what is "wow and flutter"

  • Thread starter Thread starter deerecs
  • Start date Start date
Both of them are speed variations in the playback or recording. Flutter sounds just like the name. It's like a rapid tremelo sort of sound.
Wow is much slower speed variation. It'll come across as the pitch changing......going up and down.
 
so, understandibly, it is a bad thing.
but why does it exist?
is it correctible?
 
It exists due to the anomalies in mechanical motors... it can't be completely eliminated, but better (read, more expensive) motors have less wow and flutter than cheap ones.

There is nothing you can do outside of a product redesign to change that spec (unless you're an electronics designer and can change a product's design after the fact).

Digital equipment has no wow and flutter problems since the data is buffered and streamed from the buffer at a constant rate... so the data is not affected by any mechanical motor inconsistencies.
 
Bruce is right - Digital does not have wow and flutter problems just latency and clock skew problems :p

Cheers
Kevin.
 
Digital signals can suffer jitter problems, true -- but latency is more of a soundcard issue than anything else... there is no noticeable latency in using ADATs or HD24s, for example....
 
Yeah.........I've never noticed any timing issues with my adat or more recently my Fostex 1624. Not to hijack this thread but what is latency and why does it cause those bizarre timing errors I hear?
 
Blue Bear says:
but latency is more of a soundcard issue than anything else... there is no noticeable latency in using ADATs or HD24s, for example....
Click to expand...

True enough. I just get edgy with blanket statements.

Lt. Bob says:
Not to hijack this thread but what is latency and why does it cause those bizarre timing errors I hear?
Click to expand...

You could try doing a search, I'm sure there are clearer explanations then this but latency is the delay from when a signal enters a computer (sampled by the A/D) and when you actually hear it. There is a round trip to memory or disk and back to the sound card that the CPU must perform on the sampled data. If your CPU is slow or over burdened, the latency can be quite a problem.

Cheers
Kevin.
 
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