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Re: What's the point?

Posted by Todd Krieger (A) on January 28, 2005 at 20:25:59

In Reply to: Re: What's the point? posted by Dan Banquer on January 27, 2005 at 09:31:46:

"Due to the bandwidth limitation of microphones and the input filter to the ADC on the recording end, Time smear as you call it is not as much of an issue as you may think. But: Don't believe me and get a scope to monitor the output of you CD player or outboard DAC and then tell me how much time smear you really see."

See pic. This is a 1 kHz square wave response very typical of the vast majority of CD players and DACs out there. The ringing components are the "time smear" I've been referring to.

I used to see these 1 kHz square wave plots in CD player and DAC reviews that were once in Audio (and I think Stereophile) magazine... The plots were almost always identical (and very similar to the pic), hence it was the rationale for magazines to stop showing them, in the name of saved print space.

If you go to the linked page, you will also see a square wave response of DAC with *analog* brickwall filtering. These were common in the early days of CD playback. (The first Sony players used analog brickwall filters.) The ringing on these analog-filter units occur only *after* the edges, as opposed to both before and after for digital filtering.

• http://users.pandora.be/airborne/squaire.html   (Open in New Window)

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