ftlight wrote: 
> It's interesting to note that Nyquist's original paper, “Certain Topics
> in Telegraph Transmission Theory” (which Claude Shannon relied heavily
> upon while developing information theory in 1949), was first published
> in 1924, when "high fidelity" in audio depended largely on how well
> designed your recording and reproducing horns were.  Nyquist worked for
> Bell Labs, and was trying to get the most Morse code down the smallest
> pipe, particularly important for the worldwide network of telegraph
> cables, which were first laid in 1850 and continued in operation until
> the 1960s.  
> 
> I recently acquired a copy of this 1928 Bell Labs reprint of the
> original 1924 paper, although I paid only $1.50 for my copy:
> https://www.atticusrarebooks.com/pages/books/746
> 
> Bill
:)
Hi Bill.

All that you say is indeed borne out by the heavy Wikipaedia article I
referenced: in fact Nyquist himself wasn't concerned with sampling
theory at all, and it's somewhat odd that his name has stuck to
something Shannon actually developed although he relied upon Nyquist's
much earlier work in working through his mathematical proof. Other
people did significant work on sampling theory in the 50's & have at
times had their names stuck onto the workable version of the sampling
theory application.

What is interesting is that none of this was done with any concern for
high fidelity sound, they were working on digitising communications
which only required a voice to be intelligible at the other end of the
line.

I dare say that if you connected a decent microphone in front of your
stereo, plugged it into your computer and made a Skype call to someone
with a decent sound card or other audio out on their computer and fed it
into their music system it would sound pretty ropey!

So although the sampling theory results are applicable, the design
priorities in creating high quality digital audio would be quite
different from anything that was being done in the 1950's. perhaps we
should be giving other people a heads-up as well for making it happen?

Dave


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