Xiph's Episode 2: _Digital Show & Tell_ is out, Second digital media geekout video from Xiph.Org Options

[xiphmont]

Xiph Episode 2: Digital Show & Tell is out!

"The second video from Xiph.Org explores multiple facets of digital audio signals and how they really behave in the real world. Sampling, quantization, dither, band-limiting, and vintage bench equipment all in one video!"

It's a followup in a sense to the 24/192 article of last year. Other videos: http://xiph.org/video/

This post has been edited by greynol: Feb 27 2013, 17:43

Reason for edit: Removed the "!" from the title per news submission guidelines

[bennetng]

Interesting to see the "not stairstep" illustrations. I was a sound engineer in toy design field and needed to compose/arrange music, sound effects and record voice dialogs for several kinds of low-end MCUs. Our customers often complained the sound quality (they don't know what is aliasing, they described the distortion as "metallic noise") but we just explained to them that the speakers (usually about 25 to 40mm diameter) were to blame. We won't tell them the truth.

I generated a sine sweep and digitized the analog output of those MCUs and found that the waveform is even worse than zero order hold, it looks like sawtooth.

[_if]

Monty, that was a great video. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I really would like to see more. Normally watching all of a 20-minute Internet video feels like a chore to me, but this was really good and even my not-really-techie girlfriend liked it. You should make these more often.

Interesting to see the "not stairstep" illustrations. I was a sound engineer in toy design field and needed to compose/arrange music, sound effects and record voice dialogs for several kinds of low-end MCUs...

Sorry for the off-topic, but this is interesting to me to finally hear. I've long suspected the speakers were not really the primary reason children's toys sound so terrible, since it sounded more like very low quality digital and, weirdly enough, I'd like to hear more about the mechanics of it. It seems the sound quality hasn't gotten much better since the '90s and I've wondered why when you'd think it wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to put a decent chip in.