I'm very sorry to hear that you have a $10000 microphone that apparently isn't able to measure differences that are discernible to the human ear in simple blind listening tests. When I start playing music for the enjoyment of whatever test equipment I have lying around instead of for my own personal enjoyment I guess I'll have to adjust my purchasing criteria.
What exactly are you measuring with your expensive microphone, by the way?
The main problem with a 2-transducer system IMHO is it presumes perfect positioning. If you are sitting appreciably to the left or right of dead-center, the stereo image collapses into one speaker or the other, ruining the illusion. Not that today's common multichannel solutions solve anything... what we need is nice, solid, 3-channel recording with a center channel (where most of the information ends up anyway) and 3-transducer reproduction systems. (Subwoofers and "surround" crap aside.) So the bass and the kick drum ALWAYS appear to come from the middle of the stage, no matter where you're sitting...
Oh great, when tele-immersed streaming porn DOES become available we'll all be fighting for slots on the low-ping servers and I'll no doubt continue to be an HPW struggling amongst all the LPBs...
I live in Tacoma, WA, USA, where the residents were so sick of the local cable franchise (TCI, now AT&T) they empowered the local electric utility to install and operate an alternative cable infrastructure, the Click! Network.
The utility provides digital cable television service (and bills for it, across the hall from where you pay your light bill if you do it in person) but has stayed out of the ISP business, instead leasing the lines to local ISPs (basic consumer service starts at ~1MB down/128K up, goes on from there) at VERY competitive rates.
I don't know what the effect of redundant wires is on the big-picture costs, but eliminating the monopoly on cable access (and building a network that can actually support the advertised bandwidth usage rather than overselling it by a factor of 10 makes it competitive with DSL in terms of consistent QOS too) has had a predictably positive effect on the cost and quality of local TV and broadband net service.
What MIT claims does have some basis in scientific fact. (Although I can't speak for their methods, I don't know anything about the company.) Audio frequency AC (or higher) in a wire exhibits what is called the "skin effect"; in a nutshell, the higher the frequency of a signal the more it reacts electromagnetically with the metal in the wire, the end result being that higher frequencies are phase-shifted more than lower frequencies and actually migrate to the outside of the wire, rather than travelling down the middle or uniformly through it. This is why certain components in microwave circuitry are constructed as hollow tubes; the "middle" is useless. This is also often why high-end wires sound different.
On a somewhat-related note, it is remarkably interesting what effect a more accurate clock signal has on the quality of a 44.1KHz recording
Thank you, thank you. This phenomenon (sometimes known as "clock jitter") also explains, in large part, the age-old argument as to why digital-to-digital copies are not always perfectly identical, despite the notion that "it's only copying numbers/bits, it has to be perfect". Any digital recording references a time base, and any variation in that time base skews the way the audio sounds when you play it back. Commercial recording studios pay very large sums for centralized, highly accurate clock sources to which each piece of equipment that handles a digital audio stream is synced.
It's not about preserving audible signal, it's about being able to design antialiasing filters that don't chop off audible frequencies and introduce a lot of group delay/phase problems in order to eliminate all frequencies above 1/2 the sampling rate. Higher sampling rate = maneuvering room.
The marketing folks, however, think the general public would rather hear about preserving those ultra-cool bitchen super high frequencies. And they are right.
Yes quality is generally scalable in several ways, including but not limited to:
- screen resolution in pixels
- geometric complexity, i.e., the simplification of curved solids, the use of less complex representations of items in the game etc.
- the presence/absence of special effects that require additional rendering passes before the final image goes to screen (shadows, dynamic lighting effects)
- filtering algorithms with varying computational requirements that affect the subjective quality of textured geometry and lighting.
As far as what is a better solution... well, it's a matter of personal preference. Everybody wants games to look "pretty", and much of the value of today's games seems to lie in the "wow" factor that comes with roaming a reasonably convincing, immersive environment. But in the highly competitive world of first-person 3D shooters such as the Quake series of games, for example, many hardcore players choose to make compromises in order to sustain high framerates and keep the game as RESPONSIVE as possible. I myself (while certainly not among the finest players of such games) maintain 3-4 different configuration files for different moods and purposes. Sometimes I feel like seeing all the eye candy (map development, benchmarking), sometimes I want the competitive edge that come with pure speed - it's all a set of compromises.
