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From: | Edenyard |
Subject: | Re: [fluid-dev] Purpose of dither? |
Date: | Thu, 10 May 2007 20:06:01 +0100 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (X11/20060420) |
Mihail Zenkov <address@hidden> wrote, very reasonably:
:) Where are you read this? I six years do amplifiers (mainly on tubes) and acoustics. All amplification strongly linear. Otherwise, we have big THD and IMD.
Absolutely right, Mihail. Z F wrote:
Well, what can I say, tubes afford huge dynamic range and so they go as linear as possible providing good quality. Consumer electronics, generally, does not have a huge dynamic range, so to solve the problem, speaker output (in other words, the last stages of amplification) are non-linear. This causes non-linear distortions in the signal, yes, but it is less noticable than clipping.
I really can't believe I just read that! Trust me: if you put music into an amplifier and it has a non-linear transfer characteristic, what comes from the output will sound AWFUL!!!
Furthermore (just for the record), tube (or 'valve') amplifiers will generally have worse linearity than solid-state ones because they need a large, lossy, iron-cored transformer at the output to match the high impedance of the valve output circuit to the low impedance of the speaker coils. In actual fact, tube amplifiers are much more likely to provide nolinearity (the so-called 'soft clipping') for high-amplitude output signals than solid-state circuits, due to (among other things) saturation of the output transformer core.
when I was little I used to fix analogconsumer audio/video equivment, but I do not do that anymore.
Well - with all due respect, it's probably just as well that you stopped when you did. The world doesn't need non-linear audio amplifiers.
Sorry, readers - I think that we MAY have strayed off the topic of adding dither to signals now!
Cheers, Gerald.
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