Here's a situation I experienced personally: I habitually spamcop spammers (two cancelled accounts just this morning due to my complaints in my symbolic capacity as postmaster@airwindows.com:) )
I used to support this company, Pixels, that makes a modelling/rendering package that's pretty high end in its way, Pixels 3D. I tried a demo, never could afford the actual product but got a phone call from them once and was so favorably disposed that I kept talking and ended up on the line with one of the programmers talking about different programming languages that could be used in shaders! I thought they were really cool.
I began to get different mail- before, I'd very occasionally got a very informal sort of note that didn't come off like spam at all, and I didn't mind that. Some new person came in and cranked up the email volume more and more, and the emails got harder and harder sell, until they were indistinguishable from full-on spam- nobody was listening, they weren't talking to _me_ anymore, I was just a target. It was set up as if it was a list, with instructions for unsubscribing. I don't trust 'remove' procedures from most spammers, but with my history interacting with Pixels I thought I could trust their remove procedures...
Nothing happened. The unsubscribe procedure was either broken, or being intentionally ignored. I couldn't tell which. This, not the spammish tone of the frequent emails, was what finally tipped me over the edge, and I began a full-on Spamcop.net assault against the company I'd once quite liked, bitterly. In fact I called their office and left a message stating exactly why I wished to never hear from them again and had changed from an interested potential customer to the opposite. The person they'd spoken to on the phone had turned into an enemy through _their_ actions- the actions of one marketroid whom they might not have even been keeping an eye on.
That worked- I don't know if I actually got their connectivity and website interrupted, or if someone figured out they were paying too high a price, but I don't hear from them anymore.
No company needs to make this horrible mistake. Talk about badwill.
It would be just as fair to call it 'being counted'. I intend to Be Counted voting for Nader- all other politicians in the US will be able to consult that number and know damn well what my agenda is and what will or won't get my vote. This is NOT GAME THEORY! It is power politics. It's not about winning one particular game, it is about defining the issues and concerns that politicians consider when taking action.
I heartily encourage libertarians to get out a huge vote for Harry Browne, even though I personally think he and they are lunatics: that doesn't matter, the point is that _whoever_ wins, even if it's Nader, I would want that President to remain firmly aware that there is a large power bloc stubbornly opposed to bigger government. This needs to be VISIBLE! Those people _must_ be represented, and voting for Bush is not going to do that.
By the same token, I'm damned if I'm going to vote for Gore because Gore has been... not adequate at living up to committments that he's made (such as the toxic waste burning facility in New Jersey), and because only Nader allows me to BE COUNTED as part of a large power bloc that is obviously, blatantly, stubbornly opposed to corporatism. Voting for Gore will accomplish nothing in this: voting for Nader will make it very obvious what my concerns and the basis of my vote are. It is not relevant whether the person wins- you think the President is God? The important thing is to establish the factions, to BE COUNTED in such a way that other politicians can tell what you really care about.
Politics is a damned busy job- polling, canvassing, trying to figure out what sort of actions will get people to support you and what sort of actions will produce a deadly backlash and knock you out entirely. The politicians are not going to concern themselves with the party faithful once the votes are counted- the sheep will be good and stay in line. The politicians will be grovelling over the numbers for all the third parties- "oh look, X% voted 'no big government', if I violate that they could produce a backlash and eat away at my constituency! Oh look, Y% voted 'anticorporate', they will go and tell my voters about the 7 billion in 'soft money' I got from Microsoft to swing that House vote! Dear oh dear, that will never do- and people keep finding out about these things- perhaps I'd better not do it this time if I want to get re-elected..."
Venal, but what do you expect from politicians? THIS IS NOT GAME THEORY. It is public relations. The politician who thinks it _is_ game theory gets unseated quite promptly because you have to appease the people, pay attention to the zealots because the zealots are the ones paying attention to what YOU DO. The Libertarians are the ones who can quote off the amount of government spending you authorised. The Greens (certainly the Nader supporters) are the ones who can quote off the extent of corporate abuses in current society, and make a good case for why this is a doomed, self-destructive path to follow, to end in another Great Depression. THESE ARE THE ONES THAT PAY ATTENTION. That write editorials. That get people to the polls, that go door to door, that talk politics with their friends. These are the ones that will kill your political career if you don't keep an eye on them and keep your nose clean.
CmdrTaco, I don't know if you are concerned with corporatism (Nader) or if you are perhaps vehemently opposed to big government (Browne) or whatever. I only know that if you refuse to pick a party to support based on what your genuine concerns are, you're being ignored- and I don't think you need to be ignored. Pick somebody who isn't Bush or Gore, unless you're oh-so-deeply-impressed with their wisdom and sincerity (ROFL! 'scuse me) that they truly are the ones that represent you.
Democracy doesn't work. It was tried throughout history, most notably in Greece, and it doesn't work- it's 'bread and circuses' and the dominant faction stomps all over everyone else, making it not much different from fascism. Read Federalist #10- this is hardly news.
America is not a democracy- it is a republic. THAT is why I'm voting for Nader.
I happen to be so extremely concerned with corporatism issues that choosing Nader is completely obvious- whatever his other concerns, it's plain that he entirely shares my distrust and alarm with what corporations are doing. That is reason enough to vote for him a thousand times over, since the Dems and Reps are both entirely bought, and Harry Browne is wildly in favor of turning over _all_ power to corporations and dropping any and all government counterbalances (something I find absolutely shocking. Ever heard of fiduciary duty, Harry? Why is it these huge powerful entities do not fall under your definition of 'government' themselves? They control what we do, utterly- more than the regular government.)
But that's as may be- my point is that the USA is a republic by design. The electoral college is the way it is for a reason- a state can back a different candidate and not merely be submerged in a nationwide counting of the votes- at that point politics has to deal with the different guy. In addition, a high turnout (like 5-10%?) for a third party candidate _proves it's a republic- anyone in politics must contend with what that means, it is an open admission that there's a really big voting bloc that are so concerned with some issue or other that they will act on it and be identified as a strong faction of their own.
I think people _should_ vote for Harry Browne (God help us if he wins! Linux can kiss its ass goodbye in the face of 'Halloween Document 2K- Since No Law Exists') if the guy seriously echoes their prime concerns- "Make government smaller!" is a perfectly legitimate agenda. By the same token people _should_ vote for Nader if they are even half concerned about corporatism- that's probably the one area where he'd have a significant effect, as the President is not King and doesn't make all the rules himself. People need to not vote for Gore _or_ Bush unless they are really, seriously, intelligently voting _for_ those people: I personally don't see why anybody would do this but then I'm a Nader guy and if I thought Gore or Bush were any sort of sensible choice I'd _vote_ for them instead of noisily joining an anticorporate faction too large to ignore.
As a final note, I am stunned that Katz is not already beating the drum for Nader. Read your own articles, Jon, then read some Nader interviews. Don't you realise this guy is the spearhead for your own pet issue? It's astonishing that you wouldn't know this already. Read what he has to say. If you wanted action against corporate abuses you only have one choice (plus, at least in Vermont, the Progressive party on a local level) You don't _have_ any other choices and not voting is not a choice because it is a vote for 'either Gore or Bush will be fine', and that's not true from the progressive perspective.
Re:denials by SDMI preserves our rights to fair-us
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Yet More SDMI fallout
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I'm concerned that at some point these people will go after the current state of copyright- to force people into their watermarking/armtwisting schemes. Currently, I could produce CDs (just burned the first promo today) and give them away in malls if I wished, and write 'noncommercial copying OK' on every single one (in fact I've done just that, literally), and I still retain copyright. The fact that I'm permitting fair use copying- even if I permit sampling and collage art from it! does not render the work into the public domain so that any commercial entity can use it as they please- if _they_ don't get rights they are breaking the law, and this protects me from:
unauthorised covers by major label acts
use in films or TV or Muzak (tm) or as background to advertisements
redistribution for profit by K-Tel or some comparable label
This is very important. My nervousness is that at some point the argument will be made that if you expect copyright to protect you from these things happening against your will, you'd be using watermarks and prohibiting fair use and getting a Big Record Deal etc ad nauseam- and that the laws may be _changed_ using such arguments to punish anyone who is trying to uphold fair use and still expects copyright to protect against commercial exploitation. It's kind of like 'you can't have your cake and eat it too!' Except you can- under current law. At the moment it is _my_ decision whether I want to allow fair use, and I can do so without throwing away my rights to control commercial use, as I am the copyright holder. I would like to see this more broadly understood, because it would be a hell of a thing to lose this just because a lot of people are content to take the burden of 'breaking the law' onto themselves.
It's fine that many people are willing to disobey a legal climate that they feel is unjust- but that mustn't cover up the fact that as a content producer I have a _right_ to allow and encourage fair use. It does _not_ equate to 'I am putting everything I do into the public domain, go nuts'. Currently I can allow fair use and still have leverage to resist unauthorised commercial use. If the line blurs and that begins to slip it will be a very bad thing. How would you like it if you made music and then discovered one of your tracks on TV with singing munchkins selling Windows upgrades or something? There are some aspects of copyright that need to keep their teeth.
Pray tell how much _money_ this top 1% of earners makes. You talk like it is unthinkable that the top 1% of earners should earn ten times what all the other earners do, put together. Yet, this is far from unrealistic- particularly if your percentage breakdown is according to population, the top percent is going to be earning significantly more than 1/3 of the total income.
Simple: I started my domain before there was a choice (if I remember correctly) and I am scared to attempt to do ANYTHING apart from send them the relevant money- and hope to God they get that right! It's a very bad scene.
I don't believe for one second that the law, common sense, morals or _anything_ will prevent these people from savaging me if I try changing registrars- and I don't have the resources to fight them or even raise an issue.
It sucks sucks sucks sucks SUCKS. I'm awful glad some people can afford to attack NSI. I would consider it a big victory if they were destroyed and I had to pay a new fee to freshly register airwindows.com at another registrar. I can't afford to have them hold it for ransom, or swoop in and sell it in the middle of an attempted defection to another registrar. In the world of NSI I'm one of the guys being held up at gunpoint, who hasn't been shot yet. I am not joyous about the situation.
I respect the depth of your feeling and all, and I've enjoyed your books a great deal, but I feel you are making some assumptions that are just not justified. I don't see your 'diamond' argument at all- what I've been seeing over the last 10 years is the _obliteration_ of the middle class. Maybe our definitions are just different and you're looking at upper middle class- or maybe you're looking at your age group and I'm looking at mine (I'm 32- leading edge of Gen X/13th Gen). My generation is the one that endured unemployment and poverty levels directly comparable to the Great Depression during the 80s- the Boomers were the generation that did not notice a thing as all the government policy levers were pulled to ensure that they didn't feel it.
With regard to your valid and deep concerns over things like the Supreme Court- what on _earth_ gives you the idea that Gore will be trustworthy and do as you wish, or as he promises? I'll give an example- environmentalists (not my core issue, BTW) used to put a lot of stock in Gore. He practically campaigned on that- for instance, swearing up and down that a proposed toxic waste burning facility 150 yards from a _school_ in New Jersey would never open. After years of being Vice President, guess what? The facility opened. It runs. It has _missed_ several quality inspections and is still not being shut down, and the inhabitants of the town and the children attending the school are getting sick at rates far beyond the normal- and where's Gore? How is this different from if it'd been Bush all those years? How can you even think Gore can be trusted to appoint Supreme Court justices the way you expect him to?
I'm not voting Nader because I believe he will win. I think it would be fascinating and astonishing if he did, but he'd probably be killed anyhow. I am voting Nader (and, locally, a Progressive ticket) because there is NOBODY else that embodies my own concerns so well- primarily, corporatism. What I'm seeing here in Vermont (which in theory is well suited to cottage industry and small business!) is a complete freeze-out across the board- it's becoming unthinkable to run your own business. I see many people staying afloat by working 18 hours 6 days a week- I've known several go under even doing that, for instance the finest bookstore I've ever known that had to accept the terms of Barnes and Noble or they'd not have access to stock- and in other cases I'm working until 3 in the morning trying to help local businesses that have not gone under yet. Main Street is spotted with empty storefronts, more every month- but Wal-Mart offers extremely competitive pay! I don't accept this as a picture of my ideal country. I don't accept that my only role is as a consumer and corporate cog- and with all Nader's faults he's the only guy who plainly has Lots Of Issues with the corporations.
Beyond this, there is my decision (in a way, a deeper decision) to side with the Progressives. Much of their platform seems like hippie fantasizing to me but I'll accept that since there are a few 'radical' points in there that I feel are profoundly important- that actually coincide with your feelings on inheritance. The Progressives (at least here in Vermont) take issue with wealth being derived from position or power, and that is the issue that resonates most strongly with me. As I see it, wealth needs to correspond directly to WORK. Now, there are lots of IT geeks who work absurd, impossible hours- they should get their share of wealth. However, the bookseller working 18/6 and doing good work should also have his chance at that- and the flip side is that the boss of those IT geeks, or the vice president of Barnes and Noble should _not_ get many times that amount of wealth based on the amount of damage they can cause. I'm not saying these guys should be made _poor_, I'm saying that right now the disparity between worker 'wealth' in proportion to the work they do, and boss/corporate PHB/Rambus-patent-holder/stock-option-speculator 'wealth' in proportion to the work they do is absolutely ridiculous. Never mind that in many cases (such as Rambus) the controller of this 'wealth' is actually doing damage to society and blocking progress, adding insult to injury!
I don't see Gore giving a tinker's damn about this stuff. In fact, I expect him to further prop up the corporations, appoint SC judges that will back the corporations _for_ him so he doesn't get the PR hit, and in general do everything he can to obliterate the free market in the sense of 'people can enter it and do business at whatever level they operate on'. You cannot make me trust him. Both the major parties are worthless to me now- it's like asking which major record label is the 'good one'- they are indistinguishable. Either way your vote says simply 'More please'. I refuse to say that.
Frankly, I don't think it's necessarily such a bad thing if the country goes to hell under Bush because people didn't support Gore- it takes a lot of unreasonable behavior before the general public begins to get upset and agitated, and I'm not convinced that the system can be changed through the main, two-party, existing channels. If I _really_ disbelieved it, I wouldn't be voting: I'd be throwing bombs, and I would be doing it to corporations, not clueless government officials. However, I am not and don't plan to do any such thing- instead, I'll give the system a chance. I'll vote for Nader, unhesitatingly, and I will be counted by each party as 'somebody who went and voted not for us for specific reasons', and I will _keep_ voting for anyone reasonably acceptable who supports the issues I consider absolutely crucial, and will keep voting third party.
Before Nader and, on the local level, the Progs came along, I was not going to vote at all.
Cheers. If Nader can't win, I hope we _do_ get stuck with Bush, not because he's any good but simply because he's liable to turn up the heat until it's completely intolerable. Something's got to give, sooner or later. Bush is probably the one guy most capable of designating W2K the official U.S. operating system, for instance, and impeding anything else. It would seem about as significant as designating a state bird, to him. Be careful what you wish for.
They can sell my words for all I care if they find someone dumb enough to buy usenet posts:) they just can't claim they wrote 'em- or change them and claim I wrote them.
If I remember correctly they've flirted with doing the latter already- in that they are putting hotlinks in stuff as if I, in writing 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes', had added a link like 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes'.
Leaving aside the bit depth (I keep trying to explain that it's not about maximum contrast but the quantization inherent in _linear_ reduction of a continuous range to discrete increments)...
What the _hell_ do you think I have for mains, Yamaha NS-10s? The _only_ way to get remotely serious performance is either to spend loads of money or educate yourself extensively and rebuild/custom build _everything_.
There is a hard limit to the low frequency extension available from ported enclosures: that's why my speakers have variovents. There's another hard limit on how much acoustic power you can produce with a given cone size within the linear excursion limits of the voice coil (_not_ the suspension physical limit, but keeping the voice coil within the magnet gap). That's why my speakers run 12/10/8/6.5 drivers in a series/parallel configuration as if they were a guitar speaker cab- all the drivers contribute to the piston area for subsonic content. There's a softer limit to enclosure size- I don't feel like running an active EQ system like the very clever Bag End 'ELF' system, so that's why my cabs are four feet tall, over three feet deep and as much as 15 inches wide. They'd make damn good stage bass cabinets, though they're not really designed for those wattages. That fixes the lowest frequency at... let me put it this way. I own synthesizers. I can _put_ subsonic tones through my full system, and stuff will be falling over. There's a limit to how much acoustic pressure even that much cone area can produce, but it's not giving up at 20hz, that's for damn sure.
The other extreme? Composite drivers using piezo elements to handle the extreme highs. (no, not a whizzer cone with a clunky piezo disc glued onto the back and flopping around in a plastic housing). This type of element is easily capable of extreme frequency content- this is what they use to make ultrasonic devices, piezos. I have inverted aluminum domes on these which are so light and delicate you could damage one by blowing hard at it. To top all this off these are effectively HORN LOADED- not in an extreme fashion but the waveguide is definitely reminiscent of an exponential horn, and that means LOUD. The supersonic acoustic power these can produce is not subtle- it will give you a nasty headache very quickly if there's a lot of supersonic ringiness or grunge in the signal.
I don't know _where_ these people are coming from, but there seems to be an infinite supply. All I can say is- I hope you folks are my competition for sound engineering work, because the more fervently you insist that none of that high endy stuff even matters, the less use you will be at a task like mastering. This stuff is not hypothetical: there is practical application provided you work in the business. Ability to monitor a signal over an audio range substantially beyond 20-20K means better ability to control the sound balance and integrate the various instruments into a coherent whole, never mind that in certain areas like bass there are whole subcultures (car audio!) dedicated to showing off the ability to push this limit (by the same token, electrostatic speaker fans are declaring their interest in pushing the opposite limit).
Indeed I think about bandwidth and- S/N ratio is a rotten way to express this, let's call it _linearity_. However, the system _will_ happily go above 20K- and the linearity is considerably in excess of 16-bit quantization. And so is my digital source- I swear by Alesis 20-bit 48K ADAT. The highs could be better but the linearity is really quite good and I'm not dead certain a full 24 bits is necessary. However, the difference between 20 bit and 16 bit is major- and the difference between 44.1 and 48K is minor but every little bit helps. I was testing some new tweeter design changes on Frank Zappa's "One Size Fits All" album- the Kerry McNab-engineered Zappa albums push the high end _hard_ and the mikes turn a really large amount of the 40% supersonic content of cymbals into voltage. Playing this back with the new tweeter configuration really drove home how much we've lost: that album is very good at reproducing the natural supersonic balance of the sounds it contains, and a CD cannot contain even distorted versions of this acoustic content- the LP tends to distort it but the CD throws it away completely. So, again- 44.1K (really significantly below 22K) isn't enough. 16 bits aren't enough either.
Eh, there's lots of other companies doing that. Wadia was certainly not the only one. You just won't find the products at Radio Shack;) and I daresay you won't find them cheap even now- I just looked on eBay and the prices I was seeing were $200, $500 and $1500 in US dollars.
Here's an additional point on your side- cables have a quality known as capacitance (also inductance but let's focus on the capacitance). Using a bad cable with your high powered amplifiers and speakers could lead to a situation where the cable is interacting with the tweeters and producing a dip in the impedance in the high frequencies. The result is acutely unpleasant grating highs as the amplifier's presented with a nasty impedance dip, possibly in a range where it's at risk of oscillating.
Cables are _hugely_ important. It's not because of magic- it's because of capacitance, resistance, inductance and the way amplifiers interact with these qualities. You could easily have an amplifier and speaker combination where, with one set of cables, all was well, but with another set the amplifier would oscillate to feedback blowing up the amp! That is about as real as you could ask for. Normal cables are less prone to be _that_ bad, but there's still a great deal of difference in different cables. Again, it's not primarily the cable itself but the way it interacts with the transducer and especially the amplifier.
I think in order to understand this properly, you'd kind of have to have enough technical background to know that speakers' impedance drops sharply at the driver's resonance... without granting some facts like that, it's impossible to even begin to explain to otherwise smart people what's happening. 'But I put a voltage through and it was there on the other side of the wire!' is not evidence that a wire will perform under demanding dynamic conditions- or hooked up to a borderline-unstable amplifier. And competitive high end car audio is very much about borderline-unstable amplifiers due to the very low impedances:) interestingly, stadium sound reinforcement uses similar principles. You might have a stadium-sized PA with an amplifier that puts out one watt... and God knows how many amps, through a speaker network that is 0.00000000001 ohms. The rules change when you start to deal with jobs that big...
Regarding 'hardly any loss to whom'- it would be more accurate to ask, throwing away >20K is hardly any loss to _what_?
Human voice sibilance is maybe 6% over 20K.
A cymbal crash is as much as _40%_ over 20K.
Keys jingling is _60%_ over 20K.
I (big surprise;) ) agree with Paul here: I am surprised that people will claim that throwing away more than half the sound information from a sound will be hardly any loss! This is not some piddling little 1% frequency content we're talking about here- plenty of very common sounds both in real life and in music have as much over-20K content as under, and some are _mostly_ over 20K. That's scientifically proven, and an interesting study it was too- thanks to the slashdotter who posted it:)
Read some stereo review magazines- in particular, the sort that throw a lot of test equipment at the problem. They _routinely_ graph the frequency response of amplifiers from fractional Hz to well beyond a megahertz.
Among other random terms of abuse I spotted the interesting claim that no power amplifier ever passes higher than 20K as it would hurt the speakers and damage the output stage of the amplifier. Apart from directing attention to even hoary old warhorses of the audio mag trade like Stereo Review, I think I had better let this claim pass without further comment:)
There's a good analogy for the dynamic range of CDs. It is computer monitor displays. People who are content with 16 bits in their audio because it covers a range of silent to really loud should _also_ be content to always use 'thousands' of colors on their monitors- because that covers the same range of black to white as 'millions' does.
Of course, people will not be content with this, because 'thousands' produces subtle banding and a perceptible degradation of the picture in ways that are clearly understood. In the same way, 16 bit digital audio produces a thinning and drying of the sonic texture that is the audio equivalent of banding- for the same reason, which is linear dynamic encoding of an analog source that will virtually never be _exactly_ equal to the 16 bit truncation of its resolution.