<ramble>
Also remember, 3D games are among the most demanding applications available. Games like the original GL Quake drove the video hardware industry forward as much as they responded to available hardware, and consumers continue to demand more and more "cool stuff". OpenGL was originally formulated as a way to represent 3D geometry in a serious engineering/CAD environment, to display work prior to final rendering; if you had told the folks at Silicon Graphics that their libraries would be the basis for applications that demanded full-screen rendering 60 times a second and consumer-level hardware that could actually do it, they would have laughed in your face.
</ramble>
So anyway, yes - there are fairly standard ways to scale the quality of game graphics back in order to sustain framerate. It's a matter of personal preference. I personally can't justify my purchase of one of the original GeForce cards (I had a perfectly functional - no, actually better in terms of 2D desktop graphics - Matrox card with an older 3DFX card for games until a few months ago) EXCEPT that I wanted to play games faster, and have them look cooler. And I'll eventually purchase another card so I can enjoy what I feel to be acceptable performance on the next round of games, and at the same time I'll be able to play Quake III Arena at 1600x1200 with all the options turned up and still get a more-than-usable framerate:)
Video card rendering and the calculations that determine the state of the game at any moment run asynchronously; you might think of the video card as fetching a "snaphot" of the game world whenever it is done drawing the previous frame to your screen. (It's not really that simple of course, but I think the analogy is fairly sound.) So the state of the game is calculated at an arbitrary (very high) rate, and the video card keeps up as best it can. The faster the framerate, the more information your eyes receive, your brain needs to interpolate less, and the game runs subjectively more "smoothly". And in the case of a fast-paced action game, you receive more timely and accurate feedback of game events that require reaction on your part - such as the position of a rocket that last frame was homing in on your face.
As I understand it (not to a great degree, admittedly), the answer depends on limits inherent in measurement and observation. It might be helpful to look at it this way:
Say the signal is initiated by me throwing a simple toggle switch, and you stand across the room from me watching for a light to turn on, indicating the receipt of the signal. You see me throw the switch only after the light reflected from my hand on the switch reaches your eyes. Since the signal travels faster than the light, you see the light turn on before you see me throw the switch.
The question of whether limits to observation and measurement are tied intimately to limits to "physical reality" is still an open question, IMHO.
On a more whimsical philosophic note, I rather like the idea that such a device muddies the distinction between "creating a state where x occurs, which then causes y to occur" and "creating a state where x and y occur in tandem". It's that whole "everything is connected" deal that sounds so sappy until you start applying it to energy states and particle decay and such beasties...
Not to pick on renegade187 (his is just the first visible reply to this um, subthread, given my current set of viewing preferences, so I replied here for visibility and clarity)...
Everybody who replies to stuff like this effectively negates the work of the moderators by making large segments of the thread leap into visibility; I'm sure nobody wants to spend moderation points downgrading replies of varying intelligence and humor because the original poster was an idiot. And so we end up with a big string of off-topic score:1 and score:0 (unmoderated reg users and ACs, respectively) posts telling this guy off.
Sure, he deserves it. And I bet it felt good too, especially those of you who came up with clever retorts. But IMHO it's not worth it if the rest of us then have to wade through dozens of posts having nothing to do with the original topic. People like this will generally disappear quietly if we don't rise to the bait, and in the meantime the moderators help make it easier for us all to ignore them and keep/. a useful resource.
OK, here's the poop - points for getting it right: The first letter indicates how the audio was first laid to tape; if a digital recorder (linear digital tape, helical-head DAT/ADAT/8mm format du jour, or hard disk) is used then the recording warrants that first "D". The second letter indicates whether the multitrack was mixed to analog or digital media. The third letter is a "marketing character", it's always "D" on a CD because a CD is a digital storage medium. I do, however, take issue with the assertion that "DDD" disks are always the best and "AAD" disks are some kind of second-rate ripoff. This would be a good time to get coffee...
