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?
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada