New Age "wine enhancement"

[Mr.T]

one taster doing repeated tests, and between different tasters.

With the same group of tasters, yes. Between a different group of tasters,
not so much.

Highly UNLIKE audio testing.

Not so different really. Neither group likes to admit their personal
shortcomings.

MrT.

 

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If the ringing due to the transient response of the system were
excited at one of the frequencies it contains, then the system would
resonate. Resonance is what you get when the input frequency is close
to a mode, no? The mere existence of modes is not enough...

But none of the systems I described have "modes." None
of them have a resonant frequency. Yet they still "ring"
by one definition being bandied about.

Construct a waveform from the following series:

F(t) = sum 1/n sin(nwt), n = 1, 3, 5, ...

and limit n to some number, oh, maybe 11 or 19.
The resulting waveform rings. Is it resonating?
Does it have modes?

 

[Mr.T]

Commonplace and ubiquitous or universal aren't quite the same. It is
certainly possible to find music and speakers that have been produced
by fools and cheapskates, and played in awkward places by idiots, but
the technology to produce the best, from the point of view of
reproduction, is well known and won't be otherwise for the foreseeable
future. There is no possibility of progress in design.

Now that is beyond a bold statement, completely silly I would say.

So gripes about incompetently designed products may continue, but
there still won't be anything new to discuss in the reproductionist
camp. They've done everything they can and are at the end of where
it's got them.

Sounds like the patent lawer who said 100 years ago that everything that
could be invented, had been
Even $100k speakers have their shortcomings, so I'm not sure why you imagine
those priced at what normal people can afford cannot be improved on?
As technology improves, hopefully we will see the prices get cheaper.
However there is still the not insignificant matter of personal preference,
physical size restraints, and any number of other individual compromises.

Perhaps the same could be said of science, engineering, economics,
even history. As Gordon Brown pointed out, the role of politicians is
now to serve rather than to lead: when there is nowhere else to go,
there are no reasonable alternatives to consider.

Which is only said by those with no alternative vision of course.

MrT.

 

[Mark Lipton]

Ethan Winer wrote:

This is a good distinction. I've heard people argue that modes and
standing waves are the same thing. But they're not. A room mode is
merely a propensity to vibrate, but it's not the actual vibration nor is
it a wave of any type. Mode is short for "mode of vibration," so it
describes what WOULD happen when excited, as you correctly observed.

Surely, a "mode" in this context is what we in the physical sciences
refer to as a "normal mode"? That is to say, a characteristic
vibrational frequency of a system. They are easily arrived at if one
knows the forces on a system by diagonalizing a force matrix.

Mark Lipton

 

[Mark Lipton]

Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to midrange square waves
that are pretty nasty looking. People who wince at the minor damage that
44 KHz sampling does should go ballistic.

That should be true for square waves at any frequency, no? It's a
classic problem of Fourier analysis: representing a square wave as a sum
of sinusoidal waves, which is what happens in any DAC.

Mark Lipton

 

[Randy Yates]

[...]
"JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years

JJ? You mean that short little curmudgeon Jim Johnston?
--
% Randy Yates % "Rollin' and riding and slippin' and
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % sliding, it's magic."
%%% 919-577-9882 %
%%%% <[email protected]> % 'Living' Thing', *A New World Record*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

 

[[email protected]]

[...]
"JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years

JJ? You mean that short little curmudgeon Jim Johnston?

He only acts short, especially in the presence of
entrenched stupidity.

 

[Mr.T]

IME preference predominates when practical perfection is elusive. The
natural enemy of preference is practical perfection.

Example: Phono cartridges versus CD players. For a long time phono
cartrdiges were pathetic things that as a rule were far from being
practically perfect. Near the end of the vinyl era, cartridges got to be
pretty good, and people often made choices based on other things than their
preferences in say bass and treble balance. However, CD players started out
very good and only got better and cheaper. A/Bing CD players has been a very
boring pastime for about 2 decades.

So true, and yet people still debate which one is better, clutching at
microscopic differences in op-amps etc, or even use valves in them to
actually make them sound different from the rest.
And then there are those who debate endlessly that vinyl is still superior
somehow.

Leadership is still an evolving technology, and one that is very relevant to
politics.

I see no sign of it evolving. Ancient Greece at least had real democracy for
most (but not all)
Most primitive cultures had leaders that were followed almost universally
without question.
Every permutation of leadership has been tried at some time or another, and
in fact most are still being tried in one country or another today.
None is universally accepted yet, and I can't foresee that any will either.
Or even the specific direction of the evolution process you seem to think is
happening.

MrT.

 

[Jose]

Every permutation of leadership has been tried at some time or another, and

in fact most are still being tried in one country or another today.
None is universally accepted yet, and I can't foresee that any will either.

It might be instructive to look not at leadership, but followership.
Few want to lead, but many want to follow. It's easier, and allows them
to get on with whatever they =do= want to do with their life.

To that end, I see multinational corps, mass marketing, and computer
programs as being the new (untried) things that people will follow,
mainly because it's easier, and (in the light of software) reduces the
options presented, especially as networked databases learn more about us
individually, and tailor their presentations to that.

We may end up following, without any leader.

Jose

 

[Mr.T]

either.

It might be instructive to look not at leadership, but followership.
Few want to lead,

In fact the large number who run for office, of one form or another, prove
many more would like to lead than can, or currently do.
And that's not including those who cannot afford to even attempt it, though
they may wish to.

but many want to follow. It's easier, and allows them
to get on with whatever they =do= want to do with their life.

IMO *most* want to simply control their own life without leading OR
following anyone in particular.
(Of course there are exceptions)

MrT.