The Logic Off Topic list

> From: Dennis Gunn <dennisg@...>
> 
> Once about 9 years ago on the DAW I remember writing about how the
> digital wave form for a sine wave up around say 19.k looks like a
> broken spiral staircase and how I find it hard to believe that any
> amount of filtering is going to turn that into a clean sine wave.  A
> lot of peaple called me ignorant for being decieved by the look of
> data but Nothing I have seen or heard since has ever convinced me I
> was wrong.

You're not hearing the data - you hear the data after it's been timed and
output through a D/A converter, which includes a reconstruction filter.  To
compare apples to apples you need to hook an oscilloscope up to that analog
output and compare the two.  You'll see that the digital sinewave looks the
same.

There have also been studies done showing that different looking waveforms
(due to the relative phase of thier harmonics) sound the same - so don't be
deceived by how a waveform looks.  It's useful information, to be sure, like
when editing, but it's not perfectly correlated to the sound.