Digital encoding processes have improved/immensely/ since the early days of digital recording - they are, however, no more perfect than analog processes. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. In the initial recording phase, the great strength of digital is that it introduces no analog tape noise (hiss) and, since the playback process involves a buffered data stream clocked to a crystal, there are no "wow" and "flutter" anomolies related to variations in the tape speed caused by the mechanical tape path. This is of course the great strength of digital throughout the process as regards final sound quality ; the absence of generation loss, i.e., "perfect digital copies 'cuz it's all just numbers" is the other tremendous advantage, along with the opportunities for advanced editing and manipulation in the digital realm. The great weakness of digital sound, however, lies in the conversion process. 16 bit/44.1k is just barely within the theoretical limits of the minimum required for accurate reproduction. In order to squeeze music through this 44.1k "pipe" without aliasing artifacts, an audio source must be sharply and ruthlessly filtered so as to disallow any signal above 22.05khz. You audio electronics folks out there know that, generally speaking, filtering = capacitors = variable delay and phase shift = a messed-up signal. The advantage of analog tape(as seen by some very well-respected recording engineers) is that it doesn't require pre-filtering, and the way the signal is laid on a field of ferric dust results in some very nice-sounding intermodulation that can sound more "cohesive", as if the music were subtly blending into something tastier than the sum of its parts. Think of stew, or spaghetti sauce.
Both formats suffer a bit while recording low level, i.e., quiet, sections of music. This comes out most in classical and jazz, as you might imagine. But digital suffers worse in the recording process, when compared to professional analog recorders and tapes that don't introduce noise to anything like the degree that your home cassette deck does. If the loudest point in a recording uses all available 16 bits of precision, then the quiet sections won't "fill up" the recorder, and must be rendered with less precision just when you need as much as you can get.
In the mixing arena, the problem lies in a lack of precision in the way the middle "D" is applied. There are digital and analog mixing boards, and digital and analog sound processors and effects (yes, I know your bitchin new reverb is "digital", but I'm talking about devices that take a digital input and output a processed digital signal back into your digital mixing console) and there are pluses and minuses to each type of device as well as differences in taste, but the second "D" doesn't indicate that the music signal was processed entirely in the digital realm; it is more likely, in fact, that the digital multitrack was played back, the signal on each track was converted to analog to run through that vintage British console where it could be routed to a variety of sound-processing devices (each of which converted part of the signal to digital again for processing, then back to analog), then the whole thing was converted and filtered again before being stored on some kind of 2 track digital device. None of this is necessarily bad (the a/d d/a conversions can't help though); my point is that the process is often very different from the "simple, squeaky-clean all digital" aura that the recording industry would like DDD recordings to be surrounded with...
Anyway, blah blah blah... The point I'm trying to make is that while it's pretty clear that CDs are superior to cassettes in pretty much every way as a distribution medium (although far from perfect, and far from what is possible today were we not entrenched in the CD standard), the use of digital recording techniques does not necessarily make a superior recording. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and making buying decisions based on the number of "D"s is no more a guarantee of getting a superior recording than only buying albums by artists who use Gibson guitars.
Signature? I don't have to show you no steenking signature!
I suspect ESR was referring not so much to the fairly recent release of the full source code to Doom, but more to id software's reasonable licensing terms (restrictions on "commercial exploitation" but a lot of flexibility otherwise) and the partial "opening of the source" early on that led to the widespread availability of map/game editors and resulted in a mass of maps and mod hacks of all kinds. It seems to me that one of the reasons for Doom's amazing success and longevity was its "hackability" from the get-go. Sure, nobody was digging in and improving the base code, but the availability of all those maps and mods kept Doomers fragging for a long long time - and the public perception of id as something other than a faceless corporate cash factory (thanks in part to a certain level of responsiveness to users and less tendency to treat them like idiots) continues to serve them well.
Wow, my first post not as an AC. I feel so special...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very sorry to hear that you have a $10000 microphone that apparently isn't able to measure differences that are discernible to the human ear in simple blind listening tests. When I start playing music for the enjoyment of whatever test equipment I have lying around instead of for my own personal enjoyment I guess I'll have to adjust my purchasing criteria.
What exactly are you measuring with your expensive microphone, by the way?
NT
The main problem with a 2-transducer system IMHO is it presumes perfect positioning. If you are sitting appreciably to the left or right of dead-center, the stereo image collapses into one speaker or the other, ruining the illusion. Not that today's common multichannel solutions solve anything... what we need is nice, solid, 3-channel recording with a center channel (where most of the information ends up anyway) and 3-transducer reproduction systems. (Subwoofers and "surround" crap aside.) So the bass and the kick drum ALWAYS appear to come from the middle of the stage, no matter where you're sitting...
Oh great, when tele-immersed streaming porn DOES become available we'll all be fighting for slots on the low-ping servers and I'll no doubt continue to be an HPW struggling amongst all the LPBs...
I live in Tacoma, WA, USA, where the residents were so sick of the local cable franchise (TCI, now AT&T) they empowered the local electric utility to install and operate an alternative cable infrastructure, the Click! Network.
The utility provides digital cable television service (and bills for it, across the hall from where you pay your light bill if you do it in person) but has stayed out of the ISP business, instead leasing the lines to local ISPs (basic consumer service starts at ~1MB down/128K up, goes on from there) at VERY competitive rates.
I don't know what the effect of redundant wires is on the big-picture costs, but eliminating the monopoly on cable access (and building a network that can actually support the advertised bandwidth usage rather than overselling it by a factor of 10 makes it competitive with DSL in terms of consistent QOS too) has had a predictably positive effect on the cost and quality of local TV and broadband net service.
What MIT claims does have some basis in scientific fact. (Although I can't speak for their methods, I don't know anything about the company.) Audio frequency AC (or higher) in a wire exhibits what is called the "skin effect"; in a nutshell, the higher the frequency of a signal the more it reacts electromagnetically with the metal in the wire, the end result being that higher frequencies are phase-shifted more than lower frequencies and actually migrate to the outside of the wire, rather than travelling down the middle or uniformly through it. This is why certain components in microwave circuitry are constructed as hollow tubes; the "middle" is useless. This is also often why high-end wires sound different.
On a somewhat-related note, it is remarkably interesting what effect a more accurate clock signal has on the quality of a 44.1KHz recording
Thank you, thank you. This phenomenon (sometimes known as "clock jitter") also explains, in large part, the age-old argument as to why digital-to-digital copies are not always perfectly identical, despite the notion that "it's only copying numbers/bits, it has to be perfect". Any digital recording references a time base, and any variation in that time base skews the way the audio sounds when you play it back. Commercial recording studios pay very large sums for centralized, highly accurate clock sources to which each piece of equipment that handles a digital audio stream is synced.
It's not about preserving audible signal, it's about being able to design antialiasing filters that don't chop off audible frequencies and introduce a lot of group delay/phase problems in order to eliminate all frequencies above 1/2 the sampling rate. Higher sampling rate = maneuvering room.
The marketing folks, however, think the general public would rather hear about preserving those ultra-cool bitchen super high frequencies. And they are right.
Yes quality is generally scalable in several ways, including but not limited to:
:)
- screen resolution in pixels
- geometric complexity, i.e., the simplification of curved solids, the use of less complex representations of items in the game etc.
- the presence/absence of special effects that require additional rendering passes before the final image goes to screen (shadows, dynamic lighting effects)
- filtering algorithms with varying computational requirements that affect the subjective quality of textured geometry and lighting.
As far as what is a better solution... well, it's a matter of personal preference. Everybody wants games to look "pretty", and much of the value of today's games seems to lie in the "wow" factor that comes with roaming a reasonably convincing, immersive environment. But in the highly competitive world of first-person 3D shooters such as the Quake series of games, for example, many hardcore players choose to make compromises in order to sustain high framerates and keep the game as RESPONSIVE as possible. I myself (while certainly not among the finest players of such games) maintain 3-4 different configuration files for different moods and purposes. Sometimes I feel like seeing all the eye candy (map development, benchmarking), sometimes I want the competitive edge that come with pure speed - it's all a set of compromises.
