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Blijft een zeer interessant onderwerp, daarom hieronder de tekst van een artikel uit Mondo:
DISTORTING THE TRUTH
TONY ANDREWS OF FUNKTION ONE
TALKS ABOUT A SUBJECT CLOSE TO HIS HEART
AND ASKS FOR SOME CLARITY IN THE INDUSTRY.
We "Men of Audio" as my dear friend Clifford Henricksen put it in one of his frequent moments of levity, fight the good fight for good sound or high fidelity.
Lets just take a look at the words high fidelity or hi fi. Taken literally hi fi means large quantities of faithfulness. This faithfulness refers to the original sound so in single words we are talking truth or purity. So the next issue is how shall ye judge fidelity and how do you maximise it?
Criteria for Fidelity
Even frequency response.
The desirability of flat response is self evident but in practise this is not as important as believed. This is fortunate for loudspeaker manufacturers as very few products are in fact flat.
The sound system is able to run comfortably delivering the required sound levels.
This is common sense and good practice when operating any kind of machine. As far as audio goes it maintains headroom giving peak signals room to breathe.
Absence of clipping, harmonics, artefacts, etc.
This is where it goes horribly wrong and is often completely out of control. As it is the most important aspect of fidelity we find ourselves, all too frequently, in an uncomfortable audio experience. One is able to ameliorate frequency response and a flat out sound system can always be turned down. As this is very often psychologically difficult for some people one can always get in more amplifiers and speakers. However, it is very rare, if not impossible, to regenerate a degraded signal. The concept of fidelity is replaced by all manner of noxious wave forms which, as you can probably tell by the fact that I am writing this, is a matter of great concern to me. Apart from being entirely offensive it is actually very damaging to human hearing. In fact distortion, in my and many others experience, is more damaging to hearing than level. This is because distortion is often clipped signal i.e. a smooth sinusoidal waveform with the top chopped off leaving very sharp corners which now approximates a square wave, containing excessive amounts of unwanted harmonics, which I think is very unnatural - our ears and brain are not designed to deal with such wave forms for extended periods. If responsibility and care is not brought to bear on the situation the whole industry is going to be faced with draconian level legislation where in fact the real culprit is distortion. Some of the worst offenders are clubs. I think I have only encountered a minority of djs in my entire life who didn't run the outputs of their mixers solidly into the red. There is not much you can do with the signal after that. Engineers are thus reduced to subterfuge and doctor the controls/meters so that even when they are solidly into the red the output signal is still reasonable.
In my mind distortion means twisting away from truth.
Distortion is the opposite of fidelity and is alarmingly easy to end up with. It comes in many varieties and can be introduced at any point in the signal path. Common events are over driving either the input or output levels as in the previously mentioned example. Another is the source material itself. A more recent introduction are the horrible results from inadequate A to D and D to As (this has spawned an industry wide revival in valve based processing products). Certain of the early samplers were a glaring example of this. All these points can be summed up as maintenance of signal path integrity. I have left the most damning example of distortion introduction to last which is of course the loudspeakers. Notwithstanding operator abuse the intrinsic distortion figures of loudspeakers working at just 10% of their rated power (when does that happen in real life?) dwarf anything which can be found in other parts of the signal path which are not being overdriven. There are some very guilty loudspeakers out th
DISTORTING THE TRUTH
TONY ANDREWS OF FUNKTION ONE
TALKS ABOUT A SUBJECT CLOSE TO HIS HEART
AND ASKS FOR SOME CLARITY IN THE INDUSTRY.
We "Men of Audio" as my dear friend Clifford Henricksen put it in one of his frequent moments of levity, fight the good fight for good sound or high fidelity.
Lets just take a look at the words high fidelity or hi fi. Taken literally hi fi means large quantities of faithfulness. This faithfulness refers to the original sound so in single words we are talking truth or purity. So the next issue is how shall ye judge fidelity and how do you maximise it?
Criteria for Fidelity
Even frequency response.
The desirability of flat response is self evident but in practise this is not as important as believed. This is fortunate for loudspeaker manufacturers as very few products are in fact flat.
The sound system is able to run comfortably delivering the required sound levels.
This is common sense and good practice when operating any kind of machine. As far as audio goes it maintains headroom giving peak signals room to breathe.
Absence of clipping, harmonics, artefacts, etc.
This is where it goes horribly wrong and is often completely out of control. As it is the most important aspect of fidelity we find ourselves, all too frequently, in an uncomfortable audio experience. One is able to ameliorate frequency response and a flat out sound system can always be turned down. As this is very often psychologically difficult for some people one can always get in more amplifiers and speakers. However, it is very rare, if not impossible, to regenerate a degraded signal. The concept of fidelity is replaced by all manner of noxious wave forms which, as you can probably tell by the fact that I am writing this, is a matter of great concern to me. Apart from being entirely offensive it is actually very damaging to human hearing. In fact distortion, in my and many others experience, is more damaging to hearing than level. This is because distortion is often clipped signal i.e. a smooth sinusoidal waveform with the top chopped off leaving very sharp corners which now approximates a square wave, containing excessive amounts of unwanted harmonics, which I think is very unnatural - our ears and brain are not designed to deal with such wave forms for extended periods. If responsibility and care is not brought to bear on the situation the whole industry is going to be faced with draconian level legislation where in fact the real culprit is distortion. Some of the worst offenders are clubs. I think I have only encountered a minority of djs in my entire life who didn't run the outputs of their mixers solidly into the red. There is not much you can do with the signal after that. Engineers are thus reduced to subterfuge and doctor the controls/meters so that even when they are solidly into the red the output signal is still reasonable.
In my mind distortion means twisting away from truth.
Distortion is the opposite of fidelity and is alarmingly easy to end up with. It comes in many varieties and can be introduced at any point in the signal path. Common events are over driving either the input or output levels as in the previously mentioned example. Another is the source material itself. A more recent introduction are the horrible results from inadequate A to D and D to As (this has spawned an industry wide revival in valve based processing products). Certain of the early samplers were a glaring example of this. All these points can be summed up as maintenance of signal path integrity. I have left the most damning example of distortion introduction to last which is of course the loudspeakers. Notwithstanding operator abuse the intrinsic distortion figures of loudspeakers working at just 10% of their rated power (when does that happen in real life?) dwarf anything which can be found in other parts of the signal path which are not being overdriven. There are some very guilty loudspeakers out th
. Ik ben er nog niet 1 tegen gekomen zelfs. Ik heb wel eens met een DJ gewerkt die ervoor zorgte dat de processor van ons Renkus Heinz setje, de hele avond/nacht lang de beveiliging voor max cone excursion en temp limit voor zowel het suglaag, als laag en hoog er op had staan, gewoon echt continu <img src=icon_smile_tongue.gif border=0 align=middle>.
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