Re:Cannes Interview: Christopher Nolan on a new “unrestored”...
by WalterBright on Saturday May 19, 2018 @07:07PM
(#17110220)
> loudspeaker technology is still pretty terrible compared to the rest of the audio chain
Which also goes to my point that arguing about which is better, analog or digital, is utterly pointless.
And also because loudspeaker technology is still pretty terrible compared to the rest of the audio chain. Converters are nearly perfect, amps can be made close to perfect at non-trivial cost, microphones are okay but usually add some colouration, but even the best studio-grade speakers have limitations and add significant distortion.
And consumer-grade speakers - even expensive ones - are nowhere close to perfection. And even if they were, you'd still have to deal with room resonances in the performance room, which would add extra colour to the sound that wasn't present in the original recorded ambience.
Basically hifi is good enough to be musically enjoyable in a near-enough not-too-distracting way, but you need research-grade technology - like complex wavefield speaker arrays and acoustic tuning of the performance space - before you can record and reproduce sound almost transparently.