20 or 24 bit is near as dammit: it's way harder to notice any adverse effects. The Sony format is particularly interesting as it has the potential, sometime in the future, of being handled without recourse to PCM encoding (though, distressingly, it seems that the current incarnations do make use of such a stage- hopefully a really impressive one like 128K cutoff and 32 bit or something equally flash). What that would mean is that there would be no specific bit depth it would be comparable to- saying '8 bit' or '16 bit' or '24 bit' w.r.t PCM is saying 'Here is the maximum signal displacement, from -Xv to Xv. I will now chop the area between into equal parts and quantize whatever the _real_ voltage is to the nearest level I can encode.' In this sense, PCM is never accurate at all- it's very unlikely that at a given moment, the voltage really exactly matches the encoding, because the encoding might be 1.0256 volts and the real voltage was 1.02562854647823862349823474634672348 volts.
Again, it's the same issue as monitor color trueness at 'thousands' of colors. The ironic thing is, with well recorded music the hottest peaks are _really_ hot: 99.9% of a piece of music might be less than half the available dynamic area used for encoding. The encoding is linear, so that is _wasting_ half the bits. A sort of Gaussian distribution might have been a better idea, but it's too late to worry about that now:)
Of course if you make music horrible enough sonically with brutal overcompression, most of it will take up the full dynamic range of the format. It's a pity that this sounds atrocious, as it's the only way to really make use of linear encoding:)
Actually, one of the neat things about CDs and digital sound in general is that it allows for totally-flat-to-0-hz low frequencies. This is actually a very big deal- stereo equipment tends to develop a sort of thick boomy quality around the low cutoff frequency (not just bass reflex speakers, even amplifiers show this effect a little bit). One of the primary achilles' heels of the LP playback format is that you're at the mercy of the tonearm resonances and cannot even attempt to track anything like fractional hz- if you do, the needle just skips;) it takes quite unusual design to build tonearms that will be compliant at fractional hz but not flabby wobbly things at say 20-30 hz.
It is _very_ nice that digital allows low frequencies down to 0 hz. I will never knock even CD sound quality for the ability to convey extremely low sounds- the only limitation is the analog stages that drive your stereo. I produce sonograms of my recordings sometimes, and they easily produce frequency information at 9 hz and lower (I refuse to use bass drum sounds that can't be made to have substantial subsonic content:) ). CD can easily encode _substantially_ below 20 hz. There's basically no limit. The format is flat to 0 hz.
In one sense you got me there: a wave at 14.7K with a 22K filter is exactly a sine wave. I'll retract anything I said about it not being one- I spoke too quick, I was mistaken.
I _will_ note that the wave is phase shifted compared to the original source- in fact when I talk about intermodulation distortion what's happening is that the wave gets phase shifted forward and back very rapidly.
I would _suggest_ that a wave which is phase shifted against other sounds is not the _same_ wave that is sampled. It can be _a_ sine wave but if it's not in the same phase as the source (compared to other music data) is it the same wave?
It's possible that given 4X oversampling Nyquist is as near to correct as necessary. Certainly if you're not concerned with phase but only the presence of frequency components 2X Nyquist is basically right. I draw the line at saying it is theoretically perfect- I'd say it could be a very good approximation. I don't understand why so many people arguing for Nyquist take on a positively religious tone, demanding the acceptance of articles of faith. 'Theoretically perfect' is a very strong statement, and the context (such as 'bandlimited, and ignoring phase and time information completely') needs to be clarified or people take it to mean 'therefore CDs are perfect reproducers of sound': which is not accepted by any competent sound engineer today, since again 'perfect' is a very strong term.
Note: the harmonic distortion content to the 918.75hz sine wave is not going to be continuous. It is going to be rapidly cyclical as it's the product of interaction with the sampling rate- each harmonic's strength will oscillate between zero and whatever the maximum is (a fraction of a percent?) depending on the phase of the tone relative to the sampling rate. This effect will be considerably more obvious at higher frequencies but will still be present at 918hz. The harmonic distortion is never a continuous amount, but is invariably a rapid cycling between zero and the maximum amount.
It's CD AUDIO. You don't get to pick the lowpass frequency. It has to be 22.05K.
I don't understand how you manage to turn the idea of a 14700 sine into a 918.75Hz tone, but so much the worse for you: the 14700 (ironically) does have the second harmonic obliterated by the 22.05K lowpass. When you start talking about 918 hz tones you shoot yourself in the foot- you don't _get_ a 919 hz filter in CD audio, and the modulations are going to still be there. They won't be as nasty as a stepped sampled wave but you've got quite a few harmonics that will remain after lowpass filtering at 22.05K (even the compromised realworld version). Some of the modulation you see _will_ survive this.
It's flatly incredible how many armchair audio theoreticians won't even go as far as you have, insightfully, gone, in seeing that the results of the sampling process are modulated. Phase differences do matter, but even if they did not, the degree of modulation of the sampled wave is mathematically provable unless you get to do a _specific_ lowpass filter on it. If you count obvious changes in phase, the amount of change is provable even when you do ideal lowpass filtering on it.
High fidelity audio _sells_ better. From Dark Side Of The Moon to Led Zeppelin 4, the audio that's been best balanced, most extended in frequency (note: doesn't mean just 'boosted frequency extremes' but genuine extension for a broader passband) and cleanest in the time domain (no ringy EQ crud) has _sold_ better than its competition.
Ever heard of a book called 'The Hidden Persuaders' by Vance Packard? (expose of the advertising industry) This book exposed how advertising people were able to persuade consumers to buy one thing rather than another. With music, the audio quality is the 'hidden persuader'.
Um- to be specific, it should approach perfect accuracy for all audio frequencies- and as it starts to pass a megahertz (I'm guessing as it starts to pass 500 kilohertz) you gradually go beyond 100% distortion, until you have thousands of percent distortion at a couple megahertz:)
It's a lossy format in a peculiar way- this particular method is wildly more accurate at low frequencies than high ones. The thing is, 'high' is relative >;) to this format, 100K is 'low'. The really low frequencies are almost arbitrarily accurate- and again, the ability to delineate high-energy transients is many orders of magnitude better than bandlimited formats. I must admit I am not terribly worried about 10,000% harmonic distortion... at two megahertz. I don't believe I can hear even the most outrageously powerful sound waves at 2 megahertz. Would those be microwaves? Maybe these new players will cook people in front of them if you turn them up loud enough (and have tweeters that can put out loud 2 million hertz signals;) )
Even a signal as solidly within the passband as a 14.7K _sine_ wave will completely fail to be recovered exactly. This wave gets three samples per cycle to capture a symmetrical wave. The only possible result is a pulse wave of 1/3 pulse width- that's what's in the data, there is no other possible result. When you apply a theoretically perfect brick-wall filter to that and perfectly get rid of the sampling artifacts YOU STILL HAVE IRREGULARITIES. Substantial ones, by audio measuring standards- many percent.
If you do a 14.6 sine wave, not only do you get basically a 1/3 width pulse wave, but you get a subcarrier.
Can't you _see_ this?? Doesn't your math acknowledge this? These are not only measurable distortions but the problem is still present even _completely_ in the theoretical realm.
Are you arguing that a 14.7K sine sampled at 44.1K is a symmetrical waveform? Or that a 1/3 width pulse wave at 14.7K with a 22K filter is EXACTLY a sine wave? I would suggest that it is not...
Pulses of infinitely intense sound pressure changes occurring 30,000 times a second.
What is a 15K sine wave?
The gentlest possible oscillation of sound pressure, 30,000 times a second.
