Or is it April already, I really cannot tell from this post…
So I am going to kickstart a new product; AudioNAS – sounds expensive because it is!
There are very many complaints and issues that I have dealt with when dealing with the creative types that are my user-base but never have they complained that one storage system sounds better than the other storage system. They have never asked for better quality HDMI cables, better quality USB or even better quality Ethernet cables because their current ones just don’t render their work sufficiently well.
But perhaps there is a need for AudioNAS that allows you to get more from your files…improving the bits so that they sound better. Look, believe what you want to believe but if the storage system impacts on the sound of the files being stored there, there are horrible implications…because it means it is changing the data and that would be bad.
‘Sorry, Mr Audiophile….the storage improved your medical files and has smoothed out the fact that you are allergic to penicillin’
We call such improvements data corruption…this is bad!
But I’ll take your money for my new AudioNAS…
This article is an absolute gem for the discussion of critical thinking and the Dunning-Kruger effect. We have here a non-expert writing nonsense because they lack the knowledge and cognitive tools to recognize what they’re writing as nonsense.
That sounds somewhat harsh, and it probably shouldn’t, because the authors are probably intelligent in general. They’re trying to do decent reporting and decent science, and they’re going through all the motions of a proper evaluation of whether their NAS affects audio quality. A layman reading the article would probably think that what they’re writing is perfectly reasonable as well.
They did a test of a hypothesis (without expert knowledge of why the hypothesis was preposterous from the start), collected (bad) data under what they consider to be “reasonably controlled conditions” and drew conclusions from that data (without considering alternative hypotheses, such as the difference in perceived audio quality being statistical noise due to poor methodology, …).
Even real scientists make these mistakes though, all the time, when they wander outside their area of expertise. Most of the time the peer-review process presents that sort of thing, but even so there are plenty of cases of very smart people publishing utter nonsense when then dabble with things they don’t understand.
These authors even wrote, “Maybe we can solicit logical explanations from engineers who understand the low-level mechanics and operation of computer file and storage technologies, and can suggest specific avenues to explore.” Too bad they didn’t attempt that before publishing the article…