[PD] dac object question

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 mstamm at itin.fr wrote:

> I have a "dac object" and a "number" to variate its value. When the
> number comes to a negative or positive number, the speaker generates a
> "tac" sound, and I don't understand why.

The "tac" sound is due to any sudden change of the voltage in a
speaker. If your numberbox goes suddenly from -1 to 0 and/or from 0 to +1,
then you hear a click. You will not hear a click when changing among
values higher than +1, or among values lower than -1, because of clipping.

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> If you send anything whose absolute value is greater than 1.0 to a
> dac~ it will click because of clipping at the soundcard, which is
> overdriven then.

The clipping is only a voltage stopper. It will not cause clicking by
itself; it does nothing audible. However if a roundy wave enters in
contact with one or both clipping lines, it changes the waveform, normally
enriching the sound with odd harmonics (resembling a square wave).

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Lex Ein wrote:

> Luckily, most soundcard outputs are not DC coupled; so the speaker
> won't stay pushed out there.

It doesn't matter much if, numbers are clipped during a digital-to-digital
conversion. Soundcards don't understand floats, and converting to their
number format does the clipping at -1 and +1.

> it leads to asymmetrical clipping in the signal processing chain,
> which sounds pretty bad.

At the pdmtl#2 meeting, we had a demo of asymmetrical fuzz done on purpose
using a formula involving hyperbolic tangent. Apparently some people DO
think it sounds good. But I guess it's always what happens... when we try
to imitate an old sound using a new sound, we don't see the new sound for
its own qualities, but rather for how close it is to the old one...

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Two questions: Why do they remove the DC? And is this always
> necessary? Then why not build something like that directly into
> [dac~]?

The DC is removed because:

 * float-to-int conversion does hard clipping

 * if the DC reaches the speaker, then the non-DC sound may sound
distorted, because the speaker has its own (soft) clipping, in the sense
that speakers always have the best fidelity when the average voltage is
0V (speaker cone at rest, = not strained)

 * as Lex says, if the DC reaches the speaker, then it will generate
heat. This will be a complete waste of energy (unless your house needs to
be heated), as playing a DC does not result in any acoustic wave at all. I
have never seen a speaker overheating but then I don't have experience
with big gear. Btw I'm trying to picture a speaker with a heatsink on it
and somehow it doesn't fit...

 * applying fuzz on a DC-offset signal may make it sound quieter or even
completely vanish. e.g. a sound with range [.4;.6] boosted fourfold is
[1.6;2.4], which if hard clipped to [-1;1] (e.g. by [dac~]), will
effectively become [1;1], which is silence. if your goal is to make
asymmetrical fuzz you have to adjust your settings appropriately so that
you actually get a result instead of void.



Removing the DC is not done by [dac~] because it may take some CPU time
and slightly change the "equalizing" in low frequencies in a way that the
user might not want.

I usually remove the DC just after a [adc~] though, because it's best to
design a patch assuming no sound has a DC at all, than even thinking about
how DC might skew the effects.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju