"Stephen J. Rush" > wrote in message
...
> And it usually gets even better with the next bottle. It would be really
> interesting to transfer some outrageously expensive wine into screw-top
> bottles and serve it to a party of wine snobs. Have there ever been any
> double-blind tests?

In fact most, if not all, wine judging is at least single blind, and usually
double blind.
And wine judges spit it out to prevent the wine tasting better the drunker
they get.
But it's still only a collection of opinions!

MrT.

> wrote

> Are these system resonant?

I don't care anymore. :->)

Seriously, the original issue was whether a room mode is a resonance. Well,
actually, the original issue was whether a magic resonator can improve the
taste of wine. :->) But THEN it became whether room modes are resonances.
And they most certainly are by every definition I'm aware of.

--Ethan

Stephen J. Rush wrote:

>
> And it usually gets even better with the next bottle. It would be really
> interesting to transfer some outrageously expensive wine into screw-top
> bottles and serve it to a party of wine snobs. Have there ever been any
> double-blind tests?

All the time. Almost all serious judging of wine is done under single-
or double-blind conditions. And, yes, there are some surprises, such as
Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay recently winning a prestigious California wine
competition, but far more often than not "the usual suspects" do very
well in single- and double-blind conditions. It's (usually) not without
reason that famous wines become famous, though one of the fascinating
things about wine is that each year is a different story. And why do
you think that you can't get good wine in a screwcapped bottle? Some
very fine wines are bottled under screwcap, and many winegeeks applaud
the move.

Mark Lipton

--
alt.food.wine FAQ: http://winefaq.hostexcellence.com

On Jul 11, 4:35 am, "Mr.T" <MrT@home> wrote:
> "Stephen J. Rush" > wrote in ...
>
> > And it usually gets even better with the next bottle. It would be really
> > interesting to transfer some outrageously expensive wine into screw-top
> > bottles and serve it to a party of wine snobs. Have there ever been any
> > double-blind tests?
>
> In fact most, if not all, wine judging is at least single blind, and usually
> double blind.
> And wine judges spit it out to prevent the wine tasting better the drunker
> they get.
> But it's still only a collection of opinions!
>
> MrT.

>From what I read, wine tasting is surprisingly repeatable, both with
one taster doing repeated tests, and between different tasters. Highly
UNLIKE audio testing.

"Mr.T" wrote

>> You are right of course... but wine geeks who believe in pyramids
>> and
>> magnets tends to be on the fringe and so their problem can be seen
>> as a
>> superstition on a par with astrology, while it seems to me that
>> audio
>> exotica enjoys a higher status more akin to religion. ;-)
>
> Not IMO. I would place audio superstition on the same level as
> astrology,
> numerology, feng shui, etc etc.
> Religion is far more widespread and far more insidious.

More like alchemy. No specific methodology. Groping in the half-light,
hoping to stir up a new science.

A religion is a group of people defending the boundaries of received
wisdom. Science becomes religion when it stops making progress.

Denying the possibility of progress in audio electronics is the
stock-in-trade of the defenders of the reproductionist faith. Now
accuracy of reproduction is commonplace their agenda is complete:
there's nothing left to discuss.

That's why the audio forums are dead. They are populated by geeks with
nothing left to say, save to chat about other things and defend
themselves against the New Scientists of the Golden Age.

cheers, Ian

Audiophool.

"Mike Tommasi" in :
> ...
> You are right of course... but wine geeks who believe in pyramids and
> magnets tends to be on the fringe ... their problem can be seen as a
> superstition on a par with astrology, while it seems to me that audio
> exotica enjoys a higher status ...

(Among the population of audiophiles, I take that to mean.)

