On 3 Jun 01, 12:56AM, Stainless Steel Rat wrote:
> Square waves taking more space. Just plain BS. The shape of a wave has no
> bearing whatsoever on how much "space" is required to store it.
actually, if you want to represent a square wave with the accuracy required
to make it recognizable as a digital bit, it does take a bit (no pun
intended) of extra space. electrical impulses (& therefore magnetic media)
have a hard time doing an instant change in voltage, such as the end of a
cycle of a square wave. instead, they tend to decay over time, eating into
the next cycle. this is why old cassette data storage drives on commodore
64's were so damn slow. sine waves sit much more gracefully on wires &
tapes, & also the nature of analog audio makes it less crucial to get an
exact representation anyway.
for uncompressed 16 bit stereo pcm, you're essentially dealing with a
square wave of 16 bits/channel * 2 channels * 44100 Hz = 1411200 Hz.
that's extremely high to just spit onto what is mechanically no different
from a metal cassette. we know that analog has no problem (other than the
well-known problems of cassettes;) putting this much information on a
cassette (since the highest frequency involved is around 21000 Hz even on
really high end gear), so the original poster was correct in that digital
audio requires a lot more "space" on the tape. this is why dat/dss use
rotating heads & dcc uses compression.
peter
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