Analogies with photography seem unfortunately to be misleading when it comes to the specific things that we are talking about here. To see why that is, we would need to talk about how the statistical distribution of particle size and shape is controlled during film manufacture--it would get very specific, which would turn people off. Plus I don't actually know anything about film manufacture, so let me pay respect to the very wonderful field of photography by not making analogies with it.
But that's just the thing: Analogies make people comfortable drawing conclusions about "X" by applying what they know (or imagine to be true) about "Y," without ever having looked at how "X" actually works. Thus analogies can persuade people that they "understand" things which may not be factual! This is why demagogues lurve them so much. When you pursue an analogy, how do you know when you've exceeded the limits of its validity? You don't--unless you methodically test your beliefs against the real thing. And that takes time and effort, which are the very things people try to avoid. Instead you end up comparing one concept that you have to another concept that you have, and saying, "Yeah, that feels right."
That was the whole problem with medieval thinking, and why science was such a big breakthrough for our species. That's also a big problem with so many speculative discussions on the Internet--because all discussions about things that you're not actually doing are free from the constraint of reality. It is perfectly feasible on an Internet forum to discuss the theoretical basis of digital recording and to make it as clear as day in all essentials. Unfortunately it seems equally possible for people to make interesting, intelligent guesses which are plausible, sincere, self-consistent and very persuasive--but which lack just that one tiny element of being what happens in reality. And people literally don't know which is which. The true and the false assertions weigh the same, they smell the same, so people judge based on whatever they feel like believing.
Where digital audio is concerned, that pretty much already happened a long time ago for some people. I was an analog engineer for years while digital was still in the laboratory stages. Some of the earliest digital recording systems didn't use dither, and consequently had severe defects in their performance at low signal levels. The lower you went in level, the higher went the distortion because of fewer and fewer bits being used. It got uglier and uglier as you descended, and at the very bottom there was an absolute chasm--reverberation tails simply disappeared. As sounds went bye-bye over the cliff, you could hear this odd punctuated noise that was kind of like cheesecloth gently ripping and then fading out. This was usually called "granular noise" (although it's technically a form of distortion), and most people could identify it reliably after one hearing, if it was pointed out to them.
As a result of complaints over this problem (and due in large part to the work of two AES stalwarts, Stan Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy), within two to three years most audio manufacturers saw the light and started using dither appropriately. This subtracted a couple of dB from the spec sheet signal to noise ratio of the recording system, but it cured once and for all (notice that I didn't say "covered up" or "concealed"--it fundamentally cured) those problems with "digital deafness," granular noise and the ratty sound in the lower 30 (I would say 40) dB of the dynamic range. It became very clear that they had never been an inherent part of digital audio, but were an artifact of bad design in particular systems.
And yet you see people today, a quarter century later, arguing as if all that had never happened. They not only didn't learn anything--in many cases I would say that they consciously chose not to let the information in, for whatever reason. And while it's one thing to think whatever you want to think about whatever you want to think it about--that's just being human and ornery, and it can keep you alive--it's another thing to spread ignorance and to devise more and more clever ways of covering up the fact that it is ignorance.
I want to be persuasive, not combative, but sometimes I feel like telling people to shut up and do their homework before spreading further misinformation. On the other hand, at least misinformation in the audio field only bruises some bits and some ears, rather than, say, breaking up a marriage where a child is involved (which some friends of ours are going through right now) or starting a whole war on false pretenses (which my country did and is still doing). So that helps me to stay calm about the audio issues, though I have to say I'm pretty upset about the other stuff.
--best regards