> I will not go through all the details, but there are people that seriously
> believe that weighing down a CD will bring less wow and flutter... and
> there are those who claim to hear the difference that an 8 ohm
> transmission line makes... and the latest, someone here in France has come
> up with a filter for those evil AC outlets that brings about a complete
> transformation of the sound output of CD players and amps, it sells for
> €27,000........................................
>
> Mike Tommasi - Six Fours, France

The gadgets with absurd rationalizations and €27,000 price tags are
legitimate gripes. (I could give you more real cases I collected. For an
invited talk about this at a big technical conference. I reported only
examples abject even on their own terms. Like a $10,000 or so preamplifier
that, inside, had only a commonplace audibly dubious amplifier chip selling
for a few cents.)

But the flip side to this is underappreciated in the technical world IMO.
Some of these consumer technologies are rather complex, and skilled
technical people not specifically expert may not perceive or understand
their subtleties. Years of training to model reality with mathematical
abstractions chosen partly for their tractability exacerbates this problem.
You find engineers and scientists arguing from a textbook model for a
reality it doesn't fit.

The original audio newsgroup years (net.audio from 1982, called rec.audio
after late 1986) were a showplace for these behaviors (and audiophile myths
and ideologies). Dick Pierce parodied some behaviors skillfully (from years
working on practical audio) in his classic "Audio anecdote" posting series
that many people enjoyed.

Skin effect in speaker wires is an example. (Tendency of current to flow
near the surface as frequency increases.) Not every engineer knows offhand
that this effect can be electrically important even at audio frequencies,
especially with long runs driving an often complex speaker impedance.
Quantifying skin depth is an undergraduate EM homework problem (links
below). But discussions online (and in my experience, offline too) were
full of offhand technical assertions that skin depth equated to EM
wavelength of the signal, or even to air acoustic wavelength. It's neither,
but people would argue "technically" from either assumption.

An even purer example is multiplying by -1 (known identically in the signal
world as "180-degree phase shift"). In 1991 someone asked online how to do
180-degree phase shift on a sampled audio signal. A few people answered
accurately at once, but were submerged and/or attacked by opinionated,
mutually hostile technical assertions whose sole commonality was to be
unfailingly wrong. (Did you hear the line about a little learning being a
dangerous thing?)

-- Max

Online audio skin-depth note from 20 years ago:
http://tinyurl.com/2m6mas

Arithmetic erratum:
http://tinyurl.com/3yxurt

"Ian Iveson" > wrote in message
...
> Denying the possibility of progress in audio electronics is the
> stock-in-trade of the defenders of the reproductionist faith. Now
> accuracy of reproduction is commonplace their agenda is complete:
> there's nothing left to discuss.

Well if you think speakers are now perfect, recording techniques beyond
reproach, and even room acoustics now universally faultless, then I guess
you would imagine "accuracy of reproduction is commonplace".
The discussion of course would be by the many millions who disagree with
that.

MrT.

"z" > wrote in message
ups.com...
> >From what I read, wine tasting is surprisingly repeatable, both with
> one taster doing repeated tests, and between different tasters.

With the same group of tasters, yes. Between a different group of tasters,
not so much.

>Highly UNLIKE audio testing.

Not so different really. Neither group likes to admit their personal
shortcomings.

MrT.

Mr.T wrote

>> Denying the possibility of progress in audio electronics is the
>> stock-in-trade of the defenders of the reproductionist faith. Now
>> accuracy of reproduction is commonplace their agenda is complete:
>> there's nothing left to discuss.
>
> Well if you think speakers are now perfect, recording techniques
> beyond
> reproach, and even room acoustics now universally faultless, then I
> guess
> you would imagine "accuracy of reproduction is commonplace".
> The discussion of course would be by the many millions who disagree
> with
> that.

Even if you are right, that's just three areas of legitimate debate,
whereas once there were many.

Commonplace and ubiquitous or universal aren't quite the same. It is
certainly possible to find music and speakers that have been produced
by fools and cheapskates, and played in awkward places by idiots, but
the technology to produce the best, from the point of view of
reproduction, is well known and won't be otherwise for the foreseeable
future. There is no possibility of progress in design.

So gripes about incompetently designed products may continue, but
there still won't be anything new to discuss in the reproductionist
camp. They've done everything they can and are at the end of where
it's got them.

I don't come here often, I should admit, but in audio newsgroups in
general, how often do you see legitimate technical debates? There was
an exception in rec.audio.tubes but now that is dominated by
reproductionists (and a valve oriented reproductionist is daft or
dishonest IMO) genuine discussion has almost disappeared.

The reason I don't come here often, it occurs to me, is encapsulated
in the name of the group. No point here I suppose in asserting that
the key question regarding domestic audio systems is about purpose
rather than execution.

Perhaps the same could be said of science, engineering, economics,
even history. As Gordon Brown pointed out, the role of politicians is
now to serve rather than to lead: when there is nowhere else to go,
there are no reasonable alternatives to consider.

Now we have the engineering, it's time to redevelop the art, I think.
Wrong place to say so...I guess a moderator would have shut me up
before now.

cheers, Ian

> To amplify Randy's point, consider a current state of
> the art analog-digital-analog conversion system, nothing
> more complicated than a high-quality sound card in
> a computer set up in straight pass-through mode. Hit
> it with an impulse, and it WILL ring for not an inconsiderable
> time after the impulse is done. Is it resonating? According
> to ONE of Winer's definitions, it is, but according to
> another, the existence of some measurable peak or
> dip in the amplitude vs frequency response, it is not:
> the response over the bandwidth is dead nuts flat,
> within a very small fraction of a dB, and the phase
> response is essentially perfect over the bandwidth.
>
> Take a very high quality professional analog tape recorder
> (say a Studer) running 30 ips, adjusted for the flattest
> frequency response over the bandwidth (on such a
> machine, I'd expect to make to 25 kHz +-1dB at all
> reasonable recording levels). The output WILL ring
> for a significant number of cycles. Is it a resonant
> system?
>
> And all of these system will show a decay tail if hit
> with a sine wave tone burst.
>
> Build yourself a 4th order butterworth low-pass filter,
> and hit it with an impulse, and watch the output ring:
> is it resonant (trick question, because i forgot to tell
> you you aren't allowed to build it out of components
> like inductors and capacitors).
>
> Are these system resonant?

If the ringing due to the transient response of the system were
excited at one of the frequencies it contains, then the system would
resonate. Resonance is what you get when the input frequency is close
to a mode, no? The mere existence of modes is not enough...

But, like "feedback", it is a term with several degrees of looseness.

cheers, Ian

On Jul 12, 5:50 pm, "Ian Iveson" >
wrote:
> > To amplify Randy's point, consider a current state of
> > the art analog-digital-analog conversion system, nothing
> > more complicated than a high-quality sound card in
> > a computer set up in straight pass-through mode. Hit
> > it with an impulse, and it WILL ring for not an inconsiderable
> > time after the impulse is done. Is it resonating? According
> > to ONE of Winer's definitions, it is, but according to
> > another, the existence of some measurable peak or
> > dip in the amplitude vs frequency response, it is not:
> > the response over the bandwidth is dead nuts flat,
> > within a very small fraction of a dB, and the phase
> > response is essentially perfect over the bandwidth.
>
> > Take a very high quality professional analog tape recorder
> > (say a Studer) running 30 ips, adjusted for the flattest
> > frequency response over the bandwidth (on such a
> > machine, I'd expect to make to 25 kHz +-1dB at all
> > reasonable recording levels). The output WILL ring
> > for a significant number of cycles. Is it a resonant
> > system?
>
> > And all of these system will show a decay tail if hit
> > with a sine wave tone burst.
>
> > Build yourself a 4th order butterworth low-pass filter,
> > and hit it with an impulse, and watch the output ring:
> > is it resonant (trick question, because i forgot to tell
> > you you aren't allowed to build it out of components
> > like inductors and capacitors).
>
> > Are these system resonant?
>
> If the ringing due to the transient response of the system were
> excited at one of the frequencies it contains, then the system would
> resonate. Resonance is what you get when the input frequency is close
> to a mode, no? The mere existence of modes is not enough...

But none of the systems I described have "modes." None
of them have a resonant frequency. Yet they still "ring"
by one definition being bandied about.

Construct a waveform from the following series:

F(t) = sum 1/n sin(nwt), n = 1, 3, 5, ...

and limit n to some number, oh, maybe 11 or 19.
The resulting waveform rings. Is it resonating?
Does it have modes?

"Ian Iveson" > wrote in message
...
> Commonplace and ubiquitous or universal aren't quite the same. It is
> certainly possible to find music and speakers that have been produced
> by fools and cheapskates, and played in awkward places by idiots, but
> the technology to produce the best, from the point of view of
> reproduction, is well known and won't be otherwise for the foreseeable
> future. There is no possibility of progress in design.

Now that is beyond a bold statement, completely silly I would say.

> So gripes about incompetently designed products may continue, but
> there still won't be anything new to discuss in the reproductionist
> camp. They've done everything they can and are at the end of where
> it's got them.

Sounds like the patent lawer who said 100 years ago that everything that
could be invented, had been :-)
Even $100k speakers have their shortcomings, so I'm not sure why you imagine
those priced at what normal people can afford cannot be improved on?
As technology improves, hopefully we will see the prices get cheaper.
However there is still the not insignificant matter of personal preference,
physical size restraints, and any number of other individual compromises.


> Perhaps the same could be said of science, engineering, economics,
> even history. As Gordon Brown pointed out, the role of politicians is
> now to serve rather than to lead: when there is nowhere else to go,
> there are no reasonable alternatives to consider.

Which is only said by those with no alternative vision of course.

MrT.

"Ian Iveson" > wrote in
message

>> To amplify Randy's point, consider a current state of
>> the art analog-digital-analog conversion system, nothing
>> more complicated than a high-quality sound card in
>> a computer set up in straight pass-through mode. Hit
>> it with an impulse, and it WILL ring for not an
>> inconsiderable time after the impulse is done. Is it
>> resonating?

Could be. Certainly, if you build an analog filter with a cutoff that is
even a fraction as sharp as the one in a modern converter, you'll end up
with a lot of L's and C's. It looks something like a collection of resonant
filters. For example, the CDP 101 used an analog reconstruction filter and a
schematic of it was in the service manual.

>> According to ONE of Winer's definitions, it
>> is, but according to another, the existence of some
>> measurable peak or dip in the amplitude vs frequency response, it is not:

I see a *big* dip, right at the cutoff frequency.

>> the response over the bandwidth is dead nuts flat,
>> within a very small fraction of a dB, and the phase
>> response is essentially perfect over the bandwidth.

Aside from the transition band.

>> Take a very high quality professional analog tape
>> recorder (say a Studer) running 30 ips, adjusted for the
>> flattest frequency response over the bandwidth (on such a
>> machine, I'd expect to make to 25 kHz +-1dB at all
>> reasonable recording levels). The output WILL ring
>> for a significant number of cycles. Is it a resonant
>> system?

There are no doubt some resonant circuits in the circuit. Some may even be
resonating in the bandpass. My recollection is that the final low pass
filter is based on what's happening in the tape head gap, which approximates
a filter based on delays.

>> And all of these system will show a decay tail if hit
>> with a sine wave tone burst.

Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to midrange square waves
that are pretty nasty looking. People who wince at the minor damage that
44 KHz sampling does should go ballistic.

>> Build yourself a 4th order butterworth low-pass filter,
>> and hit it with an impulse, and watch the output ring:
>> is it resonant (trick question, because i forgot to tell
>> you you aren't allowed to build it out of components
>> like inductors and capacitors).


>> Are these system resonant?

In some ways.

