[sdiy] Nifty Slider/Fader alert

[Richard Wentk]

At 17:01 02/06/2004 -0400, R. D. Davis wrote:
>Quothe The Peasant, from writings of Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 11:26:21AM -0600:
> > Heh, we tried this back in the beginning, around 1980. Nobody seemed
> > to care, instead they eagerly embraced the "perfect sound forever"
> > mantra, not realising that they were really getting "mediocre sound
> > forever". And then came MP3s, even worse, yuck, blech!!! It's a real
>
>Which just goes to prove that P.T. Barnum was right about what's born
>every minute.

Well, MP3s are considerably better than compact cassette. And while vinyl 
has some advantages over CD in theory, *real* vinyl always seemed to turn 
into a crackle and wow-fest.

2" tape still sounds great, but how many people can afford that kind of gear?

> > shame that most people don't really *listen* to music, the average
> > person equates the sound of clipping to "loud".  And the newer
> > generations are brought up to believe that this crap is quality,
>
>But it is quality, namely poor quality!  When I look at specifications
>for some consumer audio equipment and see "subwoofers" with a -3dB
>point of 50Hz, I'm caught beween laughing hysterically and feeling a
>sense of outrage over such ridiculous marketing practices.

That's true, but ridiculous marketing is hardly new, especially in audio. I 
don't know if anyone has looked at hifi specs from - say - 30 years ago, 
but they make for entertaining reading.

I remember one popular sub-woofer from back then that was designed to 
double as a very fine coffee table. ;-)

>I know what you mean, and to think that some people have the audadicy
>to call that noise rock and roll; why don't they call it what it truly
>is, "mush and rattle"?  Too bad that rock and roll appears to have
>died, and few appear to have noticed.

Rock and roll died in the 50s.

>No telling what symphonies
>sound like these days, haven't been to a live performance for a while;

You might want to try this then. Classical music is a bit of a dying art, 
but some performers are still very very good indeed.

> > Oh well, digital *is* getting better, maybe someday it
> > will actually start to sound like real music.
>
>Yes, but it will undoubtedly make equipment modifications and repairs
>more difficult and in some cases impossible.

If your main interest is tinkering with gear rather than listening to 
music, I can see this might appear to be a disadvantage. ;-)

Meanwhile the people who work with audio for a living seem quite happy with 
digital, especially 24-bit high sample rate systems.

Do you think there might be a reason for that?

The biggest difference between analogue and digital is that digital offers 
endless scope for improvement, especially as DSP power increases, while 
analogue is now a closed technology where pretty much everything that 
anyone could possibly want to do to audio has been done. There comes a 
point, especially in synthesis, where the component density and cost 
required to do something complicated makes digital a clear winner.

You can of course keep endlessly recycling vco->vcf->vca as a synthesis 
system, but that really seems more than a little conservative when that's a 
small footnote to what you can do with digital techniques.

Richard