teawrecks

I believe Grounded is limited to 4 players too, unfortunately.

And it totally does break, it's just that people are familiar with the ways windows breaks, and know how to work around it.

They couldn't, didn't you read? They were stuck in vim!

I've always preferred a Tom Collins. Sweet instead of bitter.

This is the eternal stalemate of our two party system. Everyone agrees that there are many big obvious problems that need addressing, both parties want to solve it their own way, but (for better and worse) both only have the power to prevent the other from doing anything.

All the more reason why it would be so unsettling.

Yeah, whoever designed radio waves wasn't thinking about the potential for creative architecture!

Ahh ok, that makes more sense. I think I never saw the connection between a transistor and an amp until now. Using a small signal to modulate a different, larger signal. Or like a relay.

if you don't use the volume control on the amp then there's no attenuation. the downside is that it's really loud.

Ahhh, I think this is the part I was missing. So I should think of an amp as "injecting" a fixed amount of energy to the signal, way more than I need, and then the volume pot attenuates it back to a comfortable volume. That makes sense since we've established that pots attenuate, which necessarily destroy the signal. I still had it in my head that the amount of energy used to amplify the signal was proportional to the volume knob position.

I didn't know how air affected frequency response, but that makes sense.

As for how clean my ears are, I'm completely deaf, so who cares?

jk 😁. Thanks for the talk, I learned some things!

Ok, the analog attenuation part makes sense now I think. I assumed that an amp increases the amplitude of a signal, and that a pot achieved the inverse (i guess dividing the signal?) but it's not, it's effectively subtraction?

Back to my DAC/amp, realistically am I ever intentionally attenuating the analog signal in order to get it to a listening volume? Or am I only ever amplifying it? I think that's the main difference in my head. If I output my digital signal to the DAC at 100%, and then only ever amplify it to a listening volume, then there's no way for the signal to be attenuated at all, right?

is the quiet sine wave of lower quality than one that's using the full bit depth of the adcs output because it's intended to represent the maximum level that the adcs input saw from the preamp/microphone/whatever?

of course it isn't. it just wasn't loud.

No, yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking that, it didn't matter how strong the signal was, as long as the full sine wave was still present, then quality is preserved. So dividing it down to be a very small voltage, or amplifying it up to be super large, as long as the relative voltages of the signal are retained, we wouldn't lose any quality (is my, likely flawed, impression).

I think I just don't know how to think of analog signals. I understand frequency response in theory, but I can't talk about a signal intuitively in terms of frequency space like you do. Does perfectly amplifying a signal change its frequency response? You don't have to keep answering, at this point I'm just poking your brain lol.

it doesnt matter if you achieve attenuation by dividing the 16 bit level component of a stream of samples or by using a resistor as a voltage divider.

This is the part where I'm not following. In my head, if you're using analog hardware of sufficient quality, you can attenuate the signal to be very quiet, but still preserve it's dynamic range. In fact, the DAC is already outputting a very weak, but faithful analog reproduction of the signal, and an amp with a decent S/N ratio is able to bring that very weak signal up to a listening volume without introducing enough noise to matter.

Hypothetically, if for some reason, you took the signal post-amp, used a pot to attenuate it again down to the energy of the post-DAC level, and again ran it through another amp you would theoretically have the same signal still (I understand that in the real world we would start amplifying noise and the signal would degrade, but stick with me). Nothing about the process necessarily introduces noise and thus destroys the signal, you're only limited to the quality of the components at that point. If you had an infinite chain of theoretically perfect amps and pots, you could repeatedly attenuate and amplify the signal forever without ever losing any quality. It's an analog process that theoretically preserves the signal, +/- some amount of error due to physics.

Meanwhile, 16b is 16b. If you start shrinking all samples relative to each other (ex. down to 1/64 the original volume, or 10b of resolution), different values inevitably have to clamp to the same values (fitting 64k values into 1024 values), losing information and resulting in poorer quality. If you then try to send that 10b signal through a DAC/amp to achieve the same listening volume that you would have had before digital attenuation, it's just a 10b signal bit shifted up. All your LSBs are 0s. You can't possibly attenuate digitally, and then amplify it in any way and hope to get the same signal back. It's a discrete math process which destroys the signal by design.

Would you agree?

I'd say it's off-putting for the same reason that using technically accurate biological terminology in place of sexy-talk can be off-putting. It could come off as impersonal or alien at best, and objectifying at worst.

Think of an alien in disguise saying "hello fellow humans". Technically, it's not wrong, it's just weird.