Contradictions are all around us.
For a musical example, John Lennon's lyrics, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" from The Beatles' 1968 White Album was a contradiction taken from a magazine ad for a gun company, which Lennon found both absurd and darkly humorous.
Or another example closer to home, how a ripped hard drive copy of a CD can sound better than the original it was copied from. Makes no sense, right?
One of the joys of being in engineering is unraveling contradictions. While I can't make sense of Lennon's conundrum either, I can add some clarity to the mystery of the hard drive rip vs. the master. This was a problem we solved some time ago when we first brought out the PerfectWave Transport.
Every CD player/transport we tried sounded worse than pulling that same file from a hard drive. What made the contradiction even more stark was the fact we could verify that bit-for-bit, the data were identical.
How could identical data sound different?
Timing, of course. Turns out that in a transport, the data is clocked in synch with a self-generated master clock that then is relied upon by your DAC as its master. In a hard drive, there is no master clock, and thus, whatever is feeding that data into the DAC generates its own master clock. What we're hearing then is the difference in master clock jitter between a transport and a computer.
Once we understood, our path was obvious. Build a better master clock into the transport, and voila! We could easily beat the HDD/computer combo.
Unraveling contradictions is how engineering can move from mystery to magic.