<ramble>
Also remember, 3D games are among the most demanding applications available. Games like the original GL Quake drove the video hardware industry forward as much as they responded to available hardware, and consumers continue to demand more and more "cool stuff". OpenGL was originally formulated as a way to represent 3D geometry in a serious engineering/CAD environment, to display work prior to final rendering; if you had told the folks at Silicon Graphics that their libraries would be the basis for applications that demanded full-screen rendering 60 times a second and consumer-level hardware that could actually do it, they would have laughed in your face.
</ramble>
So anyway, yes - there are fairly standard ways to scale the quality of game graphics back in order to sustain framerate. It's a matter of personal preference. I personally can't justify my purchase of one of the original GeForce cards (I had a perfectly functional - no, actually better in terms of 2D desktop graphics - Matrox card with an older 3DFX card for games until a few months ago) EXCEPT that I wanted to play games faster, and have them look cooler. And I'll eventually purchase another card so I can enjoy what I feel to be acceptable performance on the next round of games, and at the same time I'll be able to play Quake III Arena at 1600x1200 with all the options turned up and still get a more-than-usable framerate
Video card rendering and the calculations that determine the state of the game at any moment run asynchronously; you might think of the video card as fetching a "snaphot" of the game world whenever it is done drawing the previous frame to your screen. (It's not really that simple of course, but I think the analogy is fairly sound.) So the state of the game is calculated at an arbitrary (very high) rate, and the video card keeps up as best it can. The faster the framerate, the more information your eyes receive, your brain needs to interpolate less, and the game runs subjectively more "smoothly". And in the case of a fast-paced action game, you receive more timely and accurate feedback of game events that require reaction on your part - such as the position of a rocket that last frame was homing in on your face.
As I understand it (not to a great degree, admittedly), the answer depends on limits inherent in measurement and observation. It might be helpful to look at it this way:
Say the signal is initiated by me throwing a simple toggle switch, and you stand across the room from me watching for a light to turn on, indicating the receipt of the signal. You see me throw the switch only after the light reflected from my hand on the switch reaches your eyes. Since the signal travels faster than the light, you see the light turn on before you see me throw the switch.
The question of whether limits to observation and measurement are tied intimately to limits to "physical reality" is still an open question, IMHO.
On a more whimsical philosophic note, I rather like the idea that such a device muddies the distinction between "creating a state where x occurs, which then causes y to occur" and "creating a state where x and y occur in tandem". It's that whole "everything is connected" deal that sounds so sappy until you start applying it to energy states and particle decay and such beasties...
Not to pick on renegade187 (his is just the first visible reply to this um, subthread, given my current set of viewing preferences, so I replied here for visibility and clarity)...
/. a useful resource.
Everybody who replies to stuff like this effectively negates the work of the moderators by making large segments of the thread leap into visibility; I'm sure nobody wants to spend moderation points downgrading replies of varying intelligence and humor because the original poster was an idiot. And so we end up with a big string of off-topic score:1 and score:0 (unmoderated reg users and ACs, respectively) posts telling this guy off.
Sure, he deserves it. And I bet it felt good too, especially those of you who came up with clever retorts. But IMHO it's not worth it if the rest of us then have to wade through dozens of posts having nothing to do with the original topic. People like this will generally disappear quietly if we don't rise to the bait, and in the meantime the moderators help make it easier for us all to ignore them and keep
OK, here's the poop - points for getting it right: The first letter indicates how the audio was first laid to tape; if a digital recorder (linear digital tape, helical-head DAT/ADAT/8mm format du jour, or hard disk) is used then the recording warrants that first "D". The second letter indicates whether the multitrack was mixed to analog or digital media. The third letter is a "marketing character", it's always "D" on a CD because a CD is a digital storage medium. I do, however, take issue with the assertion that "DDD" disks are always the best and "AAD" disks are some kind of second-rate ripoff. This would be a good time to get coffee...
