famous beagle
Well-known member
To dredge up this old thread again ... a funny update.
I subscribe to a channel called The Great Courses on Amazon Prime. It's filled with tons of awesome courses on all kinds of topics that. A course might have 40 lectures in it, and each lecture is about 30 to 40 minutes long. I usually pick a topic and work my way through the lectures --- one a day --- during my lunch break.
I'm watching one on quantum mechanics right now.
I still have trouble with this "analog is a continuous wave" concept, especially after viewing this video:
D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org) - YouTube
Which seems to suggest that digital audio "sampling" does not work the way most people think it does. Granted, I know very little about how digital audio works (and I apparently know very little about how analog audio works too), but I found the video---and the demonstrations in it---very engaging and interesting.
Maybe some of you will not agree with it or find fault with it? It's beyond my pay grade, so I can't comment on it. I did find the demonstrations with the oscilloscope (GD -- took me about 15 tries to spell that word correctly) very compelling, though. The fact that the comments are disabled on this video leads me to believe that there was likely some serious ugly debate going on.
Anyway, I'm only on lecture 6 in the quantum mechanics course, but so far it's been made clear that---given our understanding at the current time---the universe is essentially "quantized" (hence the "quanta" in quantum mechanics), meaning that energy comes in discreet, indivisible "packets." And so this would seem to suggest that there is no such thing as a "pure continuous wave."
BUT, there's also this concept called wave particle duality. And it says that everything (every particle)---whether you're talking about light or matter---acts as both a particle and a wave, depending on when/how you look at it. (I'm paraphrasing horribly here.) And so that muddies the waters a bit more. I'm more confused now than ever!
By the way, if you want to know where I got my idea of particles on tape resembling the "analogue" of a sound wave, you can blame it on Peter McIan and his book Using Your Portable Studio. You can see in this excerpt how his simplification of the process led to my misunderstanding.
Plus, I'd always heard that phonographs and/or wire recorders essentially worked in a similar fashion --- i.e., when "recording," the needle actually etched an analogue of the sound wave into the wax cylinder. On playback, this process was essentially reversed. (Again, an extreme simplification.) So I kind of thought the same thing was essentially happening with magnetic tape.
I subscribe to a channel called The Great Courses on Amazon Prime. It's filled with tons of awesome courses on all kinds of topics that. A course might have 40 lectures in it, and each lecture is about 30 to 40 minutes long. I usually pick a topic and work my way through the lectures --- one a day --- during my lunch break.
I'm watching one on quantum mechanics right now.
I still have trouble with this "analog is a continuous wave" concept, especially after viewing this video:
D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org) - YouTube
Which seems to suggest that digital audio "sampling" does not work the way most people think it does. Granted, I know very little about how digital audio works (and I apparently know very little about how analog audio works too), but I found the video---and the demonstrations in it---very engaging and interesting.
Maybe some of you will not agree with it or find fault with it? It's beyond my pay grade, so I can't comment on it. I did find the demonstrations with the oscilloscope (GD -- took me about 15 tries to spell that word correctly) very compelling, though. The fact that the comments are disabled on this video leads me to believe that there was likely some serious ugly debate going on.
Anyway, I'm only on lecture 6 in the quantum mechanics course, but so far it's been made clear that---given our understanding at the current time---the universe is essentially "quantized" (hence the "quanta" in quantum mechanics), meaning that energy comes in discreet, indivisible "packets." And so this would seem to suggest that there is no such thing as a "pure continuous wave."
BUT, there's also this concept called wave particle duality. And it says that everything (every particle)---whether you're talking about light or matter---acts as both a particle and a wave, depending on when/how you look at it. (I'm paraphrasing horribly here.) And so that muddies the waters a bit more. I'm more confused now than ever!
By the way, if you want to know where I got my idea of particles on tape resembling the "analogue" of a sound wave, you can blame it on Peter McIan and his book Using Your Portable Studio. You can see in this excerpt how his simplification of the process led to my misunderstanding.
Plus, I'd always heard that phonographs and/or wire recorders essentially worked in a similar fashion --- i.e., when "recording," the needle actually etched an analogue of the sound wave into the wax cylinder. On playback, this process was essentially reversed. (Again, an extreme simplification.) So I kind of thought the same thing was essentially happening with magnetic tape.