Now, maybe your tweeters aren't up to putting out infinite sound pressure levels- technically the nature of a square wave is that no matter how faint it is you need to put infinite force into the transients in order to keep it square. Most people's speakers are not capable of putting out such intense pulses, cleanly or not. Many might be so bad that they can't produce the pulses at all- in which case the speaker is producing a sine wave, and no wonder you can't hear a difference.
There are, however, plenty of speakers out there that will try a lot harder to render the edges of that 15K square wave. Electrostatics. Fancy tweeters. Horn-loaded designs such as Klipsch uses. I'm currently using very fragile inverted domes with a variation on horn loading; I suggest that my speakers can produce louder sounds in the supersonic range than yours can. Since square waves are made up of transients of theoretically infinite force, it matters whether the speaker is able to produce loud sounds that high up- it translates to ability to make the square wave _be_ a square wave acoustically.
I've tried this sort of thing. A sine wave up in that range is like a clear blue light (pardon the synesthetic imagery but I'm not sure how to explain this) where a square of the same frequency is a lot whiter and sounds _discrete_ somehow- it's sort of like a super-high-frequency-sound equivalent of a strobe light and doesn't sound _smooth_. Instead it makes you squint and kind of hurts, the edge goes right through your skull. Neither note is very musical, or can be stood for long:)
Amusingly, sampling at 44.1K cannot properly capture _either_ because there's an intermodulation distortion that is waaaay beyond what people consider acceptable for total harmonic distortion. Now if you were talking about a 14700 hz note, you'd get a lot closer as that gives you three samples per cycle- either way you are producing a pulse wave at 1/3 width but at least it doesn't warble:)
No- actually it cannot get the _corners_ of the square wave but it can get the vertical part substantially more vertical than DVD audio. The rate of voltage change will keep on accelerating right until it has to reverse the rate of change and stop. DVD audio will stop at 48K. Frequency-wise this is not much of an issue but if you think about the amount of transient voltage involved with the sides of the squarewave (which demands, in theory, INFINITE voltage), there's a huge difference here. The Sony system will pack a huge amount more voltage into the sides of the squarewave- how much more I'm not sure but it could be several orders of magnitude more voltage. There's some risk of ringing that follows the edges- but when was the last time you looked at squarewaves produced by CD players? >:)
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I used to support this company, Pixels, that makes a modelling/rendering package that's pretty high end in its way, Pixels 3D. I tried a demo, never could afford the actual product but got a phone call from them once and was so favorably disposed that I kept talking and ended up on the line with one of the programmers talking about different programming languages that could be used in shaders! I thought they were really cool.
I began to get different mail- before, I'd very occasionally got a very informal sort of note that didn't come off like spam at all, and I didn't mind that. Some new person came in and cranked up the email volume more and more, and the emails got harder and harder sell, until they were indistinguishable from full-on spam- nobody was listening, they weren't talking to _me_ anymore, I was just a target. It was set up as if it was a list, with instructions for unsubscribing. I don't trust 'remove' procedures from most spammers, but with my history interacting with Pixels I thought I could trust their remove procedures...
Nothing happened. The unsubscribe procedure was either broken, or being intentionally ignored. I couldn't tell which. This, not the spammish tone of the frequent emails, was what finally tipped me over the edge, and I began a full-on Spamcop.net assault against the company I'd once quite liked, bitterly. In fact I called their office and left a message stating exactly why I wished to never hear from them again and had changed from an interested potential customer to the opposite. The person they'd spoken to on the phone had turned into an enemy through _their_ actions- the actions of one marketroid whom they might not have even been keeping an eye on.
That worked- I don't know if I actually got their connectivity and website interrupted, or if someone figured out they were paying too high a price, but I don't hear from them anymore.
No company needs to make this horrible mistake. Talk about badwill.
It didn't do anything but it just felt good >:)
What gives you the notion that word scares me like it scares you? ;)
I heartily encourage libertarians to get out a huge vote for Harry Browne, even though I personally think he and they are lunatics: that doesn't matter, the point is that _whoever_ wins, even if it's Nader, I would want that President to remain firmly aware that there is a large power bloc stubbornly opposed to bigger government. This needs to be VISIBLE! Those people _must_ be represented, and voting for Bush is not going to do that.
By the same token, I'm damned if I'm going to vote for Gore because Gore has been... not adequate at living up to committments that he's made (such as the toxic waste burning facility in New Jersey), and because only Nader allows me to BE COUNTED as part of a large power bloc that is obviously, blatantly, stubbornly opposed to corporatism. Voting for Gore will accomplish nothing in this: voting for Nader will make it very obvious what my concerns and the basis of my vote are. It is not relevant whether the person wins- you think the President is God? The important thing is to establish the factions, to BE COUNTED in such a way that other politicians can tell what you really care about.
Politics is a damned busy job- polling, canvassing, trying to figure out what sort of actions will get people to support you and what sort of actions will produce a deadly backlash and knock you out entirely. The politicians are not going to concern themselves with the party faithful once the votes are counted- the sheep will be good and stay in line. The politicians will be grovelling over the numbers for all the third parties- "oh look, X% voted 'no big government', if I violate that they could produce a backlash and eat away at my constituency! Oh look, Y% voted 'anticorporate', they will go and tell my voters about the 7 billion in 'soft money' I got from Microsoft to swing that House vote! Dear oh dear, that will never do- and people keep finding out about these things- perhaps I'd better not do it this time if I want to get re-elected..."
Venal, but what do you expect from politicians? THIS IS NOT GAME THEORY. It is public relations. The politician who thinks it _is_ game theory gets unseated quite promptly because you have to appease the people, pay attention to the zealots because the zealots are the ones paying attention to what YOU DO. The Libertarians are the ones who can quote off the amount of government spending you authorised. The Greens (certainly the Nader supporters) are the ones who can quote off the extent of corporate abuses in current society, and make a good case for why this is a doomed, self-destructive path to follow, to end in another Great Depression. THESE ARE THE ONES THAT PAY ATTENTION. That write editorials. That get people to the polls, that go door to door, that talk politics with their friends. These are the ones that will kill your political career if you don't keep an eye on them and keep your nose clean. CmdrTaco, I don't know if you are concerned with corporatism (Nader) or if you are perhaps vehemently opposed to big government (Browne) or whatever. I only know that if you refuse to pick a party to support based on what your genuine concerns are, you're being ignored- and I don't think you need to be ignored. Pick somebody who isn't Bush or Gore, unless you're oh-so-deeply-impressed with their wisdom and sincerity (ROFL! 'scuse me) that they truly are the ones that represent you.
Democracy doesn't work. It was tried throughout history, most notably in Greece, and it doesn't work- it's 'bread and circuses' and the dominant faction stomps all over everyone else, making it not much different from fascism. Read Federalist #10- this is hardly news.
America is not a democracy- it is a republic. THAT is why I'm voting for Nader.
I happen to be so extremely concerned with corporatism issues that choosing Nader is completely obvious- whatever his other concerns, it's plain that he entirely shares my distrust and alarm with what corporations are doing. That is reason enough to vote for him a thousand times over, since the Dems and Reps are both entirely bought, and Harry Browne is wildly in favor of turning over _all_ power to corporations and dropping any and all government counterbalances (something I find absolutely shocking. Ever heard of fiduciary duty, Harry? Why is it these huge powerful entities do not fall under your definition of 'government' themselves? They control what we do, utterly- more than the regular government.)
