Audio System Measurements
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Audio System Measurements
Audio system measurements are a means of quantifying system performance. These measurements are made for several purposes. Designers take measurements so that they can specify the performance of a piece of equipment. Maintenance engineers make them to ensure equipment is still working to specification, or to ensure that the cumulative defects of an audio path are within limits considered acceptable. Audio system measurements often accommodate psychoacoustic principles to measure the system in a way that relates to human hearing. Subjectivity and frequency weighting Subjectively valid methods came to prominence in consumer audio in the UK and Europe in the 1970s, when the introduction of compact cassette tape, dbx and Dolby noise reduction techniques revealed the unsatisfactory nature of many basic engineering measurements. The specification of weighted CCIR-468 quasi-peak noise, and weighted quasi-peak wow and flutter became particularly widely used and attempts were mad ...
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Wow And Flutter Measurement
Measurement of wow and flutter is carried out on audio tape machines, cassette recorders and players, and other analog recording and reproduction devices with rotary components (e.g. movie projectors, turntables (vinyl recording), etc.) This measurement quantifies the amount of 'frequency wobble' (caused by speed fluctuations) present in subjectively valid terms. Turntables tend to suffer mainly ''slow wow''. In digital systems, which are locked to crystal oscillators, variations in clock timing are referred to as wander or jitter, depending on speed. While the terms ''wow'' and ''flutter'' used to be used separately (for wobbles at a rate below and above 4 Hz respectively), they tend to be combined now that universal standards exist for measurement which take both into account simultaneously. Listeners find flutter most objectionable when the actual frequency of wobble is 4 Hz, and less audible above and below this rate. This fact forms the basis for the weighting curve ...
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LP Album
The LP (from "long playing" or "long play") is an analog sound storage medium, a phonograph record format characterized by: a speed of  rpm; a 12- or 10-inch (30- or 25-cm) diameter; use of the "microgroove" groove specification; and a vinyl (a copolymer of vinyl chloride acetate) composition disk. Introduced by Columbia in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from a few relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound, it remained the standard format for record albums (during a period in popular music known as the album era) until its gradual replacement from the 1980s to the early 2000s, first by cassettes, then by compact discs, and finally by digital music distribution. Beginning in the late 2000s, the LP has experienced a resurgence in popularity. Format advantages At the time the LP was introduced, nearly all phonograph records for home use were made of an abrasive shellac compound ...
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Filter (signal Processing)
In signal processing, a filter is a device or process that removes some unwanted components or features from a signal. Filtering is a class of signal processing, the defining feature of filters being the complete or partial suppression of some aspect of the signal. Most often, this means removing some frequencies or frequency bands. However, filters do not exclusively act in the frequency domain; especially in the field of image processing many other targets for filtering exist. Correlations can be removed for certain frequency components and not for others without having to act in the frequency domain. Filters are widely used in electronics and telecommunication, in radio, television, audio recording, radar, control systems, music synthesis, image processing, and computer graphics. There are many different bases of classifying filters and these overlap in many different ways; there is no simple hierarchical classification. Filters may be: *non-linear or linear *time-variant or t ...
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Equalization (audio)
Equalization, or simply EQ, in sound recording and reproduction is the process of adjusting the volume of different frequency bands within an audio signal. The circuit or equipment used to achieve this is called an equalizer. Most hi-fi equipment uses relatively simple filters to make bass and treble adjustments. Graphic and parametric equalizers have much more flexibility in tailoring the frequency content of an audio signal. Broadcast and recording studios use sophisticated equalizers capable of much more detailed adjustments, such as eliminating unwanted sounds or making certain instruments or voices more prominent. Since equalizers "adjust the amplitude of audio signals at particular frequencies" they are, "in other words, frequency-specific volume knobs." Equalizers are used in recording studios, radio studios and production control rooms, and live sound reinforcement and in instrument amplifiers, such as guitar amplifiers, to correct or adjust the response of mi ...
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Preamplifiers
A preamplifier, also known as a preamp, is an electronic amplifier that converts a weak electrical signal into an output signal strong enough to be noise-tolerant and strong enough for further processing, or for sending to a power amplifier and a loudspeaker. Without this, the final signal would be noisy or distorted. They are typically used to amplify signals from analog sensors such as microphones and pickups. Because of this, the preamplifier is often placed close to the sensor to reduce the effects of noise and interference. Description An ideal preamp will be linear (have a constant gain through its operating range), have high input impedance (requiring only a minimal amount of current to sense the input signal) and a low output impedance (when current is drawn from the output there is minimal change in the output voltage). It is used to boost the signal strength to drive the cable to the main instrument without significantly degrading the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Th ...
