The port made this point while building a checker for the channel-map trap, and
it refutes a sentence in my own write-up.
In the known-bad control all six channels report a peak of -18.063656 dB,
identical to six decimals, while the file contains three duplicate pairs. Equal
tone amplitudes make the peak table uniform however the channels are permuted or
duplicated; on real content the peaks simply differ from one another, which looks
equally healthy. The table is uninformative either way.
So "the WAV has plausible per-channel levels" was not weak evidence that a
capture was sound, it was none, and this page implied otherwise. The per-channel
peak table is the natural thing to eyeball after a capture and it cannot see this
failure at all. What detects it is hashing each channel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QsEPXWVaEpyfudtR6re1Pd
cfcc6d90a2