Golden Earring wrote: > :) > 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. >
Bell Labs (who no longer exist) concerned themselves with far more than mere telephone conversations. Given your probable age you should remember when about half of all movies featured "Western Electric Sound System" in their credits. If you are familiar with large corporate arrangements of the day, Western Electric was the manufacturing division of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and their research devision was called "Bell Labs" IOW, high quality sound was part of their agenda. There is a principle called extensibility or scaling. Basically, in very many cases high performance is obtained using the same basic principles as is used to achieve lower level performance, they are just logically extended by carrying them a little further. This is abundantly true for audio. If modest frequency response and distortion yields good speech performance, extending the relevant technology along existing clear paths yields far better performance, and excellent high fidelity will result. This is particularly true of audio, and even more true of digital audio. It shows up in the development of digital audio in that many of the same research organizations as developed digital switchboards extended the same basic technology and within 10 years their digital hardware were producing commercial digital recordings that sound excellent to this day. > > 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! > That is a pretty brave dare because if you actually do it, the resulting sound is actually pretty good, and it gets even better when leave a component that is superfluous for recording and playback namely Skype, out of the system. OTOH, even the sonic and visible performance of Skype continues to improve. The technical performance of modern PC sound systems is in the same or better than best audio CDs, and in fact millions of audiophiles use their computers or cell phones (whose basic audio systems aside from the cell phone system) is comparable or better than the best audio recording and playback systems that were in use for the most critical professional work not that many years ago. In fact most technical advances beyond current cell phones and PC's have no scientifically demonstrable audible advantages. > > 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? > What a wad of Poorly informed falsehoods! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ arnyk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64365 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