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Bass (music)
Bass or Basses may refer to: Fish * Bass (fish), various saltwater and freshwater species Music * Bass (sound), describing low-frequency sound or one of several instruments in the bass range: ** Bass (instrument), including: ** Acoustic bass guitar, with a hollow body ** Bass clarinet, a clarinet with a lower sound ** Bass cornett, a low pitched wind instrument ** Bass drum, a large drum ** Bass flute, an instrument one octave lower than a flute ** Bass guitar, with a solid body and electric pickups ** Bass recorder, an instrument one octave lower than the alto recorder ** Bass sarrusophone, a low pitched double reed instrument ** Bass saxophone ** Bass trombone, a lower pitched trombone ** Bass trumpet ** Bass violin ** Double bass, the largest and lowest pitched bowed string instrument ** Electric upright bass, the electric version of a double bass ** Tuba, often called "the bass" in the context of brass instruments * Bass (voice type), a type of classical male singing v ...
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Hertz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one hertz is the reciprocal of one second. It is named after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), the first person to provide conclusive proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in multiples: kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz), gigahertz (GHz), terahertz (THz). Some of the unit's most common uses are in the description of periodic waveforms and musical tones, particularly those used in radio- and audio-related applications. It is also used to describe the clock speeds at which computers and other electronics are driven. The units are sometimes also used as a representation of the energy of a photon, via the Planck relation ''E'' = ''hν'', where ''E'' is the photon's energy, ''ν'' is its freq ...
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Decibel
The decibel (symbol: dB) is a relative unit of measurement equal to one tenth of a bel (B). It expresses the ratio of two values of a power or root-power quantity on a logarithmic scale. Two signals whose levels differ by one decibel have a power ratio of 101/10 (approximately ) or root-power ratio of 10 (approximately ). The unit expresses a relative change or an absolute value. In the latter case, the numeric value expresses the ratio of a value to a fixed reference value; when used in this way, the unit symbol is often suffixed with letter codes that indicate the reference value. For example, for the reference value of 1 volt, a common suffix is " V" (e.g., "20 dBV"). Two principal types of scaling of the decibel are in common use. When expressing a power ratio, it is defined as ten times the logarithm in base 10. That is, a change in ''power'' by a factor of 10 corresponds to a 10 dB change in level. When expressing root-power quantities, a change in ''ampl ...
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Decibel
The decibel (symbol: dB) is a relative unit of measurement equal to one tenth of a bel (B). It expresses the ratio of two values of a power or root-power quantity on a logarithmic scale. Two signals whose levels differ by one decibel have a power ratio of 101/10 (approximately ) or root-power ratio of 10 (approximately ). The unit expresses a relative change or an absolute value. In the latter case, the numeric value expresses the ratio of a value to a fixed reference value; when used in this way, the unit symbol is often suffixed with letter codes that indicate the reference value. For example, for the reference value of 1 volt, a common suffix is " V" (e.g., "20 dBV"). Two principal types of scaling of the decibel are in common use. When expressing a power ratio, it is defined as ten times the logarithm in base 10. That is, a change in ''power'' by a factor of 10 corresponds to a 10 dB change in level. When expressing root-power quantities, a change in ''ampl ...
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Frequency Response
In signal processing and electronics, the frequency response of a system is the quantitative measure of the magnitude and phase of the output as a function of input frequency. The frequency response is widely used in the design and analysis of systems, such as audio and control systems, where they simplify mathematical analysis by converting governing differential equations into algebraic equations. In an audio system, it may be used to minimize audible distortion by designing components (such as microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers) so that the overall response is as flat (uniform) as possible across the system's bandwidth. In control systems, such as a vehicle's cruise control, it may be used to assess system stability, often through the use of Bode plots. Systems with a specific frequency response can be designed using analog and digital filters. The frequency response characterizes systems in the frequency domain, just as the impulse response characterizes systems in the ...
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Dolby Noise-reduction System
A Dolby noise-reduction system, or Dolby NR, is one of a series of Audio noise reduction, noise reduction systems developed by Dolby Laboratories for use in analog audio tape recording. The first was ''#Dolby A, Dolby A'', a professional broadband noise reduction system for recording studios in 1965, but the best-known is ''#Dolby B, Dolby B'' (introduced in 1968), a sliding band system for the consumer market, which helped make high fidelity practical on cassette tapes, which used a relatively noisy tape size and speed. It is common on high-fidelity stereo tape players and recorders to the present day, although Dolby has as of 2016 ceased licensing the technology for new cassette decks. Of the noise reduction systems, ''Dolby A'' and ''#Dolby SR, Dolby SR'' were developed for professional use. ''Dolby B'', ''#Dolby C, C'', and ''#Dolby S, S'' were designed for the consumer market. Aside from #Dolby HX/HX-Pro, Dolby HX, all the Dolby variants wo ...
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