But that's as may be- my point is that the USA is a republic by design. The electoral college is the way it is for a reason- a state can back a different candidate and not merely be submerged in a nationwide counting of the votes- at that point politics has to deal with the different guy. In addition, a high turnout (like 5-10%?) for a third party candidate _proves it's a republic- anyone in politics must contend with what that means, it is an open admission that there's a really big voting bloc that are so concerned with some issue or other that they will act on it and be identified as a strong faction of their own.
I think people _should_ vote for Harry Browne (God help us if he wins! Linux can kiss its ass goodbye in the face of 'Halloween Document 2K- Since No Law Exists') if the guy seriously echoes their prime concerns- "Make government smaller!" is a perfectly legitimate agenda. By the same token people _should_ vote for Nader if they are even half concerned about corporatism- that's probably the one area where he'd have a significant effect, as the President is not King and doesn't make all the rules himself. People need to not vote for Gore _or_ Bush unless they are really, seriously, intelligently voting _for_ those people: I personally don't see why anybody would do this but then I'm a Nader guy and if I thought Gore or Bush were any sort of sensible choice I'd _vote_ for them instead of noisily joining an anticorporate faction too large to ignore.
As a final note, I am stunned that Katz is not already beating the drum for Nader. Read your own articles, Jon, then read some Nader interviews. Don't you realise this guy is the spearhead for your own pet issue? It's astonishing that you wouldn't know this already. Read what he has to say. If you wanted action against corporate abuses you only have one choice (plus, at least in Vermont, the Progressive party on a local level) You don't _have_ any other choices and not voting is not a choice because it is a vote for 'either Gore or Bush will be fine', and that's not true from the progressive perspective.
- unauthorised covers by major label acts
- use in films or TV or Muzak (tm) or as background to advertisements
- redistribution for profit by K-Tel or some comparable label
This is very important. My nervousness is that at some point the argument will be made that if you expect copyright to protect you from these things happening against your will, you'd be using watermarks and prohibiting fair use and getting a Big Record Deal etc ad nauseam- and that the laws may be _changed_ using such arguments to punish anyone who is trying to uphold fair use and still expects copyright to protect against commercial exploitation. It's kind of like 'you can't have your cake and eat it too!' Except you can- under current law. At the moment it is _my_ decision whether I want to allow fair use, and I can do so without throwing away my rights to control commercial use, as I am the copyright holder. I would like to see this more broadly understood, because it would be a hell of a thing to lose this just because a lot of people are content to take the burden of 'breaking the law' onto themselves.It's fine that many people are willing to disobey a legal climate that they feel is unjust- but that mustn't cover up the fact that as a content producer I have a _right_ to allow and encourage fair use. It does _not_ equate to 'I am putting everything I do into the public domain, go nuts'. Currently I can allow fair use and still have leverage to resist unauthorised commercial use. If the line blurs and that begins to slip it will be a very bad thing. How would you like it if you made music and then discovered one of your tracks on TV with singing munchkins selling Windows upgrades or something? There are some aspects of copyright that need to keep their teeth.
Pray tell how much _money_ this top 1% of earners makes. You talk like it is unthinkable that the top 1% of earners should earn ten times what all the other earners do, put together. Yet, this is far from unrealistic- particularly if your percentage breakdown is according to population, the top percent is going to be earning significantly more than 1/3 of the total income.
I don't believe for one second that the law, common sense, morals or _anything_ will prevent these people from savaging me if I try changing registrars- and I don't have the resources to fight them or even raise an issue.
It sucks sucks sucks sucks SUCKS. I'm awful glad some people can afford to attack NSI. I would consider it a big victory if they were destroyed and I had to pay a new fee to freshly register airwindows.com at another registrar. I can't afford to have them hold it for ransom, or swoop in and sell it in the middle of an attempted defection to another registrar. In the world of NSI I'm one of the guys being held up at gunpoint, who hasn't been shot yet. I am not joyous about the situation.
With regard to your valid and deep concerns over things like the Supreme Court- what on _earth_ gives you the idea that Gore will be trustworthy and do as you wish, or as he promises? I'll give an example- environmentalists (not my core issue, BTW) used to put a lot of stock in Gore. He practically campaigned on that- for instance, swearing up and down that a proposed toxic waste burning facility 150 yards from a _school_ in New Jersey would never open. After years of being Vice President, guess what? The facility opened. It runs. It has _missed_ several quality inspections and is still not being shut down, and the inhabitants of the town and the children attending the school are getting sick at rates far beyond the normal- and where's Gore? How is this different from if it'd been Bush all those years? How can you even think Gore can be trusted to appoint Supreme Court justices the way you expect him to?
I'm not voting Nader because I believe he will win. I think it would be fascinating and astonishing if he did, but he'd probably be killed anyhow. I am voting Nader (and, locally, a Progressive ticket) because there is NOBODY else that embodies my own concerns so well- primarily, corporatism. What I'm seeing here in Vermont (which in theory is well suited to cottage industry and small business!) is a complete freeze-out across the board- it's becoming unthinkable to run your own business. I see many people staying afloat by working 18 hours 6 days a week- I've known several go under even doing that, for instance the finest bookstore I've ever known that had to accept the terms of Barnes and Noble or they'd not have access to stock- and in other cases I'm working until 3 in the morning trying to help local businesses that have not gone under yet. Main Street is spotted with empty storefronts, more every month- but Wal-Mart offers extremely competitive pay! I don't accept this as a picture of my ideal country. I don't accept that my only role is as a consumer and corporate cog- and with all Nader's faults he's the only guy who plainly has Lots Of Issues with the corporations.
Beyond this, there is my decision (in a way, a deeper decision) to side with the Progressives. Much of their platform seems like hippie fantasizing to me but I'll accept that since there are a few 'radical' points in there that I feel are profoundly important- that actually coincide with your feelings on inheritance. The Progressives (at least here in Vermont) take issue with wealth being derived from position or power, and that is the issue that resonates most strongly with me. As I see it, wealth needs to correspond directly to WORK. Now, there are lots of IT geeks who work absurd, impossible hours- they should get their share of wealth. However, the bookseller working 18/6 and doing good work should also have his chance at that- and the flip side is that the boss of those IT geeks, or the vice president of Barnes and Noble should _not_ get many times that amount of wealth based on the amount of damage they can cause. I'm not saying these guys should be made _poor_, I'm saying that right now the disparity between worker 'wealth' in proportion to the work they do, and boss/corporate PHB/Rambus-patent-holder/stock-option-speculator 'wealth' in proportion to the work they do is absolutely ridiculous. Never mind that in many cases (such as Rambus) the controller of this 'wealth' is actually doing damage to society and blocking progress, adding insult to injury!
I don't see Gore giving a tinker's damn about this stuff. In fact, I expect him to further prop up the corporations, appoint SC judges that will back the corporations _for_ him so he doesn't get the PR hit, and in general do everything he can to obliterate the free market in the sense of 'people can enter it and do business at whatever level they operate on'. You cannot make me trust him. Both the major parties are worthless to me now- it's like asking which major record label is the 'good one'- they are indistinguishable. Either way your vote says simply 'More please'. I refuse to say that.
Frankly, I don't think it's necessarily such a bad thing if the country goes to hell under Bush because people didn't support Gore- it takes a lot of unreasonable behavior before the general public begins to get upset and agitated, and I'm not convinced that the system can be changed through the main, two-party, existing channels. If I _really_ disbelieved it, I wouldn't be voting: I'd be throwing bombs, and I would be doing it to corporations, not clueless government officials. However, I am not and don't plan to do any such thing- instead, I'll give the system a chance. I'll vote for Nader, unhesitatingly, and I will be counted by each party as 'somebody who went and voted not for us for specific reasons', and I will _keep_ voting for anyone reasonably acceptable who supports the issues I consider absolutely crucial, and will keep voting third party.
