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SanDisk, Music Publishers Push DRM-free SlotMusic Format
Strudelkugel writes "The LA Times and others are reporting the music industry is working with SanDisk to try unrestricted music files on microSD memory cards to improve sales of physical media: 'In addition to music, the slotMusic cards will come pre-loaded with other things, such as liner notes, album-cover artwork and sometimes video.' The important part: 'The music on slotMusic comes without copyright protection, so it can be used on almost all computers, mobile phones and music players — but it won't play on an iPod, which doesn't have a micro-SD memory slot. It has one gigabyte of memory, and the music tracks are played back at high quality.' Could it be the labels have finally recognized that providing features and convenience to customers is preferable to suing them?" Most computers also don't have microSD slots; according to EMI's press release, there will be a "tiny USB sleeve" packaged with each card, and the "high quality" format means up to 320kbps MP3. From the given description, it seems like it would be no harder to transfer the tracks to an iPod (via a computer) than to most other players.
Stereo, for example, was invented to create more space for sounds in a recording.
No, it wasn't. Stereo is used to recreate the spatial component of music: when you record a number of instruments sitting at different positions in the studio, you should be able to hear where those instruments are. That has nothing to do with 'too many waveforms ...cramped together on the same output'.
In fact, in a stereo recording, most of the information will be played back by both speakers.
It is possible to make a recording where the left and right channels have nothing in common, but you'll find that those sound very unnatural, so these recordings are (thankfully) rare. It's like having half the musicians on the far left of the stage, and the other half on the far right, with nobody in the center.
you need different ranges assigned to different speakers that can give out that frequencies. but, there has to be more of the same speakers assigned to a particular frequency range - lets say, you got a certain size of tweeter. if there are 4 of this, and you divide a small incremental range of high frequency sound to four of these in small increments, you'll have, say, seperated two sopranos' (each soprano will have differences in their frequencies, even if minute and hardly identifiable by human ear) voices to two tweeters of the SAME kind, but while playing these two sopranos' voices, each of their voices will come from the different tweeters. this will increase the distinctiveness of each sound. here, the quality of the tweeters matter VERY much.
Nonsense. No audio system works like that.
1. you can't separate two voices or two instruments like this, because each voice produces a range of frequencies that mostly overlaps. They'll sound different because their harmonic spectrum (the relative volume of each harmonic) differs a bit, but there is no filter that can separate them.
2. A loudspeaker box usually contains a few drivers of different sizes, because the driver size needs to be matched more or less to the frequency. A 12" bass driver is too heavy to produce 10 kHz, conversely a 1" tweeter can't move enough air to produce convincing bass. The challenge is to use no more drivers than necessary, because dividing the frequency spectrum like this introduces all kinds of problems. The holy grail of loudspeaker design is the point source: a single point that can produce the entire spectrum.
The only reason loudspeaker arrays are used, is volume. Multiple parallel drivers can produce more volume than a single driver.
There are some interesting side effects to arrays. The dispersion pattern changes a bit, which can be beneficial if done right. But 'a sound stage that encompasses you'? No. That's due to the surfeit of power which sets up reverberations in the hall. You get the same effect cranking up your non-array home stereo.