Hi Andrew.
Your theoretical numbers kind for remind me of a sign I once saw. "If you can't
dazzle them with brilliance. Baffle them with Bull Shit".
Seriously, what it really comes down to is not numbers, but rather what the human eye
can see and hear.
I included sight because my nephew who was a video major in college once made a point
about video that has always stuck with me. I realize that video isn't necessarily a
digital media. But it is an electronic one. As opposed to film which is a "true"
analog reproduction.
I once asked him if he ever thought that there would come a time when video
reproduction would actually be superior to film. Now remember this came from a VIDEO
major. He said know, "because as good as you can make video, all you have to do is
double the size of the film and you will once again have better quality on film.
Of course increasing the size of the film has it's practical limits.
Of course all this sounds like I'm the one trying to baffle you with bull shit.
Enjoy the weekend (I guess it's already Sunday where our list members from down under
live).
This is a little off topic. But I have made many friends from Australia thanks to
the net that I would have never had a chance to correspond with. I hate to
generalize but if my experience is typical, you guys are the greatest. I'm so glad
that there are a large number active list members from down under. From a "Tank".
LAS
Andrew Hobgood wrote:
> > I know that this is going to sound stupid to most of you. But I still question
> > using digital storage to store analog information. Sound is analog. At some
> > point in the process you are going to have to convert analog to digital.
>
> Very true... the only issue is that as soon as you try to store data in an
> analog format, you have to worry about A) physically moving parts that are
> very sensitive (like phonograph cartridges) or B) media damage (like a
> cassette). Degradation becomes too much of a factor, both on the playback
> end *and* on the media.
>
> As for storing the data digitally, Nyquist's theorem (IIRC) states that with
> a sampling frequency of n Hz, you can store data at *NO LOSS* that goes up to
> the Nyquist frequency, which is n/2 Hz. Now, currently, a CD stores data at
> 44.1kHz, 16 bits wide. That means that there are 65536 distinct possible
> sound intensity values. As digital storage sizes increase, the potential
> exists to double the sampling rate to 88.2kHz (bringing the Nyquist frequency
> to 44.1kHz, high enough to be inaudible by animals, and finishing up the
> farthest reaches of the dynamic range that the human ear can discern), and
> bringing the bit width to 32 bits (so there would be 4294967296 distinct
> sound pressure values). You could store *much* higher quality audio in only
> 4x the space.
>
> If such a format shift was performed, backward compatibility into older DAC's
> would be trivial (cut the last 2 bytes off of the end of the sample, making
> it the most significant 16 bits, then skip every other sample to bring the
> sample rate to 44.1kHz) without going below the current quality standard. If
> such a format shift occurred, the bottleneck of audio quality would no longer
> be the storage medium, but the playback equipment, and whether your speaker
> system could reliably respond across the range that you're encoding into your
> media.
>
> /Andrew
>
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