Why Your Digital Music Is Lying to You — The Science of Audio Truth

A journey into the microscopic world of digital sound, where invisible errors create an artificial reality, and how a radical approach to engineering can bring us back to the truth.

There’s a peculiar feeling familiar to anyone who deeply loves music. You’re listening to a song you’ve known for years, a track encoded in a supposedly “lossless” format, streaming from a high-quality service. All the notes are there, the lyrics are clear, but some intangible essence is missing. The sound, while clean, feels strangely flat, sterile, as if you’re viewing a perfect photograph of a living person. It’s technically correct, but emotionally vacant.

This is the uncanny valley of digital audio. And the unsettling truth is that, in a way, your music is lying to you. The deception isn’t malicious, nor is it hidden in the data of the file itself. It’s a lie of omission, a story half-told during the most critical and least understood moment in all of digital audio: the act of translation. The journey from the cold, hard logic of ones and zeros back into the warm, fluid, and continuous reality of a soundwave.

To understand this lie, we must venture into the world of signal processing, a place of ghosts, echoes, and the relentless tyranny of time. And in doing so, we’ll discover how a small, unassuming device, acting as our case study, showcases a fanatical devotion to uncovering the truth.

The Ghost in the Machine: Digital’s Original Sin

At its core, a digital audio file is a simple thing: a massive list of numbers. Each number represents the amplitude of the soundwave at a precise moment in time—a dot on a graph. To turn this back into music, a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) must connect these dots to reconstruct the original, smooth, analog curve. The problem is, it doesn’t know what happened between the dots. It has to make an educated guess.

To guide this process, every DAC employs a digital filter. Its job is to smooth out the staircase-like steps of the raw digital output, interpolating the path the wave would have taken. But here we encounter the ghost in the machine, an unavoidable mathematical artifact known as “ringing.”

Imagine dropping a pebble into a perfectly still pond. You see the main splash, but you also see ripples that spread out after the event. Now, imagine you also saw faint, ghostly ripples appear on the water an instant before the pebble hit. That’s pre-ringing. It’s an unnatural echo of an event that hasn’t happened yet. Standard digital filters, in their quest to perfectly reconstruct the signal, inadvertently create these temporal ghosts around sharp, transient sounds—the snap of a snare drum, the pluck of a guitar string.

This ringing, though microscopic, is the source of that sterile, digital glare. It smears the timing of the music, robbing it of its immediacy and impact. It’s the primary reason digital audio can sound artificial. It is the lie.

The Architect vs. The Assembler

Most of the world’s digital devices, from phones to high-end audio players, tackle this problem using an off-the-shelf DAC chip. These chips are miracles of mass-production, made by a handful of specialized companies. They are predictable, reliable, and cost-effective. The device manufacturer who uses them is an “Assembler,” skillfully putting together excellent pre-made components. But they are ultimately constrained by the chip designer’s philosophy and compromises.

There is, however, another path. The path of the “Architect.” This approach rejects the pre-made solution and instead starts with a blank slate: a Field-Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. An FPGA is a type of processor that has no fixed function. It’s a vast sea of programmable logic gates that an engineer can configure to do anything. It’s exponentially more difficult and expensive to use, but it offers absolute control. It allows an architect to build a DAC from the ground up, based on their own theories of how digital audio should be reconstructed.

This is where our case study enters the picture. The British company Chord Electronics, with their Mojo 2 DAC, is one of the few proponents of this architectural approach. Their digital designer has spent decades developing a unique filter algorithm, one that could never fit on a conventional DAC chip.

The Detective with a Million Clues

Chord’s solution to the ringing problem is their “Watts Transient Aligned” (WTA) filter. To understand what makes it so different, we need to introduce the concept of “taps.” In a digital filter, the number of taps roughly corresponds to how much data the algorithm can look at to inform its interpolation—its guess about what happened between the dots.

Think of it like this: a standard DAC is a detective arriving at a crime scene with only a handful of Polaroid photos. They can piece together a plausible story, but many details will be inferred. The WTA filter, with its staggering 40,960 taps, is a detective who has access to weeks of high-resolution security footage from every angle. The sheer volume of data allows for a reconstruction of events that is so accurate, it borders on prescience.

This immense number of taps allows the filter to recreate the transient, the initial impact of a sound, with phenomenal accuracy, dramatically reducing the unnatural ringing that plagues simpler designs. It pushes the ghostly artifacts outside the range of human hearing, leaving behind a sound that is shockingly clear, immediate, and rhythmically precise. It is a brute-force computational approach to achieving sonic purity.

The Tyranny of Time

But even a perfect filter is useless if the timing is wrong. There is another, more insidious villain lurking in digital audio: Jitter.

Jitter is a deviation in timing. The digital file dictates that a sample should be played at a precise microsecond, but if the system’s internal clock wavers, that sample might arrive a few nanoseconds early or late. Imagine a world-class orchestra, where every musician plays their notes perfectly, but their sense of rhythm is ever-so-slightly off. The result would not be music; it would be a chaotic, unfocused mess.

That is what jitter does to sound. It collapses the soundstage, blurs the leading edge of notes, and creates a sense of unease. A great DAC must therefore also be a master timekeeper, possessing an ultra-high-precision clock to ensure every single one of those thousands of samples per second is delivered with unwavering rhythmic integrity. This fanatical focus on timing is as critical as the filter itself.

Sculpting Reality Without Breaking It

Once you have a signal that is fundamentally truthful—free from ringing and rhythmically stable—you can then begin to shape it. The same FPGA that provides the power for the advanced filter can also be used for Digital Signal Processing (DSP), such as equalization (EQ).

The challenge with traditional DSP is that mathematical operations on a 16-bit or 24-bit audio signal can introduce rounding errors, subtly degrading the information. The Mojo 2, however, utilizes a 104-bit processing core. This provides such an enormous amount of computational headroom that it can adjust the tonal balance of the music with no measurable loss of the original data. It’s like editing a master photograph in an infinitely high resolution; the adjustments are perfect, with no digital artifacts.

This power enables features like Crossfeed, which gently blends a tiny, carefully filtered amount of the left and right channels. It’s a clever use of psychoacoustics to mimic the way we hear sound in a real room, where our left ear also hears a bit of what’s happening on the right. It makes headphone listening less fatiguing and more like listening to speakers, demonstrating how technology can be used not just for accuracy, but for a more natural human experience.

The Pursuit of Authenticity

Ultimately, the complex engineering inside a device like this isn’t about winning a numbers game. It’s not about the taps, the bits, or the megahertz. It’s about a singular goal: to remove the technical barriers that stand between an artist’s microphone and your ears. It is a relentless, fanatical pursuit of authenticity.

The lie of digital audio isn’t that it’s inherently flawed, but that we have accepted a compromised version of it for the sake of convenience. The truth is there, buried in the data. To hear it requires a tool that doesn’t just play the notes, but reconstructs the very fabric of the soundwave with an almost philosophical obsession with accuracy. The goal is to make the technology so profoundly capable that it becomes completely invisible, leaving behind nothing but the music, in its most honest and unvarnished form. That is the real audio truth.