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Vinyl trend causes discord

GTM said:
What I find interesting is that if you're walking down the street and hear someone playing the piano, you instantly know it's a real instrument rather than a recording even through a partially open window. Same goes for hearing a band when passing a pub for example. These are situations where clearly the fidelity of the sound you're actually hearing is poor but it's still immediately obvious that it's live rather than recorded.
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Indeed, you can always tell.
 
Werner said:
Yes. Most recorded music has had some compression (or at least gain riding), and nearly all recorded music is never replayed at exactly the original level.

The operation of the auditory system is very level-dependent, so this establishes a difference between live signals and recorded signals that can be expected to give significant differences in perception.


An interesting experiment would be to fly to Dublin, put a decent band in a pub, with a two-channel PA. Open the pub window and listen from across the street.

Then insert a unity-gain ADC/DAC chain the in the PA and listen again.
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The PA may already have at least one AD/DA conversion already.
 
F1eng said:
Nowadays quite a few live bands are doing this anyway in their mixers. I am a very amateur user of my Metric Halo ADC/DAC for recording but joined their discussion forum.
I have been surprised how many of these devices are used for mixing and adding "character", such as transformer, valve, etc sounds for live concerts rather than just for recording.
It is extremely unlikely that anybody has been to a non-amateur amplified concert in the last decade or more where there hasn't been digital mixing and character involved.
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The active crossover networks are almost all digital now too. Many speakers won't function properly without it.
 
Greg said:
Thanks. Any personal preference?
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I use Sequoia and Reaper.

Reaper is free to demo and cheap to own. The install files are tiny, and the program is incredible. Sequoia is very expensive. its baby sibling, samplitude offers 90 percent of the capabilities(no 4 point cross fade editor).

www.cockos.com/reaper

audition is used primarily by radio stations, i find it a bit mickey mouse GUI-wise(and capabilities)
 
adamdea said:
This might be true but it would still not be helpful. I cannot imagine how you would set about analysing a real time-variant signal using this form of analysis. You would have a hell of a job identifying an equation representing any sine wave (leaving aside the question of whether the equation would theorecticaly exist). It would be an extremely inelegant, time consuming and pointless way of doing things.

It would also not be useful because you would find that it was impossible to express the limits of human frequency in terms of a square wave. As a matter of fact real world waves do behave in a sinusoidal fashion and a truly square wave sound is impossible.

By contrast all dacs with a reconstruction filter illustrate by their ioperation that a square wave can be analysed into sine waves- band limit the square wave "sample and hold" output and the true signal appears
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The maths of this is a convenience, it is not necessarily inherent in nature. We may find sine waves easier to calculate with, but real waves in the real world don't care much for that. A harp string may produce something quite like a sine wave, but many sound waves have quite irregular shape and are not much like sine waves at all. It makes no more sense to regard them all as being composites of sine series than it does to regard them as being composites of a series of sawtooth or square waves, regardless of how impossible those individual waves may be. Don't confuse the impossibility of square waves with the impossibility of a wave built up from a series of square waves. The use of sine waves is a calculation convenience. When you say "as a matter of fact real world waves do behave in a sinusoidal fashion and a truly square wave sound is impossible", you are attributing too much veracity to the cookie-cutter that is maths. "Real world waves" are chaotic, modal, unpredictable and unique. Something close to a square wave is an interesting test for transparency of a sampled medium. Apparently we aren't supposed to be able to hear any difference between 44.1k/16 and 48k/24 sampling. Bearing in mind the complex nature of timbre, it's interesting to try to verify that something near a square wave sounds the same with each medium.
 
sonddek said:
The maths of this is a convenience, it is not necessarily inherent in nature. We may find sine waves easier to calculate with, but real waves in the real world don't care much for that.
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They may not care, but then they don't need to care. The Fourier transform is correct, complete, lossless, ... whatever you want, while using sines as orthogonal base functions.

In other words: there is no need for anything else.

I'm not even sure you can build a set of orthogonal functions based on what you very generalisingly call square waves.

But if you want to listen to squares, go ahead. Just take some care, mistakes in the experiment's setup are very easy to make.
 
Werner is correct, all waveforms can be described as a combination of sine waves (including square waves which are a simple series of odd harmonics reducing in amplitude) The Fourier transform is adequate in every way, using anything other than sine waves increases, rather than decreases, complexity so is unnecessary.
 
Werner said:
But at least Audition is mathematically healthy.
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It is very good, no doubt about it. Id be fine using it or Sequoia, Pyramix, Sadie, or Samplitude, or Reaper.

Can't stand Pro Tools, but thats another thread. :)

these things mostly boil down to preference/learning curve, once certain requirements are met.

I use Sequoia for classical work and Reaper for all my rock based recordings because of workflow.
 
"a bot here/cyborg?" ?

Make that 3. Shame to fall to a natural language error after such a good run.
 
I'm not sure it is correct to describe someone as failing a turing test as it is the machine not the human which is bring tested.

In any event I doubt that turing would regard it as an achievement for a machine to mimic the effect of a human being talking nonsense.
 
adamdea said:
I'm not sure it is correct to describe someone as failing a turing test as it is the machine not the human which is bring tested.

In any event I doubt that turing would regard it as an achievement for a machine to mimic the effect of a human being talking nonsense.
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Oh Jesus. Don't make me spell it out ;-)
 
avole said:
Hmm - would Alan Turing have invoked a deity?
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He might not have agreed with you that Jesus is the deity. And I'm not Alan Turing. He probably wouldn't have approved of the implicit logical errors in your comment though. He hated shoddy logic ;-)
 
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