This poor guy is getting praise in a thread questioning if somebody else is stupid. I agree, it was a good interview - much different than what I'm used to reading on these topics.
I too found it interesting that they really don't do any listening tests. I agree that it's all measureable, but since the end result is generating audio for humans to listen to with their ears, it seems pretty brazen to exclude the human ear as a test tool. Sure, it shouldn't be your primary test/validation tool, but I think it should be part of your validation. 15 years ago I worked for a company that developed and pioneered products that inegrated PCs and telephone lines. These products were popular in building voice messaging and automated attendant applications (voice mail). A codec chip from TI was used. During the lifetime of one product, TI rev'ed the coded with seemingly better specs. On paper it all looked great. However, some of our customers found that under certain environmental conditions (higher than usual signal loss on analog phone lines, a speaker with a soft voice, etc) that the recorded audio would break up with terrible distortion sound like faulty cable or a flakey connection. This problem was only found with human interaction with the product. The root cause was that TI improved the snr spec by turning the codec off at very low levels of audio, thus turning low level noise into silence. I don't remember the technical term now. Due to the design involving AGC, this resulted in audio being cut off at higher and very audible levels. Sure you could conceive of an automated test to capture this failure, but in the end it was simple human interaction with the product that isolated the issue. -- maggior Rich --------- Setup: 2 SB3s, 4 Booms, 1 Duet, 1 Receiver, 1 Touch, iPeng on iPod Touch. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeBoxServer 7.5.0, MusicIP, and SqueezeSlave. Current library stats: 34,767 songs, 2,776 albums, 505 artists. http://www.last.fm/user/maggior ------------------------------------------------------------------------ maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85280 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