Before Nader and, on the local level, the Progs came along, I was not going to vote at all.
Cheers. If Nader can't win, I hope we _do_ get stuck with Bush, not because he's any good but simply because he's liable to turn up the heat until it's completely intolerable. Something's got to give, sooner or later. Bush is probably the one guy most capable of designating W2K the official U.S. operating system, for instance, and impeding anything else. It would seem about as significant as designating a state bird, to him. Be careful what you wish for.
If I remember correctly they've flirted with doing the latter already- in that they are putting hotlinks in stuff as if I, in writing 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes', had added a link like 'connect w box to x box and then to y and z boxes'.
What the _hell_ do you think I have for mains, Yamaha NS-10s? The _only_ way to get remotely serious performance is either to spend loads of money or educate yourself extensively and rebuild/custom build _everything_.
There is a hard limit to the low frequency extension available from ported enclosures: that's why my speakers have variovents. There's another hard limit on how much acoustic power you can produce with a given cone size within the linear excursion limits of the voice coil (_not_ the suspension physical limit, but keeping the voice coil within the magnet gap). That's why my speakers run 12/10/8/6.5 drivers in a series/parallel configuration as if they were a guitar speaker cab- all the drivers contribute to the piston area for subsonic content. There's a softer limit to enclosure size- I don't feel like running an active EQ system like the very clever Bag End 'ELF' system, so that's why my cabs are four feet tall, over three feet deep and as much as 15 inches wide. They'd make damn good stage bass cabinets, though they're not really designed for those wattages. That fixes the lowest frequency at... let me put it this way. I own synthesizers. I can _put_ subsonic tones through my full system, and stuff will be falling over. There's a limit to how much acoustic pressure even that much cone area can produce, but it's not giving up at 20hz, that's for damn sure.
The other extreme? Composite drivers using piezo elements to handle the extreme highs. (no, not a whizzer cone with a clunky piezo disc glued onto the back and flopping around in a plastic housing). This type of element is easily capable of extreme frequency content- this is what they use to make ultrasonic devices, piezos. I have inverted aluminum domes on these which are so light and delicate you could damage one by blowing hard at it. To top all this off these are effectively HORN LOADED- not in an extreme fashion but the waveguide is definitely reminiscent of an exponential horn, and that means LOUD. The supersonic acoustic power these can produce is not subtle- it will give you a nasty headache very quickly if there's a lot of supersonic ringiness or grunge in the signal.
I don't know _where_ these people are coming from, but there seems to be an infinite supply. All I can say is- I hope you folks are my competition for sound engineering work, because the more fervently you insist that none of that high endy stuff even matters, the less use you will be at a task like mastering. This stuff is not hypothetical: there is practical application provided you work in the business. Ability to monitor a signal over an audio range substantially beyond 20-20K means better ability to control the sound balance and integrate the various instruments into a coherent whole, never mind that in certain areas like bass there are whole subcultures (car audio!) dedicated to showing off the ability to push this limit (by the same token, electrostatic speaker fans are declaring their interest in pushing the opposite limit).
Indeed I think about bandwidth and- S/N ratio is a rotten way to express this, let's call it _linearity_. However, the system _will_ happily go above 20K- and the linearity is considerably in excess of 16-bit quantization. And so is my digital source- I swear by Alesis 20-bit 48K ADAT. The highs could be better but the linearity is really quite good and I'm not dead certain a full 24 bits is necessary. However, the difference between 20 bit and 16 bit is major- and the difference between 44.1 and 48K is minor but every little bit helps. I was testing some new tweeter design changes on Frank Zappa's "One Size Fits All" album- the Kerry McNab-engineered Zappa albums push the high end _hard_ and the mikes turn a really large amount of the 40% supersonic content of cymbals into voltage. Playing this back with the new tweeter configuration really drove home how much we've lost: that album is very good at reproducing the natural supersonic balance of the sounds it contains, and a CD cannot contain even distorted versions of this acoustic content- the LP tends to distort it but the CD throws it away completely. So, again- 44.1K (really significantly below 22K) isn't enough. 16 bits aren't enough either.
Eh, there's lots of other companies doing that. Wadia was certainly not the only one. You just won't find the products at Radio Shack ;) and I daresay you won't find them cheap even now- I just looked on eBay and the prices I was seeing were $200, $500 and $1500 in US dollars.
Cables are _hugely_ important. It's not because of magic- it's because of capacitance, resistance, inductance and the way amplifiers interact with these qualities. You could easily have an amplifier and speaker combination where, with one set of cables, all was well, but with another set the amplifier would oscillate to feedback blowing up the amp! That is about as real as you could ask for. Normal cables are less prone to be _that_ bad, but there's still a great deal of difference in different cables. Again, it's not primarily the cable itself but the way it interacts with the transducer and especially the amplifier.
I think in order to understand this properly, you'd kind of have to have enough technical background to know that speakers' impedance drops sharply at the driver's resonance... without granting some facts like that, it's impossible to even begin to explain to otherwise smart people what's happening. 'But I put a voltage through and it was there on the other side of the wire!' is not evidence that a wire will perform under demanding dynamic conditions- or hooked up to a borderline-unstable amplifier. And competitive high end car audio is very much about borderline-unstable amplifiers due to the very low impedances :) interestingly, stadium sound reinforcement uses similar principles. You might have a stadium-sized PA with an amplifier that puts out one watt... and God knows how many amps, through a speaker network that is 0.00000000001 ohms. The rules change when you start to deal with jobs that big...
- Human voice sibilance is maybe 6% over 20K.
- A cymbal crash is as much as _40%_ over 20K.
- Keys jingling is _60%_ over 20K.
I (big surpriseAmong other random terms of abuse I spotted the interesting claim that no power amplifier ever passes higher than 20K as it would hurt the speakers and damage the output stage of the amplifier. Apart from directing attention to even hoary old warhorses of the audio mag trade like Stereo Review, I think I had better let this claim pass without further comment :)
There's a good analogy for the dynamic range of CDs. It is computer monitor displays. People who are content with 16 bits in their audio because it covers a range of silent to really loud should _also_ be content to always use 'thousands' of colors on their monitors- because that covers the same range of black to white as 'millions' does.
Of course, people will not be content with this, because 'thousands' produces subtle banding and a perceptible degradation of the picture in ways that are clearly understood. In the same way, 16 bit digital audio produces a thinning and drying of the sonic texture that is the audio equivalent of banding- for the same reason, which is linear dynamic encoding of an analog source that will virtually never be _exactly_ equal to the 16 bit truncation of its resolution.
20 or 24 bit is near as dammit: it's way harder to notice any adverse effects. The Sony format is particularly interesting as it has the potential, sometime in the future, of being handled without recourse to PCM encoding (though, distressingly, it seems that the current incarnations do make use of such a stage- hopefully a really impressive one like 128K cutoff and 32 bit or something equally flash). What that would mean is that there would be no specific bit depth it would be comparable to- saying '8 bit' or '16 bit' or '24 bit' w.r.t PCM is saying 'Here is the maximum signal displacement, from -Xv to Xv. I will now chop the area between into equal parts and quantize whatever the _real_ voltage is to the nearest level I can encode.' In this sense, PCM is never accurate at all- it's very unlikely that at a given moment, the voltage really exactly matches the encoding, because the encoding might be 1.0256 volts and the real voltage was 1.02562854647823862349823474634672348 volts.
