[SurroundSound] Re: PS3 SACD rips

It's a very interesting topic, this matter of "lossy" conversions.
I still maintain that, before mp3 "lossy" compression came about, any
loss of musical information was as natural as rain, and not called
lossy. In fact, maybe the loss was actually a reduction in amplitude
but not outright. Sure, information may or will be lost in the
process, but it's a given, and not intentionally discarded.

When methods like mp3 came about, music information was intentionally
discarded, for the sake of reducing file size. So the term "lossy
compression" became widespread when listeners started hearing weird
artefacts at low bitrates. To me, this is the very essence of "lossy",
and is not the same as the inherent loss of detail in downsampling and
certain digital format conversions.

To exacerbate the matter, when transcoding from pcm to a different
format like DSD, we're comparing apples to oranges. Why even bother
about the loss of information when there is no intentional discarding
anything, but just an inherent byproduct of the downconversion or
cross-conversion process.

@Lokkerman -- Thanks for your comment. :)
For those interested in reading about Lipshitz's negative comment
about DSD, here's one link: http://sjeng.org/ftp/SACD.pdf

@Chris Lueders -- Thanks for trying to clarify certain nomenclature.
Could there be an academic difference between "natural loss or
attenuation of music information" as opposed to "outright discarding
of certain music information for the purpose of maximising data
compression"?
Before compression methods like mp3 came about, the loss of
information had been a given in downsampling, format conversions, etc.
As far as I can remember, people only starting playing up the the term
"lossy" or "lossy compression" when complaints started surfacing due
to the sonic artefacts of such intentional discarding of information.
As far back as I can remember, even the term lossless never came into
widespread usage until mp3 became a hot trend. It's as if the term was
meant to show the stark contrast of intentionally throwing music
information away in mp3. Perhaps the terms "lossy" and "loss of
information" are not meant to describe exactly the same thing?

@Joe A -- Your statement "Therefore it is not interchangeable between
domains and is more akin to a lossy conversion than it is to up/
downsampling in the same domain of PCM."
May I ask, is this a definitive conclusion in some AES paper or
something? I find it hard to understand that converting between two
completely different methods of recording (and the digital formats
that store the information) would be akin to a lossy conversion. This
brings to mind a popular question when converting from DSD to PCM: are
we doing justice to the music when converting DSD to 24/192? Or is
24/88 enough to minimize all that loss of musical information? On a
side note, I find that that one elegant thing about DSD is that it is
not as complicated as pcm with its multiple bit depths and sampling
rates.

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