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.
>

I am aware of all that but looking at the data gives you an idea of 
the kind of contortions it takes to get it back into some semblance 
of the intended wave form at the intended pitch and it seems to be 
pretty hard to do because I can often hear aliasing distortion in 
high frequencies on softsynths and I think so can just about everyone 
else whether they realise that is what they are hearing or not.