Oh! Some parts of Monty’s demonstration just nails it. For example:
@2:28 - white noise at 90 dB below signal - unimportant, distortion at 70 dB below signal - unimportant.
And my favorite quote:
@3:09 - “just because we can measure improvement doesn’t mean we can hear it”
(couldn’t find it earlier during this discussion, because my memory doesn’t serve me well, and I though it
was Ethan Winer’s comment)
Bloody state-of-the-art analog lab test equipment from 1970s/80s had 1 00 000 times more (-70 vs -120 dB)
distortion than Cubase’s SRC. The very best recording gear of that time may have had order of magnitude worse
figures (probably even worse), which means they had distortion figures of 1 000 000 times worse than Cubase.
All of the recordings of that time must have sounded REALLY horrible!