[sdiy] Nifty Slider/Fader alert

[The Peasant]

Quoting Richard Wentk <richard at skydancer.com>:

> 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. 

In some respects maybe. With decent hardware, cassettes can actually sound 
fairly good, and they certainly don't give you the un-natural digital 
distortion of an MP3. In fact, I still prefer them to MP3s.

> And while vinyl 
> has some advantages over CD in theory, *real* vinyl always seemed to turn 
> into a crackle and wow-fest.
 
Vinyl has some advantages over CD in practice as well, it's not just theory. 
And if you take good care of your vinyl, it is possible to keep clicks and pops 
to a minimum. As far as wow goes, maybe you should try a better quality 
turntable?

There is a fundamental difference between digital distortion and analogue 
distortion in audio. Vinyl surface noise is easier for the ear-brain mechanism 
to ignore, as it is a separate artifact to the music. The music still sounds 
realistic, you just ignore the noise. But digital distortion artifacts affect 
the musical signal directly, they become a part of the sound of the instruments 
themselves, and the ear-brain mechanism cannot ignore this. It just doesn't 
sound "right" or natural.

My favorite analogy for this is driving a car with a dirty windshield. The dirt 
is like analogue noise, you eye-brain mechanism can easily ignore it, and the 
world outside is perceived as normal. But if the dirt is actually coating 
everything outside, like digital distortion does, your eye-brian mechanism is 
not fooled, and you perceive that something is wrong with the world.
 
> > > 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.

That's for sure, their have always been hucksters out there. Computers are even 
worse for this.

> 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?

Well, it's the industry standard, for better or worse, so they really have 
little choice in the matter. And why should they care about improving it, they 
are just doing their jobs and getting paid, everybody seems happy, consumers 
don't seem to care, so why rock the boat? There were some prominent people in 
the industry that did speak out against it, but they have been ignored.
 
> The biggest difference between analogue and digital is that digital offers 
> endless scope for improvement, 

This is certainly true. When an analogue signal is digitised, endless amounts 
of information are discarded, especially at today's sampling rates. Reducing 
this loss of information would provide for 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.
 
Certainly digital has a lot of unrealised potential, and it is destined to go 
much further than analogue ever will. But it still has a loooong way to go!

Take care,
Doug
______________________
The Electronic Peasant

www.electronicpeasant.com