Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Not simulated. Standard PCM digitization occurs in two stages. First is sampling. As long as the sampling rate is at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency in the signal to be sampled, this process is completely lossless. Filter the sampled signal to remove components above half the sampling frequency, and you get back the original signal exactly. Sampling is required to facilitate the second stage of digitization, quantization, which is not lossless. If enough bits are used to quantize each sample, however, the losses will be very, very small. Each bit affords about 6 dB of dynamic range, so once you get to 12 bits the loss across the entire frequency band is smaller than for even the best vinyl records at just midband, and at 16 bits (CD quality), LPs are totally smoked. Put any sort of signal onto a CD and onto an LP, then compare the output from each of those media to the original on a scope. The signal from the CD will be identical to the original, while the signal from the LP will be a bit of a mess, relatively speaking, especially at high frequencies. LP playback is a bit like attaching a rock to the end of a telephone pole and dragging it through a canyon—it’s amazing it works as well as it does.

2. 1 day ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Analog is not inherently warmer than digital. That’s a myth, though that becomes most clearly apparent when comparing a very good analog tape master to a digital copy of it. The copy will sound identical. Vinyl LPs, though a terrific medium for their day, are compromised in important ways. Back in the day, almost all LP masters were filtered below 40 Hz to prevent overcutting and to extend playing times, for example. Frequency response on playback was almost never flat, and frequency response is what we’re most sensitive to once noise and distortion are adequately low. Typically there would be a dip around 3 kHz inherent to the phono-cartridge response (often exacerbated by improper loading) and a mild low-frequency rise caused by tonearm/cartridge resonance—a little false warmth. A few years ago, some folks did a carefully controlled blind comparison of a CD, an LP, and a 192-kbps MP3 file all mastered from the same original. The LP always came in last for all listeners. Unblinding the experiment, so listeners knew which source they were hearing when ranking them, resulted in some preferring the vinyl. CD is actually the highest-quality mass-market music distribution medium we’ve ever had.

3. 23 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Turning into a Magic School Bus adventure.

4. 23 days ago on Last Kiss

   It can be worked out by testing how they respond to different colors and by examination of the cone cells in their retinas. Dogs also tend to be near-sighted relative to humans. A dog’s visual world is rather drab and somewhat blurry compared to ours. On the other hand, they have a wider field of view, see significantly better at night, and have superior motion detection. It’s hypothesized that our sharper, clearer vision emerged in tandem with bipedality, because when your eyes are several feet above the ground, seeing distant objects becomes both practical and valuable. (Same with birds.) Animals whose heads are close to the ground, on the other hand, usually have a much better sense of smell than we do. Our sense of smell stinks.

5. 24 days ago on Last Kiss

   Dogs aren’t actually color blind, but they have only two types of color receptors instead of the three we have, so the range of colors they can see is much more restricted. They can see shades of blue and yellow but not red, green, or orange, for example.

6. 25 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Strictly speaking, far side of the moon, which does not have a consistently dark side any more than Earth does.

7. 2 months ago on Luann

   Like “fun with Gun.”

8. 2 months ago on Luann

   Gunther is very sensitive and detail-oriented—you may be selling him short. Tiffany might know.

9. 2 months ago on Bozo

   Bozo appears to be teeing off from a green.

10. 3 months ago on Dick Tracy

    Isn’t Mysta Glenna after her DNA was mixed?