> If the ringing due to the transient response of the
> system were excited at one of the frequencies it
> contains, then the system would resonate. Resonance is
> what you get when the input frequency is close to a mode,
> no? The mere existence of modes is not enough...

> But, like "feedback", it is a term with several degrees
> of looseness.

IIRs seem to have internal energy exchanges that seem to harken back to
simple LC circuits.

"Mr.T" <MrT@home> wrote in message
u
> "Ian Iveson" > wrote in
> message
> ...
>> Commonplace and ubiquitous or universal aren't quite the
>> same. It is certainly possible to find music and
>> speakers that have been produced by fools and
>> cheapskates, and played in awkward places by idiots, but
>> the technology to produce the best, from the point of
>> view of reproduction, is well known and won't be
>> otherwise for the foreseeable future. There is no
>> possibility of progress in design.
>
> Now that is beyond a bold statement, completely silly I
> would say.

Agreed.

>> So gripes about incompetently designed products may
>> continue, but there still won't be anything new to
>> discuss in the reproductionist camp. They've done
>> everything they can and are at the end of where it's got
>> them.

We are far from doing everything we can or need to do in the acoustic
domain. In some ways, we are just starting out.

> Sounds like the patent lawer who said 100 years ago that
> everything that could be invented, had been :-)
> Even $100k speakers have their shortcomings, so I'm not
> sure why you imagine those priced at what normal people
> can afford cannot be improved on?

Good point.

> As technology improves, hopefully we will see the prices
> get cheaper. However there is still the not insignificant
> matter of personal preference, physical size restraints,
> and any number of other individual compromises.

IME preference predominates when practical perfection is elusive. The
natural enemy of preference is practical perfection.

Example: Phono cartridges versus CD players. For a long time phono
cartrdiges were pathetic things that as a rule were far from being
practically perfect. Near the end of the vinyl era, cartridges got to be
pretty good, and people often made choices based on other things than their
preferences in say bass and treble balance. However, CD players started out
very good and only got better and cheaper. A/Bing CD players has been a very
boring pastime for about 2 decades.

>> Perhaps the same could be said of science, engineering,
>> economics, even history. As Gordon Brown pointed out,
>> the role of politicians is now to serve rather than to
>> lead: when there is nowhere else to go, there are no
>> reasonable alternatives to consider.



> Which is only said by those with no alternative vision of
> course.

Leadership is still an evolving technology, and one that is very relevant to
politics.

Ian,

> If the ringing due to the transient response of the system were excited at
> one of the frequencies it contains, then the system would resonate.
> Resonance is what you get when the input frequency is close to a mode, no?
> The mere existence of modes is not enough...

This is a good distinction. I've heard people argue that modes and standing
waves are the same thing. But they're not. A room mode is merely a
propensity to vibrate, but it's not the actual vibration nor is it a wave of
any type. Mode is short for "mode of vibration," so it describes what WOULD
happen when excited, as you correctly observed.

--Ethan

Arny,

> Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to midrange square
> waves that are pretty nasty looking. People who wince at the minor damage
> that 44 KHz sampling does should go ballistic.

LOL, this is why the "analog tape rules" crowd cracks me up. If they'd just
admit it's an effect they find pleasing, I'd be happy and we could go our
separate ways in peace. But no, they argue that analog tape is "better" than
digital recording, and then when they can't back it up with actual science
that resort to name calling. Likewise for vinyl enthusiasts. :->)

--Ethan

Ethan Winer wrote:


> This is a good distinction. I've heard people argue that modes and
> standing waves are the same thing. But they're not. A room mode is
> merely a propensity to vibrate, but it's not the actual vibration nor is
> it a wave of any type. Mode is short for "mode of vibration," so it
> describes what WOULD happen when excited, as you correctly observed.

Surely, a "mode" in this context is what we in the physical sciences
refer to as a "normal mode"? That is to say, a characteristic
vibrational frequency of a system. They are easily arrived at if one
knows the forces on a system by diagonalizing a force matrix.

