🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ku9ldkINNh0l@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> nemeth@helix.Eng.Sun.COM (Les Nemeth) writes:
>In article <1992Apr8.091944.19345@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.UUCP (Gary Coffman) writes:
>  
>>>Some respondents have claimed that because any loudspeaker is so much 'worse'
>>>than a CD player (and I'd love to see him/her explain precisely what _that_ is
>>>supposed to mean) even if there might possibly be differences between CD
>>>players you'll never hear them.  This is arrant nonsense.
>
>>The typical loudspeaker generates between 4 and 7% distortion. A CD player
>>at .03% distortion is at least 200 times better. If you can tell differences
>>of 1/200th in distortion, you qualify as one of the golden eared.
>
>Gary,
>
>What you are missing here is the fact that distortion is of no relevance
>in this equation. There are going to be better and/or worse players than
>others regardless of price. Sound quality of the CD player has to do with
>how well the player converts the data from digital to analog. Therefore,
>it is in your best interest to buy the player with the most oversampling
>per dollar spent. It has been proven that, the more oversampling a player
>has, the better it is at reproducing the sound faithfully.

It does reduce *production* cost somewhat to use oversampling instead of
building good brickwall filters, but it's not *necessary*, however, to
use oversampling to get a faithful reproduction. Standard high quality 
14 bit A/D converters, and well designed brickwall filters are available. 
They cost more than single bit oversamplers to produce, but there's no 
theoretical reason why they should be inferior. The real culprit in
many CD players is lousy line driver amps, and that's just straight
forward analog engineering. Everybody *should* be able to get that
right, but a dime saved on capacitors is $100,000 on a million unit
production run.

>A CD player can have .0001% distortion, but if it has a tinny sound who the
>heck is gonna buy it. Probably the guy that doesn't take the time out to 
>compare one player to the other...  Conversely, if another player has .001%
>distortion but has a muddy sound, who the hecks gonna want it either. What
>we are looking for is the one that sounds the most natural, regardless of
>the distortion level, provided it's not around 10%.

My dictionary defines distortion as a deviation from the orginal signal
waveform. It doesn't define "muddy" in any useful way. When you get the
same signal out of a recording that was put into it originally, that's
no distortion. A machine with .03% total distortion is over 200 times
more faithful to the orginal recording than a system with 7% distortion.
Whatever "muddy" means, it has to show up in the total distortion figure,
or you are describing the orginal signal, and there's no helping that.

Gary