Integer is King? - the challenge

[jens]

you're not making the slightest sense, Shy - all you do is contradicting yourself...

[Shy]

How am I contradicting myself?

[whyterabbyt]

Now you're starting to talk about the way I write?

No, Im talking about the fact that you have made a claim about something but point-blank refuse to entertain the idea of providing one single reference that backs up your claim.

Shows how serious you are.

No, it shows how little you're prepared to validate your claim.

So, I guess you think synthesizers are designed to sound objectively good?

Guess all you want, but your crass attempt to put words in my mouth has nothing to do with the subject I am pursuing; your refusal to provide any references to validate Yamaha's supposed 'smart aliasing' at all.

I wonder how someone could define what is objectively good sound. You think people can't design things for subjective purposes? That's interesting.

Interesting? A facile misdirection, thats all. Im not engaged in any debate on quality of sound, as I keep telling you. Im engaged in a debate about claims of an implementation of 'smart aliasing' by Yamaha. Is that too hard for you to remember from one post to the next?

[jens]

How am I contradicting myself?

let's see:

you say

- it's a fact that they designed purposely 'intelligent' aliasing

- this intelligent aliasing results in a sound which is subjectively pleasurable

- as it is only subjectively pleasurable it can't be broven, just perceived

- but it's a fact that they designed purposely 'intelligent' aliasing

- which is why it sounds so good that they still use it

- but it can't be proven that it's fact that they designed purposely intelligent aliasing because the pleasure of listening to the resulting sound of it is based on subjective perception...



right?

[MadBrain]

What is there to prove? Do you think Yamaha's aliasing in their FM synths is stupid and that's why their synths sound good? Do you have any idea about the effort it takes to make aliasing actually compliment generated sound rather than ruin it? It doesn't take a genius to realize their aliasing is very smart, or at least far smarter than uncontrolled aliasing. There is nothing to "prove".

Oh, but Yamaha engineers have been very careful about not using just any alias!


This is a picture of a yamaha engineer preparing a special dopant mixture for the silicon. This will help protect the circuit from electrical interference and cosmic rays, just like Shakti stones, and prevent it from giving it that "foggy" sound.


She just found out that a small part of the circuit was not in hexagonal shape, which would've introduced bad alias, and have given much less punch, imaging, and clarity in the mids.


Yamaha have hired the famous Mathemagician Art Benjamin, to add more bass to the sound, which was clearly lacking. He found that the synth was using too many odd numbers, and helped the engineers introduce more even ones.


This scientist is testing the DX7's high voltage power supply to make sure it generates perfect +5v and -5v, which gives it much a more steady sound than the cheap +3.3v electronics you get nowadays.


Yamaha's best mathematician, which just finished resolving the extremely complicated equations that let the dx7 have just the right alias, which gives it the so sought-after magical sparkle in the highs that no other synth can emulate.

So as you see, a lot of work goes into making a synth, and those VST wankers can only dream about making such great sounding stuff.

[Shy]

jens: you got it. And there's nothing contradicting about it, or am I missing something?
Yes, the aliasing they've been using is intelligent, because it doesn't sound like horrible plain aliasing. It actually contributes to the pleasurability of the sound. Now I can't prove that plain simple aliasing is horrible. I just perceive it as such, and so do most people, but it's not a "proof" for anything. I can say that Yamaha has used the specific aliasing in their various FM synths in their own factory presets to create a distinctive fine sound, and I couldn't "prove" that it was done on purpose, even though my ears tell me that's obviously the case. This is a subjective topic and people asking for "proofs" are wasting their time.

[whyterabbyt]

jens: you got it. And there's nothing contradicting about it, or am I missing something?
Yes, the aliasing they've been using is intelligent, because it doesn't sound like horrible plain aliasing. It actually contributes to the pleasurability of the sound. Now I can't prove that plain simple aliasing is horrible. I just perceive it as such, and so do most people, but it's not a "proof" for anything. I can say that Yamaha has used the specific aliasing in their various FM synths in their own factory presets to create a distinctive fine sound, and I couldn't "prove" that it was done on purpose, even though my ears tell me that's obviously the case. This is a subjective topic and people asking for "proofs" are wasting their time.

so, not 'smart aliasing', then. Just patches which rely on the aliasing that occurs as part of their sound, like I said.

[jens]

jens: you got it. And there's nothing contradicting about it, or am I missing something?

yes, it indeed looks like you are missing something - what you are saying is akin to:

'It's a fact that Peter prayed the whole last year each evening for two hours that his innermost dream may be fullfilled.

But as we don't know what his innermost dream is, we can't prove the fact that he prayed the whole last year each evening for two hours that it may be fullfilled.'


That's rubbish, mate - we don't need to know what his dream is to prove whether he prayed or not.

[Shy]

whyterabbyt: You say that since patches happen to make use of the aliasing for their benefit it means Yamaha has no smart aliasing? Or what? Is that what you're trying to prove? Are you really that obsessed with "proving" things that can't be proven? Like that me claiming their aliasing is smart is unproven? Hey, you don't need to prove that it's unproven, I can save you the trouble: it's unproven.

[Shy]

jens: I have no idea how that's related to a subjective topic like sound quality. Rubbish? Fine.

[jens]

jens: I have no idea how that's related to a subjective topic like sound quality. Rubbish? Fine.

You're mixing up intention, action and result. If you don't get my really simple example then I don't know how I could possibly help you...

[Shy]

jens: I didn't ask for your help and I don't need help. It seems to me that you're just too obsessed that you forget you can't mix objective terms like "proof" with subjective terms like "smart". Sorry, but you're the ones who aren't making any sense.

[whyterabbyt]

whyterabbyt: You say that since patches happen to make use of the aliasing for their benefit it means Yamaha has no smart aliasing? Or what?

Are you having that much difficulty following logic? I say that the existence of patches which make use of aliasing for their benefit is not proof of 'smart aliasing'.

Is that what you're trying to prove?

Can you read? Im not trying to prove anything, Im waiting for you to prove something.

Are you really that obsessed with "proving" things that can't be proven? Like that me claiming their aliasing is smart is unproven? Hey, you don't need to prove that it's unproven, I can save you the trouble: it's unproven.

Congratulations.

[Shy]

whyterabbyt: refer to my previous post. You're not making sense.

[Urs]

it doesn't sound like horrible plain aliasing.

True. The carrier feedback of the DX-7 (strangely followed by the DX-100) generates almost perfect white noise, if set to 6 or up. The only thing that beats this is a noise generator based on Mersenne primes running on IBM PowerPC processors. It's almost as good on Freescale chips, but these lack a bit of the pink noise spectrum, maybe because the Freescale processors use the same registers for integer as for floating point, which somehow diffuses the precision. X86 processors are a whole different problem. Due to the fewer general purpose registers a strange side effect happens where some registers would auto-frequency-modulate themselves, adding an extra portion of aliasing. This is called register aliasing ( http://www.fefe.de/devel/aliasing.txt ), and it's a very unpleasant thing which especially AMD users react weird about (as numerous discussions on http://www.anandtech.com/ clearly prove). However, Mac users will be happy to know that Intel has recently improved register aliasing - it's now called pointer aliasing ( http://american.cs.ucdavis.edu/Micro27/html/abst13.html ). As pointer aliasing happens in the imaginary part of the dsp process - which is discarded ion favour of the real part by the asio/coreaudio driver), it does not contribute to the sound in an unpleasant way, so Intel macs are pretty clean sounding here. Maybe too clean to be pleasant sounding.