Sony low noise SDXC memory card

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Stephen Dawson

I need add nothing to this:

From EEVBlog.com.

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Posted in Audio, Digital Audio, Mysticism | 1 Comment

‘can theoretically reach 100,000 Hz’

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Stephen Dawson

Here’s something I’d completely forgotten about, or perhaps never known. The ‘Scarlett Book’ for SACD recommended that the high resolution audio be low pass filtered at 50kHz (@-3dB). I was reminded/informed of this by the datasheet for the Cirrus Logic CS4398 DAC.

What then to make of this insert that appeared in just about all SACDs in the early days?

SACD Insert

A lot rests on the word ‘theoretically’.

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Posted in Audio, Codecs, Digital Audio | 2 Comments

Siglent SDG1020 signal generator

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Stephen Dawson

So, here’s another signal generator to compare to those I looked at in ‘Noise and distortion in signal generation’. This is the Siglent SDG1020, a dual output 20MHz, arbitrary waveform model. It uses 14 bits of resolution apparently.

Here’s its noise performance. Channel 2 output (Channel 1 is identical), 1kHz sine wave recorded using a Focusrite Forte ADC at 24 bits, 96kHz using the ASIO interface with Reaper to preserve full resolution, then examining the file in CoolEdit 2000. I neglected to record the output levels in the previous post. This one I had it set to 4 volts peak-to-peak:

Siglent SDG1020 noise performance

A slight improvement over the Velleman, but not all that much.

What was a big improvement was the square wave rise time (as you’d expect, since the Velleman is only a 1Mhz unit). As a reminder, here’s the zoomed in leading edge of a 1V p-p sine wave with the Vellemen:

Rise Time Velleman HPG1

You can read the rise time off the info bar near the bottom: 233 nanoseconds.

And here’s the same from the Siglent:

Rise Time Siglent SDG1020

A bit of overshoot there

, but a hugely fast rise time. The info bar shows 5 nanoseconds, but it was actually toggling between 5 and 9. Still, that’s pretty damned fast. That overshoot is present regardless of output frequency or level. I wonder if there’s a calibration adjustment.

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Posted in Digital Audio, Testing | Leave a comment

The Magic of Dither

Posted on February 4, 2015 by Stephen Dawson

(I have written an article for Australian HI-FI suggesting that a good way to start to understand the differences between 16 and 24 bit audio is to listen to the differences between 8 bit and 16 bit audio. To that end I will in the future be posting I have posted four versions of a musical excerpt here. In the meantime, I want to explore a weirdness that my experiments revealed, and explain why it happened.)

Let’s create a sine wave of 980 hertz with a sampling rate of 44.1kHz and 16 bits of resolution. Let this sine wave be of an extremely low level, with a peak of -80dB. Here’s its spectrogram:

980 hertz <div name=buy-levitra-usa.com

, -80dB, 16 bits” width=”589″ height=”310″ />

(This was generated with a small amount of dither, which is why it has a noise floor at -138dB and is unaccompanied by the nasty harmonics that would normally be present with a sine wave that is sketched out in values of +3 to -3). Note that the spike reaches -80dB.

Now let’s downsample it to 8 bits, accompanied by some dither noise:

980Hz - 8 bits - unshaped dither

Note the very high level of the noise, to the point that the 980 hertz signal barely peeks out over the top. This signal’s spike reaches -80dB, just as it did before it was downconverted.

So let’s go back to the 16 bit original and downsample it again to 8 bits, this time with some aggressive noise shaping:

980z - 8 bits - shaped dither E2

That’s better. The 980 hertz signal stands well out from the signal, and if you turn the whole thing up it is clearly audible. It, once again, reaches -80dB.

Now what I’ve been leading up to:  again we return to the 16 bit original, and again we downsample to 8 bits. But this time there’s no dither, no added low level noise. Instead we simply divide the 16 bit value of each sample by 8, and map it onto the nearest 8 bit integer value. Here’s the spectrum:

980Hz - 8 bits - no dither

Lots of harmonics, quite a bit of noise (although a lower level than with the plain dithering) and something that’s distinctly odd. Instead of the 980 hertz spike reaching -80dB, it makes it up to -48dB. How could reducing its precision from 16 bits to 8 bits have caused that?

Well, here’s the thing: -80dB is lower than minimum value definable in an 8 bit signal. The lowest quantisation level is -48dB. So the only way this wave form can be represented is by toggling between values for zero and one. Let’s zoom in on the wave form:

980Hz - 8 bits - no dither wave form

As you can see, our sine wave has become a kind of square wave, which explains all those harmonics. But it also explains why the fundamental is way too powerful. A sample value of ‘1’ is -48dB on an 8 bit scale, so that’s what our signal becomes.

Which is why dither is so vitally important, at least with 8 bit audio.

Here are the four test signals with the low level 980 hertz sine wave:

Download them and listen. You’ll have to turn up the volume quite a way to hear the 980 hertz tone.

And here are the four excerpts of the music from the group B’Jezus referred to in the article:

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Posted in Codecs, Digital Audio, How Things Work | 1 Comment