/immensely/ since the early days of digital recording - they are, however, no more perfect than analog processes. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. In the initial recording phase, the great strength of digital is that it introduces no analog tape noise (hiss) and, since the playback process involves a buffered data stream clocked to a crystal, there are no "wow" and "flutter" anomolies related to variations in the tape speed caused by the mechanical tape path. This is of course the great strength of digital throughout the process as regards final sound quality ; the absence of generation loss, i.e., "perfect digital copies 'cuz it's all just numbers" is the other tremendous advantage, along with the opportunities for advanced editing and manipulation in the digital realm. The great weakness of digital sound, however, lies in the conversion process. 16 bit/44.1k is just barely within the theoretical limits of the minimum required for accurate reproduction. In order to squeeze music through this 44.1k "pipe" without aliasing artifacts, an audio source must be sharply and ruthlessly filtered so as to disallow any signal above 22.05khz. You audio electronics folks out there know that, generally speaking, filtering = capacitors = variable delay and phase shift = a messed-up signal. The advantage of analog tape(as seen by some very well-respected recording engineers) is that it doesn't require pre-filtering, and the way the signal is laid on a field of ferric dust results in some very nice-sounding intermodulation that can sound more "cohesive", as if the music were subtly blending into something tastier than the sum of its parts. Think of stew, or spaghetti sauce.
Digital encoding processes have improved
Both formats suffer a bit while recording low level, i.e., quiet, sections of music. This comes out most in classical and jazz, as you might imagine. But digital suffers worse in the recording process, when compared to professional analog recorders and tapes that don't introduce noise to anything like the degree that your home cassette deck does. If the loudest point in a recording uses all available 16 bits of precision, then the quiet sections won't "fill up" the recorder, and must be rendered with less precision just when you need as much as you can get.
In the mixing arena, the problem lies in a lack of precision in the way the middle "D" is applied. There are digital and analog mixing boards, and digital and analog sound processors and effects (yes, I know your bitchin new reverb is "digital", but I'm talking about devices that take a digital input and output a processed digital signal back into your digital mixing console) and there are pluses and minuses to each type of device as well as differences in taste, but the second "D" doesn't indicate that the music signal was processed entirely in the digital realm; it is more likely, in fact, that the digital multitrack was played back, the signal on each track was converted to analog to run through that vintage British console where it could be routed to a variety of sound-processing devices (each of which converted part of the signal to digital again for processing, then back to analog), then the whole thing was converted and filtered again before being stored on some kind of 2 track digital device. None of this is necessarily bad (the a/d d/a conversions can't help though); my point is that the process is often very different from the "simple, squeaky-clean all digital" aura that the recording industry would like DDD recordings to be surrounded with...
Anyway, blah blah blah... The point I'm trying to make is that while it's pretty clear that CDs are superior to cassettes in pretty much every way as a distribution medium (although far from perfect, and far from what is possible today were we not entrenched in the CD standard), the use of digital recording techniques does not necessarily make a superior recording. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and making buying decisions based on the number of "D"s is no more a guarantee of getting a superior recording than only buying albums by artists who use Gibson guitars.
Signature? I don't have to show you no steenking signature!
I suspect ESR was referring not so much to the fairly recent release of the full source code to Doom, but more to id software's reasonable licensing terms (restrictions on "commercial exploitation" but a lot of flexibility otherwise) and the partial "opening of the source" early on that led to the widespread availability of map/game editors and resulted in a mass of maps and mod hacks of all kinds. It seems to me that one of the reasons for Doom's amazing success and longevity was its "hackability" from the get-go. Sure, nobody was digging in and improving the base code, but the availability of all those maps and mods kept Doomers fragging for a long long time - and the public perception of id as something other than a faceless corporate cash factory (thanks in part to a certain level of responsiveness to users and less tendency to treat them like idiots) continues to serve them well.
Wow, my first post not as an AC. I feel so special...