Mark Lipton
--
alt.food.wine FAQ: http://winefaq.hostexcellence.com

Arny Krueger wrote:

> Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to midrange square waves
> that are pretty nasty looking. People who wince at the minor damage that
> 44 KHz sampling does should go ballistic.

That should be true for square waves at any frequency, no? It's a
classic problem of Fourier analysis: representing a square wave as a sum
of sinusoidal waves, which is what happens in any DAC.

Mark Lipton
--
alt.food.wine FAQ: http://winefaq.hostexcellence.com

1. "Mark Lipton" in :
> Arny Krueger wrote:
>
>> Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to
>> midrange square waves that are pretty nasty looking. ...
>
> That should be true for square waves at any frequency, no?

Exactly, that's the mathematical side of it. Any finite bandwidth in a
signal path exactly implies protracted tails in its time-domain response to
transient signals ("square waves"). The sharper the bandwidth is limited,
the more the tails look oscillatory. (Like a particular form of a Gibbs
effect in Fourier synthesis, Mark.)

The human side is that we do not hear via time-domain waveforms. Therefore
they are not very useful or intuitive for understanding perceptual effects
in a signal path. But they are unsurpassed for gee-whiz value. People
unable to interpret them have expressed shock at the ringing responses of
bandlimiting filters (in digital-audio paths) since the start of audio
newsgroups or earlier. It belongs in an FAQ. (I wonder what they'd ever do
if they saw the transient response of a loudspeaker!)


2. "z" > in
ups.com :
> ...
>From what I read, wine tasting is surprisingly repeatable, both with one
>taster doing repeated tests, and between different tasters. Highly UNLIKE
>audio testing.

Actually they have much in common. In serious writing by professionals in
the business of measuring what people actually hear, they take great care to
exclude suggestive or prejudicial biases from audio testing. This can be
much harder with fine audio measurements than with wine tasting, but that
does not alter its importance.

Those professionals tend to be in businesses dependent on what people
actually can hear (e.g., telecommunications firms) rather than on what they
can be sold (e.g., consumer audio-equipment firms), as a broad rule with
exceptions. For an enlightening example of the real perspective of highly
technical engineers on perceptual quality measures, look at Jayant and
Noll's classic 1984 text _Digital Coding of Waveforms._ (Just how important
the human, perceptual measures are to serious engineers in this field seems
to be a well-kept secret among hobby audiophilia and, for that matter, among
nonspecialist engineers.)

It happened that one of the genuine Bell Labs experts on what people can
hear -- working on the boundary between signal theory and psychoacoustics --
was also among the first and longest audio contributors on the Internet in
the 1980s. "JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years
(though, be it said, he gave as good as he got). He still surfaces
occasionally, sometimes incognito.

Cheers -- Max

"Max Hauser" > writes:
> [...]
> "JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years

JJ? You mean that short little curmudgeon Jim Johnston?
--
% Randy Yates % "Rollin' and riding and slippin' and
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % sliding, it's magic."
%%% 919-577-9882 %
%%%% > % 'Living' Thing', *A New World Record*, ELO
http://home.earthlink.net/~yatescr

On Jul 13, 5:21 pm, Randy Yates > wrote:
> "Max Hauser" > writes:
> > [...]
> > "JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years
>
> JJ? You mean that short little curmudgeon Jim Johnston?

He only acts short, especially in the presence of
entrenched stupidity.

> in
oups.com...
> On Jul 13, 5:21 pm, Randy Yates > wrote:
>> "Max Hauser" > writes:
>> > [...]
>> > "JJ" was scorned and disbelieved by skeptics for many years
>>
>> JJ? You mean that short little curmudgeon Jim Johnston?
>
> He only acts short, especially in the presence of entrenched stupidity.

Very well put.

