understanding some terms and theory

[John Tuffen]

On the subject of wavetable size....

The larger the better, the more samples in a wavetable, the less
'grainy' the resultant sound. I suspect that the reason for the
very-very-small wavetables in the old PPG (etc.) stuff was purely
financial. These days, memory is cheap - so wavetables tend to
be larger. In my experience of software synthesis (both with CSound
and a system under development) only control-rate wavetables are
8k or less. Audio wavetables are usually at least 64k.

Simply... if you play a 64-byte wavetable to generate a 1Hz signal,
then each step lasts for 1/64 of a second - zipper noise anyone??!
On the other hand, each step of an 8k wavetable lasts 1/8192 of
a second.

Hey ho.. I'm writing too much :)


john..