“Mom!” he shouted downstairs. “Do not run the garbage disposal! It introduces mains hum into the electrical circuit and will alias with my sampling rate!”

Years later, in Pasadena, when Leonard asked why Sheldon sometimes winced at streaming video, Sheldon would simply say, “Season 3, Episode 9. You had to be there. Lossless.”

In the world of the show, Sheldon had been secretly recording episodes of a fictional 1980s sci-fi series called Cosmic Frontier — but Season 3, Episode 9 was special. It contained a 17-second monologue by the villain, Dr. Phobos, delivered in a whisper. The network had accidentally broadcast it in lossless analog stereo — a rare, un-companded, high-bandwidth audio signal hidden in the vertical blanking interval of the TV broadcast.