Christian Luther
Author Archives: Christian Luther
Research & Development Engineer in the audio industry and the creator of The Science of Sound.
Christian Luther
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Making Phase Audible – Part 3: Comb Filters
And on we go to the third and final part of the series about making phase audible. This time it’s about the most important ways in which a phase response influences sound tremendously. At the same time, I’m introducing a highly versatile concept that will become a recurring theme on The Science of Sound.
Making Phase Audible – Part 2: Even More Fun With Allpasses
Continuing our journey through the world of phase, we are going to have even more fun with allpasses today. The magic starts to happen when a phase response changes over time.
Making Phase Audible – Part 1: Fun With Allpasses
After last week’s introduction, we’re going to start actually listening to phase effects today. First of all, we look at what it takes to make a static nonlinear phase response audible.
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One Word To Confuse Them All
In the world of audio, nothing seems to trigger more reflexes of fear than “phase issues”. The reason is probably that it describes a rather scientific concept which is sometimes hard to relate to the reality of music signals. Also, there are three very different phenomena that are often confused by using the same word for all of them.
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Time Resolution in Digital Audio
After having covered the more or less well known basics of digital audio in terms of bit depth and samplerate, I’d like to go one step further and explore another common buzzword: the time domain resolution of digital audio.
Analog Summing Demystified Part 2 – Thinking Outside the Summing Box
We continue our journey through the world of analog summing with a detailed look at active summing networks. After that, we’ll recap what we now know about the analog summing myth and start thinking out of the summing box.
Analog Summing Demystified – Part 1: An Introduction
Today, we are entering the dangerous territory of one of the most reliable causes for flame wars on audio forums: analog summing boxes!
It is essentially a recreation of the part of an analog mixing console that actually mixes all the channels together. The promise is to provide a bit of “console sound” while otherwise still working “in the box“. In this two-part series, we’ll analyze analog summing circuits thoroughly and try to find out what there is to it. Today’s article is about introducing you to the basics of analog summing circuits and the first of two typical types of these circuits – the passive summing network. Next week we’ll look at the active summing network and think about how we can apply what we learned to think outside the summing box.
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About Sampling Rates in Digital Audio
We continue to dive into the foundations of digital audio. I hopefully cleared up a thing or two about the choice of bit depth already. And today I’d like to take you on a short trip into the unwieldy territory of the sampling theorem.
Hearing: The Blessings and Curses
For working with audio, we have two tools at hand to assess what is going on: hearing and measurement. I already posted an article about the blessings and curses of audio measurement, to increase awareness about what we can and cannot achieve with it, and about the several traps installed along the way. And necessarily there must be a complementary post that deals with the even more important tool we use: our hearing. Continue reading
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Quantization Noise and Bit Depth
In this early stage in the life of The Science of Sound, I’d like to cover some of the basics especially of digital audio, as these are a recurring source of confusion in many discussions. Today we’ll start with covering the „vertical“ dimension of digital audio: quantization noise and bit depth.