Early digital audio sounded genuinely bad.
Not in a "slightly disappointing" way. Harsh, fatiguing, flat. CDs arrived promising perfect sound forever, and what we got had compressed imaging, glassy treble, and something missing from the weight and breath of instruments. We in the audiophile community heard it immediately. Something was wrong.
And that is exactly when this industry does what I love about it most.
At the 66th AES Convention in Los Angeles, 1980, Dr. John Diamond — a psychiatrist practicing something called Behavioral Kinesiology — demonstrated what digital was really doing to us. Hold out your arm. Keep it strong. Analog plays; someone pushes — you resist easily. Switch to digital. Push again.
Your arm collapses.
Diamond claimed digital recordings caused a loss of muscle tone "by a factor of up to 300%" and warned of alarming implications for the world's musical heritage. This wasn't a fringe gathering. The Boston Audio Society covered it. It was debated seriously at the AES, in the same rooms where engineers were arguing about sampling rates and reconstruction filters.
The obvious flaw was that the pusher knew which recording was playing. So did the subject. Critics called for double-blind testing immediately. Nobody conducted any.
That whole circus put a smile on my face.
This is what I love about us. The passion that sends someone to a Behavioral Kinesiologist is the same passion that drives a better DAC design — the absolute refusal to accept that something sounds wrong and nobody can explain why. It's all the same fire, pointed in different directions.
The demonstration was theater. What drove someone to stand up at the AES and do it was not.
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