to 16bit resolution, it appears as a stair stepped waveform, unlike a recorded analog which is more rounded

You got this wrong from get-go, a DAC does not see a waveform in the sense you use the term, it recovers a digital datastream of some sort PCM, DSM or whatever from the carrier signal at it's input. The reconstruction filter reconstructs the orignal analog waveform from the datastream recovered at DAC input.

Remember, there are two chief distinctions between an analog and a digital signal. The first is that the analog signal is continuous in time, meaning that it varies smoothly over time no matter how short a time period you consider(the rounded waveform), whereas the digital signal, in contrast, is discrete in time, meaning it has distinct parts that follow one after another with definite, unambiguous division points (called signal transitions) between them.(the square tooth waveform).

As stated previously, a DAC recovers a datastream at it's input, You've conflated the quantization process and the reconstruction process. A DAC uses a filter to reconstruct an analog signal from a quantized datastream. The recovered analog signal is continuous in time by definition whereas the digital datastream received at it's input is quantized.

Jitter is a problem with digital that is not a problem with analog. Aliasing is a problem with digital that is not a problem with analog. Quantization errors (noise) occurs with digital audio, that does not occur with analog, and overload characteristics of digital are profoundly different than that of analog

You've thrown a scatter load of unrelated stuff out there. Aliasing is non-issue, a well designed will reject out-of-band images with no problem, Quantisation noise occurs at the noise floor, dither lowers it even further. Analog has similar issues with noise, tape noise and groove noise are two well known examples.

Jitter is an issue, but it's minor compared to the gross distortions that occur in the analog. And it related cousins in the analog world are wow and flutter and then there is stuff like rumble.

That is a theory argument, not a real world one. If all things were perfect, you would be right. But in the real world all things are not perfect, and that is a fact. No signal chain is perfect whether it is digital or analog.

Ha! Perfection is a non-issue, a DAC always outputs analog waveform, if it doesn't it's broken. Analog waveforms ( at least, audio ones) are continuous in time by definition.