Recommended: Two more good STRATFOR articles

George Friedman of STRATFOR has written two more good articles which I can recommend. One is called A Net Assessment of the World, in which he discusses the overall geopolitical situation today. The second article is entitled World War II and the Origin of American Unease, and is also quite insightful.

Visiting an American WW2 Cemetery

On our Rhine-Moselle river trip we made a stop a couple of days ago at the American WW2 cemetery at Hamm, near Luxemburg, the last resting place of about 5000 American servicemen (and 1 woman, an Army nurse) most of whom died in the 1944/45 Battle of the Bulge. Nearby in the German WW2 cemetery lie about 11,000 young German soldiers who lost their lives in the same battle. There is something terribly poignant about all those young people, American and German alike, who could in other circumstances have been the best of friends, but instead cut each other’s lives so short.

 As a group (we are all Americans on this river cruise) we laid a wreath at the central chapel. The superintendent called forth all the veterans in the group, and I found myself terribly moved as a number of old men (we are almost all old in this cruise) stepped forward to form ranks and place the wreath while taps were played.

I cannot help but reflect what madness, what political incompetence on both sides  led us into all the senseless devastation and lost lives in World War 2, and wonder whether the world isn’t repeating this madness today. Our Middle Eastern wars haven’t produced as many American deaths, but it has produced tens of thousands of physically and/or mentally damaged American soldiers whose lives and whose family’s lives will be blighted by their disabilities for the rest of their lives. And of course millions of the native residents of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan have been killed, wounded, and/or displaced in the senseless fighting

Traveling through the Rhine and Moselle valleys one learns about the many invasions and conflicts that have washed over these areas repeatedly since before Roman times right up to World War 2. What, one wonders, would it take to permanently restrain the inevitable ambitions of demagogues (President Putin comes to mind)  and religious fanatics (the IS comes to mind) and end this senseless cycle of destruction.

About Hi Fi equipment and suckers

There are some items, like watches, cars, wines and hi fi audio gear where people with enough money (more money than sense, some would say) spend inordinate amounts for little or no real gain. A $250,000 Rolls-Royce is no doubt better constructed than a $25,000 Chevrolet, but is it really 10 times better, especially on a slow daily commute? A $50,000 Patek Philippe watch certainly has more status than a $50 Timex, but it doesn’t really tell time any better – certainly not $49,950 better.  And as several researchers have shown, even people who fancy themselves wine experts often can’t really distinguish $10/bottle wines from $200/bottle wines in blind tests.  In fact in one published test experts confidently rated two glasses of wine quite differently in a blind test, although both glasses were in fact poured from the same bottle.

The world of hi fidelity music has always had roughly three levels – (1) the cheap boom-box level for casual listening of popular music, (2) a mid-level where a reasonable living-room system might cost $1000-$3000 including speakers, receiver/amplifier, and cd player.  Above that (3) is a stratospheric level where people obsess about things like $7000 audio cables (Pear ANJOU Speaker Cables), $200,000 hand-built amplifiers (Dynaudio Arbiter monoblocks), $40,000 speaker sets (Waterfall Audio Niagara Platinum Speakers) and $8000 headphones (Final Audio Muramasa VIII).  I have no doubt that to a very experienced audio engineer with decades of experience in the studio these may possibly sound a bit better, but are they really $20,000-$300,000 better for the average listener?

I am thinking about this right now because my Logitech Duo wireless music devices just died. They were discontinued several years ago and support/repair is almost nonexistent, so I had to replace them. In the process of researching on the web what was available these days (I went with Sonos devices) I discovered - typical for the web - numerous highly emotional and acrimonious debates on such subjects as whether it was worth buying expensive external DACs (digital to analogue converters) for the Sonos Connect, and whether 16-bit digital files (CD quality) were adequate for “real” audiophiles or whether one had to move up to 24-bit files, which are not supported by the Sonos system.

Of course many of these people are absolutely convinced they can hear differences with more expensive equipment (especially expensive equipment they have just bought) but few have really done blind A/B tests, and if they did many would no doubt be surprised and dismayed to find out that they really couldn’t reliably tell which was the output from the more expensive system. 

In fact human hearing isn’t really all that good compared to many other creatures.  At our best when we were young we may have heard a range from about 10 Hz to 20k Hz, and by the time we are old enough to afford expensive audio equipment, and to have lived with loud city noises, rock bands and music around us for several decades, our hearing is much worse, especially at the upper end.

The spirited debate about 16-bit vs 24-bit music files is largely based on a faulty understanding of the physics involved. Despite the prevalent myth that more bits somehow gives more “accurate” music, it really only gives more dynamic range (loud to soft), and 16 bits already encompasses the entire loud-soft range (up to about 96 db, about the sound standing next to a loud gas lawn mower.) that the human ear can comfortably listen to. A 24-bit range just pushes the upper end to about 144db, which is about the ear-damaging sound level standing right next to a 155mm howitzer when it is fired.  For studio work where the digital files are going to be merged and manipulated, it may well be worth working in 24-bit formats to avoid introducing rounding errors, but 16-bit final output is more than enough dynamic range for any meaningful music listening.

What does actually make a difference in the “accuracy” of digital music is the sampling rate. There is an arcane thing called the “Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem” that says that to accurately digitally record a wavelength of frequency x one needs to sample at  least 2x times the frequency plus about 10%. CDs sample at 44,0000 samples per second, which happens to be 20k Hz times 2 plus 10%, meaning that (not by accident)  standard CDs already sample at a rate capable of accurately recording up to the  maximum 20k Hz frequency that a young person can hear, and far better than most of us older folks can hear.

The upshot of all of this is that, once again, as with cars and wines and watches, a lot of people are apparently being sold very expensive stuff that they really don’t need for their purposes with appeals to “status” and “more expensive is better”.  I suppose this is a natural feature of any economy.  As the old saying goes ‘There's a sucker born every minute”, except that it is now probably down to every 10 seconds or less.

If I had enabled comments on this blog I would no doubt be swamped with emotional and outraged flames from people who have sunk a lot of money into their expensive audio systems (or cars or watches or wine collections) and desperately need to believe their money was well spent. As a classical music lover with normal adult ears, I find my rather modest mid-level system (320kbs MP3 files or internet streaming stations fed through the Sonos wireless system to a $500 Denon receiver and $100 AR-6 speakers) more than adequate, and in fact I really can’t hear the difference between 320kbs files and 160kbs files, or even some 128kbs files, so even my setup is probably overkill.