On 2013-01-27 23:43, unruh wrote:
On 2013-01-27, David Taylor<[email protected]> wrote:
On 27/01/2013 19:33, unruh wrote:
On 2013-01-27, [email protected]<[email protected]> wrote:
[]
In case you are wondering, my app is a professional piano tuning app.
The standard in this industry is that tuning devices should be
accurate to 12 parts per million. I know that is probably overkill
for tuning pianos, but that is what the professionals expect from
their equipment.
Ah. I would expect 1 cent, which is more like 500PPM.
1% (10,000 ppm) is a 4.4 cycles per second beat at 440 Hz! Completely
unacceptable. You want an imperceptible beat, ideally, well under 1 Hz.
Agreed that 12 ppm is overkill.
I agree that 1% is pretty bad-- that is 1/6 of a semitone, which is
clealy preceptible. However 1 cent, 1/100 of a semitone, is the limit of
audibility
Not really. A cent is simply 1/100th of a semitone, no more, no less. It's true
that few if any should be able to distinguish a note from a note that's one cent
off when heard in isolation, but the cent is not some sort of biological limit,
as far as I know. When played together, a difference of one cent between notes
is certainly audible in the beating (at least on artificial waves, I have no
idea if the same is true for physical pianos). Whether you can even physically
tune a piano that accurately is another matter altogether. Even if you can't,
you should still like to be able to tell that you didn't.
Even if you consider accurate detection of 1 cent to be good enough for tuning
purposes, your measuring equipment still needs to be an order of magnitude
better. A 0.1 cent difference is 57.8 ppm. 12 ppm is 0.02 cent, which isn't
excessive if you're going for 0.2 cent accuracy.
--
J.
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