[pd-ot] electric circuits in software

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Christian Klippel wrote:

> on analogue gear you have no samplerate at all. its continous.

Continuity is a human-made concept that approximates reality. Since
Quantum Mechanics, it is no longer believed that continuity can describe
the world exactly, because it's been observed that all energy changes
happen in sudden very small jumps. For example, the theory of
incandescence made no sense at all until the assumption of continuity 
got dropped.

There's a samplerate for analogue gear, but it's both fuzzy and hidden.  
The signal-to-noise ratio of a digital transmission at 0 dB is 2^-n if you
transmit n bits/sample (it's the rounding errors). If you turn this idea
backwards, the bits/sample of an analogue wire would be the log2 of the
signal-to-noise ratio of the wire. You could compute the bitrate of an 
analogue wire by combining the signal-to-noise ratios for 
frequencies all over the spectrum, to find a kind of "effective 
Nyquist frequency" related to the way the wire doesn't handle high 
frequencies very well...

This concept can be extended to any sequence of wires/connectors/filters.
The bitrate of two things together may be smaller than both bitrates of 
individual things.

What do you think?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada