When CDs came out I bucked at them. I was still into tape, and still am. I had a bunch of tunes made on my A3440 with dbx and I mixed them onto a very good cassette deck -- the 122 (without the XLRs). From cassette I bounced to CD. My friends praised the result. "See how much better that sounds?" they said. "You finally came around." Yeah, right.
Tube distortion: harmonic, OK. Transistor and IC distortion: ....b-a-a-d, instant overload. Digital Distortion: the worst, data overload and instant overload.
TEAC/Tascam makes voice and data black boxes which must survive airplane crashes. Since they have government contracts, they are constrained from exaggerating their specs for any of their other products.
By the time a bass note pushes a VU meter needle to 'zero' the actual level is well into the red. Clip lights show this. I only allow distortion if it is the sound one is going for.
Tests of sound arrivals at the human ear -- which ear hears an arriving sound first? -- show an accuracy of 3 to 4 microseconds, requiring an accuracy of 1 to 2 microseconds for each ear. So, if you listen to digital at 44,100 times/second sampling rate, your ears perceive 20 'stairs' or separate sound blocks of info per second.
Our brain lets us hear great sound because the stairs are so close that the data omitted is negligible. Still, we are not fooled, and have a number of terms to try to describe the digital sound, clean, accurate, dry -- and of course: 'distortionless'.
