My accompaniment to work today was some restorations of recordings done between 1916 and 1926. Similar bandwidth to a regular phone call.
Has anyone noticed, now that enough phones and networks have HD calling that you get thrown when suddenly you have full bandwidth available? It shouldn't do as I was testing it 20 years ago, its just taken forever to take off!
Has anyone noticed, now that enough phones and networks have HD calling that you get thrown when suddenly you have full bandwidth available? It shouldn't do as I was testing it 20 years ago, its just taken forever to take off!
On short, I agree with the physics, but I don't agree that we fully understand how the brain interprets them when presented to it as psychosensorial stimuli.
I can tell you how we always seem to progress 2 step forwards 1 back. After we finally got nice voice quality with FM amateur radio, we now invented digital voice modes where everyone on the repeater sound like they're drunks with rocks in their mouth. Yay progress!!! 🙄
P.S. opamp content: after we were finally able to make some nice discrete transistors, we proceeded to making opamps with lateral pnp's.
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It doesn't matter, I don't pretend to understand why a guitarist swears by one brand of strings over another. These issues IMO were never on the table.
I made it clear in the preface to my second article on microphone pre-amps in LA after taking in some off line comments. The problem of amplifying, buffering and conditioning the electrical signal is an instrumentation problem which has two degrees of freedom and known technology to verify the performance. This has nothing to do with artistic choices at all.
EDIT - You could use a little history of semiconductor process development. It's not like Crapper's water closet virtually unchanged for decades.
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Oh well. The issue WAS on the table. The allegation was that until we don't understand / take into account the *effects* of the physics, we might not be able to fully use them to our advantage. Blindly "linearizing" whatever we can - or looking at it as an "instrumentation problem" - is what we did for the past decade or two and we haven't made much progress re listening enjoyment.
I guess we've been on very different channels. There is nothing even remotely like linearizing or instrumentation in what a luthier does. When a guitarist like John Fahey chose to pick up a Bacon & Day guitar to record one of his masterpieces all we can do is try to capture the event, two different worlds. If manipulation and effects to enhance listening enjoyment are what you want go for it.
And that actually is the problem with monolithic opamps!
If you have the perfect string quartet, playing in the worlds best hall, recorded with those unobtainable perfect microphones being reproduced later through a completely distortionless signal chain into perfect loudspeakers there is still at least one issue left!
From the quartet to the microphones there will be some atmospheric absorption of the acoustic energy. This means some of the high frequencies are diminished. Now when you reproduce this through the playback system there is additional air losses as the signal travels the additional distance to your ears.
So if you do as Jan did and record from seats that may actually be too close for the best musical balance, it may produce a recording that when played back and listened to with some more distance and air loss has a better tonal balance. (But perhaps does not blend the instruments as well.)
Or if you add a miniscule amount of harmonic distortion to the reproduction chain you may actually get a better balanced tonal reproduction.
Many years ago IEEE Spectrum reported on an electronic organ chip. A letter to the editor mentioned the issue of pitch stability. The editors' response was it was perfectly stable being derived from a crystal oscillator. They did not understand a true pipe organ does not behave that way.
So if some folks prefer a bit of harmonic distortion not only is that fine by me. I have shown some folks how to get a tube sound by using inverse parallel diodes in an opamp feedback loop and mixing some of the resulting distortion back into the main signal chain.
I also have a trick for reproducing low frequencies in an arena, that involves equivalent cheating.
Of course none of these techniques work if there is greater masking in the chain.
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I don't think there's any musician who would pick a sine wave generator though.
Btw, these folks "musicians" seem to actually not follow any hard rules. My father taught me "son, if you want the most precise Chopin possible, go to the concert of an Asian male pianist; if you want the best rubato, look for European female pianists; if you want neither, play it yourself". Oh yeah good old man knew how to encourage someone... But now back to topic. I like it the second way. Imprecise/innacurate but in an expert way. What gives?
P.S. I eventually figured out that I would make a lousy musician so I chose EE instead. 😀
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1N34's? one guys secret sauce. Another one was a 1N34 in parallel with a 1N914.
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Not allowed anymore, note perfect performance is the rule now. A concert master like Szigeti would not happen anymore, even Jimi Hendrix had an occasional touch of the ham-fist.
Sort of. Editing capabilities in digital audio workstations has done a lot make perfection the standard people have become used to hearing. However, some aspects of note perfect performance cannot be precisely notated in written sheet music. Exact timing is a big one. Some sheet music may have a word like "swing" or "funk" or something written above the staff. That is to inform the performer not to play the note timing exactly as written. The player is presumed to be familiar with various "feels" and play the piece accordingly.
For classical music, we actually don't know exactly how they used to play it. We do know, for example, there is a tradition in Vienna, Austria to play waltz music (in 3/4 time) with the note on the 2nd extended in duration, and the first and third beats shortened in duration to make up the difference.
We also know that if music is played too note perfect as written, as occurs with very literal MIDI playback of written scores, it often tends to sound way too mechanical and unenjoyable.
It seems like the note perfect music we like is still something like Viennese waltz's, where there is some lilt, groove, or swing to the performance that may be executed with precision, but not exactly as written in conventional notation.
1n34 does something like a soft tube clipping. Never heard of paralleling those with a silicon diode, interesting.
Well, Jimi was about being rebellious. Chopin was about love and longing. Those demanding mechanically perfect pitch and duration didn't understand either.
Robin Trower is a talented guy but his more carefully crafted covers just have something missing for me.
A good result is not when mixing clipped signals to clean ones, but when a crest factor is being decreased by a soft clipping limiter. The record becomes "louder", less chance to damage it by dirty clipping amps.
No magic here. I've experimented with it a lot, and found that nobody likes added distortions, no matter what claims, rather presence of one distortions (less audible) versus presence of other distortions (nasty sounding) is being preferred by people. However, some "audiophiles" adhere to a "Cargo Cult" and believe that "a signature" is what is needed by "Real Audiophiles".
No magic here. I've experimented with it a lot, and found that nobody likes added distortions, no matter what claims, rather presence of one distortions (less audible) versus presence of other distortions (nasty sounding) is being preferred by people. However, some "audiophiles" adhere to a "Cargo Cult" and believe that "a signature" is what is needed by "Real Audiophiles".
If you want the best tube amp simulator, here it is:
boss hm 2 heavy metal pedal schematic Download page :: Schematics Unlimited
However, it does not simulate an absence of nasty distortions, but "A Signature" instead. You can play with it, how much of a "signature" you can tolerate when listening to a record. ;-)
boss hm 2 heavy metal pedal schematic Download page :: Schematics Unlimited
However, it does not simulate an absence of nasty distortions, but "A Signature" instead. You can play with it, how much of a "signature" you can tolerate when listening to a record. ;-)
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