keep in mind that before the signal is sampled it needs to be low-pass filtered at the nyquist frequency. so everything above that frequency is attenuated as much as possible.obviously you cannot eliminate the problem of aliasing altogether but the practical goal is to eliminate it from occuring within the band you are sampling (e.g. 20-22Khz for audio). I agree with you that digital audio could use better sampling overall if for no other reason to deal with the granularity problems. they did a pretty good job with cd audio and it came pretty close to being indistinguishable... there are actually alot of listeners that have a very difficult or even impossible time telling the difference now in a true A/B setup. Often the issue is that an "audiophile" will make comparisons that are not direct: e.g. a standard high end CD player against a high end phono/preamp combo and the phono sounds obviously better. The problem is that there is no proof that the digital component was inferior.. it could be that the phono/preamp colored the sound in a more pleasing manner, or that the cd engineer made changes during mastering.. we just dont know because nobody likes doing an exact A/B comparison of digital/analog format and it ends up as sort of anecdotal evidence that we all hear about... The new digital workstations used for professional mastering are all either 24 or 32 bits and when i listen to tracks being played back on those systems that are sampled even at 24bit/96khz they sound nothing short of amazing. It would be fun to do a richard clark type A/B monetary bet: the audiophile can use their own reference system; you take a master recording of a record album playing at the preamp output at 24bits and then do A/B playback with the reference levels set the same. I would bet that it would be impossible for anybody to be able to tell the difference...

aliasing doesnt have anything to do with sampling (e.g. quantization errors) either in frequency or amplitude). aliasing is simply an unwanted side effect of not having enough sampling resolution. That being said yes there is always going to be quantization errors but that is irrelevant: what is important is what level of difference the human ear can hear and while red book audio is not perfect is comes pretty close. At 24 bits the differences are exceedingly small. Finally the one thing that i never hear the analog audiophile types talk about (keep in mind i have nothing against it: if you prefer analog good for you) is that the same quantization errors that apply to digital audio also apply to analog: e.g. if you consider a 5 volt audio signal found in any audio setup (even the really nice ones) and look at any signal based on the same quantization as cd audio: 16 bits is 5/65536 or 76 microvolts. Now look at any piece of high end audiophile equipment with a scope that can resolve to microvolts and you will see noise in the signal at the same amplitudes typically introduced by the environment but also simply as a result of the environmental changes on the various circuits... Analog noise eixsts to and it is typically on the same order of amplitude as digital. With the move to 24 bit audio the quantization noise for 1 bit is 5.9 nV which is insanely low.. AFAIK there is no high end analog audio equipment that is even close in mitigating noise at those levels.

aliasing doesnt have anything to do with sampling (e.g. quantization errors) either in frequency or amplitude). aliasing is simply an unwanted side effect of not having enough sampling resolution. That being said yes there is always going to be quantization errors but that is irrelevant: what is important is what level of difference the human ear can hear and while red book audio is not perfect is comes pretty close. At 24 bits the differences are exceedingly small. Finally the one thing that i never hear the analog audiophile types talk about (keep in mind i have nothing against it: if you prefer analog good for you) is that the same quantization errors that apply to digital audio also apply to analog: e.g. if you consider a 5 volt audio signal found in any audio setup (even the really nice ones) and look at any signal based on the same quantization as cd audio: 16 bits is 5/65536 or 76 microvolts. Now look at any piece of high end audiophile equipment with a scope that can resolve to microvolts and you will see noise in the signal at the same amplitudes typically introduced by the environment but also simply as a result of the environmental changes on the various circuits... Analog noise eixsts to and it is typically on the same order of amplitude as digital. With the move to 24 bit audio the quantization noise for 1 bit is 5.9 nV which is insanely low.. AFAIK there is no high end analog equipment that is even close in mitigating noise at those levels.

wow, asking for relationship/advice about girls on slashdot? talk about going to the wrong place... seriously though, the best thing you can do to ensure a happy marraige is to at least make an attempt to work out some of the difficult issues before you actually get married... Do you or your GF have any annoying/disgusting habits: (weird laugh, make noises, leave toenail clippings around, etc..) those sorts of things tend to be ignored in the beginning when things are going well but once your married they can get very irritating very quickly. Secondly, work out basic stuff like finances: how is the money going to be spent and on what, how are you going to pay bills.. and so on... get that sort of stuff worked out before. Finally, I hope you are getting a decent amount of sex now because however much that is, its going to be *less* once you are married. if you arent getting much or any now then you might want to rethink things...

ok who let the nanobots out... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

The arms race with BD+ mirrors exactly what happened with sattv hacking 10 years ago. The encryption starts out simple and uses a minimal implementation of the BD spec. Once that is compromised the ip holders inevitably move to the more complex implementation of the spec. Currently this involves uploading a code package with each new release that performs the decryption, blacklist checking, and ultimately a system integrity check (the latter makes sure that BD+ API has not been patched to allow unconditional decryption which is the method slysoft uses). With every release, the IP holder looks at how the system has been hacked and writes a specific code package to detect those changes. The end result of this game is that the system will become totally compromised as hackers will simply rebuild the entire BD+ VM and API in emulation and allow for patching outside of the VM implementation (e.g. the system will respond as a valid unhacked system to any checks via VM code packages but will still perform unconditional decryption) Once that happens its over for BD+ as the only possible countermeasure is to attack flaws in the emulator implementation and those are easily fixed. Give it a year or so...

wasnt this in the "king of the hill" episode where dale puts the fire ants on hank's lawn?

thats not the worst part.... As of midnight, the WOPR is mere hours away from "winning the game"...

Thats not true. I can tell you from experience that aside from some equipment that resides under the hood, most automotive electronics are NOT conformal coated at all...