On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:25:24 +0100, Nick Gorham
wrote:

Don Pearce wrote:

All sound can be treated as though it is composed of sine waves.


All sound can be treated as if its composed of putty, but that still
doesn't mean that it is.

Dealing with waves only in the frequency domain does mean you have lost
temperal (phase) information.


And how exactly do you think that a cable might screw this up? And do
bear in mind that the speaker itself subsequently does a heroic job of
doing exactly that.

d

Pearce Consulting
http://www.pearce.uk.com

And what exactly makes you think I was suggesting it would, Don't assume
what side of the fence I am on this one.

I was just replying to the assumption that a FFT gives you ALL the
information about a signal, and the deeper assumption that just because
a model is useful, then the model is equivalent to the reality.

But an FFT DOES give you all the information - phase as well as
frequency. THe fact that the normal presentation of the data is simply
a magnitude plot is neither here nor there.

THe FFT is not, though, as you say, a model of reality. It is a model
of what reality would look like if it were repeated for ever - it
should have the word Groundhog in there somewhere. Provided you
understand the depths of it, though, it is a very useful tool that can
do virtually anything an audio engineer would want of it.

d

Pearce Consulting
http://www.pearce.uk.com