Recent Comments

1. 8 days ago on Luann Againn

   Interesting Tiff and Luann are on reasonably good terms now, though that happens, I guess.

2. 15 days ago on Swan Eaters

   Happy days!

3. 15 days ago on Luann

   Oh, boy, what a ridiculous movie. Patrick Swayze was arguably an even worse actor, so maybe that helped her a bit. I remember watching “A Few Good Men” and thinking, why did they cast her.

4. 15 days ago on Luann

   Don’t really see that. Luann had Quill, for example, who certainly seemed more appealing than Nil. Tiffany is always implied to have enjoyed the attentions of many guys, though we don’t really see it. And she could have Ox in a heartbeat. Meanwhile, what about Phil?

5. 25 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Please, noe.

6. 25 days ago on Dick Tracy

   I like this read on Sam. Like this writer in general.

7. 29 days ago on Dick Tracy

   I’m more inclined to agree with firestrike1.

8. about 1 month ago on Dick Tracy

   If the implication is that Pa Totten worked under Himmler in the SS, it’s a stretch. Even if he were in his early 20s at the time, that would make him over 100 now.

9. about 2 months ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   LP mastering did not usually involve high-frequency filtering; it was just a struggle to get very high frequencies onto and off of a vinyl record. Anyhow, there are many other issues with LPs. It’s nearly impossible to get frequency response flat enough for the errors not to be audible. Dynamic range is pretty limited, especially at low frequencies. Impulse noise. Audible time-base errors (wow and flutter) are almost inevitable. Phono cartridges (some worse than others) tend to generate excess vertical stylus motion at high frequencies, resulting in excess L-R information in the output. This can masquerade as greater depth or width in the stereo image, but it’s essentially fake.

10. about 2 months ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

    Square waves are not what come out of a digital-to-analog converter, though. What comes out is identical to the waveform that entered the analog-to-digital converter used when the recording was made (or the equivalent after whatever manipulation is applied during production). The only way to get a square wave out is to start out with a square wave, and even then it can’t have a fundamental at too high a frequency or the squareness will get lost, because square wave is generated by taking a tone and adding odd-order harmonics to it at precise levels. Put a square wave with a 10-kHz fundamental into an A/D converter and the only thing that will survive is the fundamental, because all the other components of the square wave will have been filtered out. I think the idea that square waves are involved emerged from the diagrams commonly used to illustrate sampling, which unfortunately give the impression that a smooth waveform is being permanently transformed into a jagged one. I wrote one of the first articles explaining digital audio to consumers and to this day regret not creating a sidebar to explain sampling in greater detail, because of this misconception. Although the process does generate spurious signal components at frequencies above half the sampling rate, these are filtered out on playback. In the end, what comes out is, very pristinely, what went in. Raising the sampling rate just increases the highest frequency that can be recorded without distortion. Although there’s no harm in going to a sampling rate greater than 44.1 or 48 kHz, there’s no real benefit, either. A 96-kHz sampling rate just means that you could cleanly record frequencies up to almost 48 kHz, yet only young people with exceptional hearing will notice the insertion of a filter that removes everything above about 16 kHz, especially on music. Bats we ain’t.