Hi All,
I think Ron makes a very good point. I can't contribute much from a
technical standpoint, but I would add that I find the Datong analog filters
(made back in the 80's in the U.K.) are, in my view, superior to most of the
digital filters like those from Timewave and other manufacturers. If you
haven't tinkered with a Datong filter, you should try and track one down.
Unfortunately, they aren't that easy to get ahold of here in the U.S., but
every so often one pops up on Ebay. I think there were three models, the
I, II, and the III. The only real difference between the two latter
models is that the III had an automatic notch feature, while the II was
manual.
Dave W7AQK
- Original Message -
From: Ron D'Eau Claire r...@cobi.biz
To: 'Elecraft Reflector' Elecraft@mailman.qth.net
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2009 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Interesting Read: Dinosaur Concepts - why are
wealways so conservative?
Right now the cheapest and most powerful tool in most designer's arsenal
is
digital signal processing and digital control systems.
Remember the old saying, When all you have is a hammer, everything begins
to look like a nail.
We humans are designed to process and analyze analog data, not digital
data.
That's why we love pictures and graphs but can't make sense out of the
racket of a raw digital signal fed to an audio transducer. All of our
senses
work with analog inputs.
The fastest computers I ever used are still among the fastest today at the
tasks they are designed for, and that was back in the 1960's. They were
analog computers.
Digital systems became popular in recent decades because the hardware
became
absurdly cheap, both in cost and energy demand. With this technology, one
can take an absurd brute force approach to a problem, including going to
extremes trying to produce an analog output humans can work with
efficiently, and come up with an acceptable result at an acceptable price
(aided by an overwhelming amount of marketing saying if it's digital it's
better!).
But just considering the millions of active devices and the huge number of
lines of code it takes to accomplish even a simple task shows just what a
brute force solution digital systems are today, especially when one
realizes that 99.9% of the same results can be had with a handful of
analog
parts and one or two active devices.
What we haven't done over the past few decades is develop analog
technologies that can be cookie-cutter stamped out by the billions at
cheaply as digital integrated circuits.
It is true that digital systems are amazingly valuable and useful but,
like
Alley Oop's stone axe in Moo, because they're invaluable today doesn't
mean
they aren't just a stop gap until we develop a more efficient technology
better adapted to our analog senses.
In the meantime there are those right here who prefer a K2 or K1 to a K3.
And many who prefer an older vacuum tube rig to any of those. They aren't
just 'conservative' or 'dinosaurs'. Many, perhaps most, are just
connoisseurs of good analog signal processing which, for their purposes,
they find better than even the best of today's digital systems.
Ron AC7AC
-Original Message-
This was published in 2007, and makes no reference to our exalted Elecraft
K3, but it's still very interesting reading, and indirectly on topic.
Thanks to Adam Farson, VE7OJ / AB4OJ, for translation and hosting:
http://www.ab4oj.com/dl/misc/dinosaur_concepts.pdf
73,
Steve
NN4X
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