For most of us, our beliefs become fact.
We develop ideas and stories that explain how the world works, what's possible, what's impossible, and after a while those ideas and stories harden into "facts." When something comes along that doesn't fit, it's often easier to dismiss it than rethink what we believe.
At least that's true for most people.
Crazy people like me take a different approach.
I actually enjoy having my beliefs challenged. In fact, I'm usually the first one trying to tear them apart. If an idea survives, wonderful—it was stronger than I thought. If it doesn't, even better. I've learned something.
Take digital audio.
For decades it drove me crazy that different CD transports feeding the same DAC sounded different. According to the theory, they shouldn't. Digital is digital. The bits are the bits.
Then John Atkinson did something that made the problem even worse. He captured the digital output from two CD transports that sounded dramatically different.
The result?
The data streams were bit-for-bit identical.
Now we had a real problem.
If the bits were indeed identical, why did they sound so different?
There are two ways to respond when the evidence in front of you doesn't match the story you're telling yourself: dismiss what you're hearing. If the bits matched, then any perceived difference has to be listener bias. End of discussion. Or, own up to what you know must be right and figure it out.
I knew what we were hearing, and it drove me and our chief engineer, Bob Stadtherr crazy enough that we couldn't let it go. We kept asking the question instead of dismissing it. That obsession eventually led us to develop the original Digital Lens nearly thirty years ago.
What we ultimately learned was that the bits were only part of the story.
How those bits arrive matters too.
Their timing. The electrical noise riding along with them. The process of recovering the clock and reconstructing the music. None of that changes the data itself, but it certainly changes what comes out of the speakers.
The destination is the same.
The journey is not.
And as each hurdle jumps out in front we can choose to ignore, deny, or change.
That's the fun of it.
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