In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” doesn’t always apply—especially in digital audio. But if we look a little deeper, it’s clear that the “garbage” isn’t just in the transports or CD players—it’s memorialized in the medium itself.
I’m thinking of the Compact Disc. When CDs first arrived on the scene, they promised “perfect sound forever.” What we got instead was a two-dimensional, sterile insult to everything vinyl stood for. Gone were the natural warmth, the depth, the spaciousness. In their place: flat soundstages, bright highs, and an uncanny sense that you were listening to a copy of music, not the music itself. To those of us deep in analog, it was offensive.
But here's the twist. Many of those same CDs, played today on a well-designed modern system, can sound absolutely breathtaking.
How is that possible? The discs didn’t change. The 16-bit, 44.1kHz data on it is identical to what it was in 1985. No remastering, no reissuing—just the original, flawed digital file. And yet today it sounds alive, three-dimensional, even emotionally engaging. What changed wasn’t the medium.
It was everything else.
From the beginning, I knew this was the future of audio. It just wasn’t there yet—not by a long shot—but the potential was obvious. Perfect channel balance, no groove noise, consistent playback—it was all there, waiting to be tapped. Like any emerging technology, it just needed care and refinement, especially with an eye toward high-end performance.
Unfortunately, the big players rolling out the format had no interest in that. Their focus was mass-market convenience, not sound quality. Timing errors, jitter, noisy power supplies, and crude analog stages were baked into early CD players. To them, bits were bits—and that was that. But from where I sat, it was clear that if we applied the same engineering attention we gave to analog, digital could offer something extraordinary. That was the opening, and we ran with it.
The result? Those same old CDs now reveal layers of information and emotion we never knew were there. Soundstages bloom. Instruments have air around them. Vocals take on body and nuance. The digital ceiling we once thought so low turns out to have been self-imposed all along.
It’s a humbling reminder of how much our assumptions can get in the way of progress.
Thanks to better design, deeper understanding, and decades of evolution, the output is anything but garbage.
0 comments