Again, it's the same issue as monitor color trueness at 'thousands' of colors. The ironic thing is, with well recorded music the hottest peaks are _really_ hot: 99.9% of a piece of music might be less than half the available dynamic area used for encoding. The encoding is linear, so that is _wasting_ half the bits. A sort of Gaussian distribution might have been a better idea, but it's too late to worry about that now :)
Of course if you make music horrible enough sonically with brutal overcompression, most of it will take up the full dynamic range of the format. It's a pity that this sounds atrocious, as it's the only way to really make use of linear encoding :)
It is _very_ nice that digital allows low frequencies down to 0 hz. I will never knock even CD sound quality for the ability to convey extremely low sounds- the only limitation is the analog stages that drive your stereo. I produce sonograms of my recordings sometimes, and they easily produce frequency information at 9 hz and lower (I refuse to use bass drum sounds that can't be made to have substantial subsonic content :) ). CD can easily encode _substantially_ below 20 hz. There's basically no limit. The format is flat to 0 hz.
I _will_ note that the wave is phase shifted compared to the original source- in fact when I talk about intermodulation distortion what's happening is that the wave gets phase shifted forward and back very rapidly.
I would _suggest_ that a wave which is phase shifted against other sounds is not the _same_ wave that is sampled. It can be _a_ sine wave but if it's not in the same phase as the source (compared to other music data) is it the same wave?
It's possible that given 4X oversampling Nyquist is as near to correct as necessary. Certainly if you're not concerned with phase but only the presence of frequency components 2X Nyquist is basically right. I draw the line at saying it is theoretically perfect- I'd say it could be a very good approximation. I don't understand why so many people arguing for Nyquist take on a positively religious tone, demanding the acceptance of articles of faith. 'Theoretically perfect' is a very strong statement, and the context (such as 'bandlimited, and ignoring phase and time information completely') needs to be clarified or people take it to mean 'therefore CDs are perfect reproducers of sound': which is not accepted by any competent sound engineer today, since again 'perfect' is a very strong term.
Note: the harmonic distortion content to the 918.75hz sine wave is not going to be continuous. It is going to be rapidly cyclical as it's the product of interaction with the sampling rate- each harmonic's strength will oscillate between zero and whatever the maximum is (a fraction of a percent?) depending on the phase of the tone relative to the sampling rate. This effect will be considerably more obvious at higher frequencies but will still be present at 918hz. The harmonic distortion is never a continuous amount, but is invariably a rapid cycling between zero and the maximum amount.
I don't understand how you manage to turn the idea of a 14700 sine into a 918.75Hz tone, but so much the worse for you: the 14700 (ironically) does have the second harmonic obliterated by the 22.05K lowpass. When you start talking about 918 hz tones you shoot yourself in the foot- you don't _get_ a 919 hz filter in CD audio, and the modulations are going to still be there. They won't be as nasty as a stepped sampled wave but you've got quite a few harmonics that will remain after lowpass filtering at 22.05K (even the compromised realworld version). Some of the modulation you see _will_ survive this.
It's flatly incredible how many armchair audio theoreticians won't even go as far as you have, insightfully, gone, in seeing that the results of the sampling process are modulated. Phase differences do matter, but even if they did not, the degree of modulation of the sampled wave is mathematically provable unless you get to do a _specific_ lowpass filter on it. If you count obvious changes in phase, the amount of change is provable even when you do ideal lowpass filtering on it.
Yes, math is grand ;)
Ever heard of a book called 'The Hidden Persuaders' by Vance Packard? (expose of the advertising industry) This book exposed how advertising people were able to persuade consumers to buy one thing rather than another. With music, the audio quality is the 'hidden persuader'.
It's a lossy format in a peculiar way- this particular method is wildly more accurate at low frequencies than high ones. The thing is, 'high' is relative >;) to this format, 100K is 'low'. The really low frequencies are almost arbitrarily accurate- and again, the ability to delineate high-energy transients is many orders of magnitude better than bandlimited formats. I must admit I am not terribly worried about 10,000% harmonic distortion... at two megahertz. I don't believe I can hear even the most outrageously powerful sound waves at 2 megahertz. Would those be microwaves? Maybe these new players will cook people in front of them if you turn them up loud enough (and have tweeters that can put out loud 2 million hertz signals ;) )
Even a signal as solidly within the passband as a 14.7K _sine_ wave will completely fail to be recovered exactly. This wave gets three samples per cycle to capture a symmetrical wave. The only possible result is a pulse wave of 1/3 pulse width- that's what's in the data, there is no other possible result. When you apply a theoretically perfect brick-wall filter to that and perfectly get rid of the sampling artifacts YOU STILL HAVE IRREGULARITIES. Substantial ones, by audio measuring standards- many percent.
If you do a 14.6 sine wave, not only do you get basically a 1/3 width pulse wave, but you get a subcarrier.
Can't you _see_ this?? Doesn't your math acknowledge this? These are not only measurable distortions but the problem is still present even _completely_ in the theoretical realm.
Are you arguing that a 14.7K sine sampled at 44.1K is a symmetrical waveform? Or that a 1/3 width pulse wave at 14.7K with a 22K filter is EXACTLY a sine wave? I would suggest that it is not...
Pulses of infinitely intense sound pressure changes occurring 30,000 times a second.
What is a 15K sine wave?
The gentlest possible oscillation of sound pressure, 30,000 times a second.
Now, maybe your tweeters aren't up to putting out infinite sound pressure levels- technically the nature of a square wave is that no matter how faint it is you need to put infinite force into the transients in order to keep it square. Most people's speakers are not capable of putting out such intense pulses, cleanly or not. Many might be so bad that they can't produce the pulses at all- in which case the speaker is producing a sine wave, and no wonder you can't hear a difference.
There are, however, plenty of speakers out there that will try a lot harder to render the edges of that 15K square wave. Electrostatics. Fancy tweeters. Horn-loaded designs such as Klipsch uses. I'm currently using very fragile inverted domes with a variation on horn loading; I suggest that my speakers can produce louder sounds in the supersonic range than yours can. Since square waves are made up of transients of theoretically infinite force, it matters whether the speaker is able to produce loud sounds that high up- it translates to ability to make the square wave _be_ a square wave acoustically.
I've tried this sort of thing. A sine wave up in that range is like a clear blue light (pardon the synesthetic imagery but I'm not sure how to explain this) where a square of the same frequency is a lot whiter and sounds _discrete_ somehow- it's sort of like a super-high-frequency-sound equivalent of a strobe light and doesn't sound _smooth_. Instead it makes you squint and kind of hurts, the edge goes right through your skull. Neither note is very musical, or can be stood for long :)
Amusingly, sampling at 44.1K cannot properly capture _either_ because there's an intermodulation distortion that is waaaay beyond what people consider acceptable for total harmonic distortion. Now if you were talking about a 14700 hz note, you'd get a lot closer as that gives you three samples per cycle- either way you are producing a pulse wave at 1/3 width but at least it doesn't warble :)
No- actually it cannot get the _corners_ of the square wave but it can get the vertical part substantially more vertical than DVD audio. The rate of voltage change will keep on accelerating right until it has to reverse the rate of change and stop. DVD audio will stop at 48K. Frequency-wise this is not much of an issue but if you think about the amount of transient voltage involved with the sides of the squarewave (which demands, in theory, INFINITE voltage), there's a huge difference here. The Sony system will pack a huge amount more voltage into the sides of the squarewave- how much more I'm not sure but it could be several orders of magnitude more voltage. There's some risk of ringing that follows the edges- but when was the last time you looked at squarewaves produced by CD players? >:)