Here are a couple of comments, saved from newsgroup postings at the time.
--


"The 'proof by elegant and misleading assertion' is a common tactic in
net.audio, and indeed in the audio world at large. This tactic, coupled
with those individuals who have vested interests, is another one of the
reasons that the audio industry is 20 years behind the state of both the
analog and digital art, and lagging further behind as I write."
-- jj, >, net.audio, 23 Sep 1985


"Inform thyself."
-- , >, rec.audio, 1 Mar 92 16:43:19 GMT

"Arny Krueger" > wrote in message
...
> IME preference predominates when practical perfection is elusive. The
> natural enemy of preference is practical perfection.
>
> Example: Phono cartridges versus CD players. For a long time phono
> cartrdiges were pathetic things that as a rule were far from being
> practically perfect. Near the end of the vinyl era, cartridges got to be
> pretty good, and people often made choices based on other things than
their
> preferences in say bass and treble balance. However, CD players started
out
> very good and only got better and cheaper. A/Bing CD players has been a
very
> boring pastime for about 2 decades.

So true, and yet people still debate which one is better, clutching at
microscopic differences in op-amps etc, or even use valves in them to
actually make them sound different from the rest.
And then there are those who debate endlessly that vinyl is still superior
somehow.

> >> Perhaps the same could be said of science, engineering,
> >> economics, even history. As Gordon Brown pointed out,
> >> the role of politicians is now to serve rather than to
> >> lead: when there is nowhere else to go, there are no
> >> reasonable alternatives to consider.
>
> > Which is only said by those with no alternative vision of
> > course.
>
> Leadership is still an evolving technology, and one that is very relevant
to
> politics.

I see no sign of it evolving. Ancient Greece at least had real democracy for
most (but not all)
Most primitive cultures had leaders that were followed almost universally
without question.
Every permutation of leadership has been tried at some time or another, and
in fact most are still being tried in one country or another today.
None is universally accepted yet, and I can't foresee that any will either.
Or even the specific direction of the evolution process you seem to think is
happening.

MrT.

> Every permutation of leadership has been tried at some time or another, and
> in fact most are still being tried in one country or another today.
> None is universally accepted yet, and I can't foresee that any will either.

It might be instructive to look not at leadership, but followership.
Few want to lead, but many want to follow. It's easier, and allows them
to get on with whatever they =do= want to do with their life.

To that end, I see multinational corps, mass marketing, and computer
programs as being the new (untried) things that people will follow,
mainly because it's easier, and (in the light of software) reduces the
options presented, especially as networked databases learn more about us
individually, and tailor their presentations to that.

We may end up following, without any leader.

Jose
--
You can choose whom to befriend, but you cannot choose whom to love.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"Jose" > wrote in message
...
> > Every permutation of leadership has been tried at some time or another,
and
> > in fact most are still being tried in one country or another today.
> > None is universally accepted yet, and I can't foresee that any will
either.
>
> It might be instructive to look not at leadership, but followership.
> Few want to lead,

In fact the large number who run for office, of one form or another, prove
many more would like to lead than can, or currently do.
And that's not including those who cannot afford to even attempt it, though
they may wish to.

>but many want to follow. It's easier, and allows them
> to get on with whatever they =do= want to do with their life.

IMO *most* want to simply control their own life without leading OR
following anyone in particular.
(Of course there are exceptions)

MrT.

"Mark Lipton" > wrote in message

> Arny Krueger wrote:
>
>> Often high quality analog tape recorders do things to
>> midrange square waves that are pretty nasty looking.
>> People who wince at the minor damage that 44 KHz
>> sampling does should go ballistic.
>
> That should be true for square waves at any frequency,
> no?

No, not if audibility is the criteria.

It coformance to an arbitrary standard is the criteria, then yes.

> It's a classic problem of Fourier analysis:
> representing a square wave as a sum of sinusoidal waves,
> which is what happens in any DAC.

Square waves can be tremendously visually altered by phase shift that has no
audible effects.