[sdiy] Truly white noise

[Ian Fritz]

At 10:15 PM 6/24/2004, Peter Grenader wrote:
>No two bits:
>
>Agreed. My opinion is that one can spend days/years/eons making the flatest
>of flat white noise and in the the end - would it amount to a hill of beans?
>If it wasn't flat would it be less  musical than however musical white noise
>could possibly be considered to be in the first place?  Would it  it color a
>source of randomness to the point of  un-usability?  My gut feeling:
>hardly.

The biggest problem I have had with analog white noise sources is that they 
often have too much popcorn noise or 1/f noise.  To me this sounds 
terrible.  A very carefully chosen transistor can give a nice smooth white 
sound, but I only found one out of 50 2N3906s to be acceptable.

>In my opinion, flat white noise is not the synth designer's holy grail.
>Now, making a lowpass gate that doesn't leak - now THAT's a different story!

Hmmm ...  what exactly is the problem here?  Whenever I need a complete 
turnoff of something I just put in a hard clamp that kicks in below some 
(low) threshold.

   Ian