## Reading cassettes, tout azimuth (Part II)

18/04/2017

Last week we started to look at the problem of azimuth alignment on olden compact cassette tape drives, and how this misalignment affects the sound. Let’s now have a look at how azimuth affects the frequencies.

11/04/2017

While reading on compact cassette readers (as part of a preliminary study on digitizing archives) I found out that azimuth, or the angle made between the tape and the reading is a considered a big issue, the best case being an azimuth of exactly 90°. I could not, however, quite find what was the effect of varying that angle, even if pretty much everyone agrees that it somehow lessen the tape’s high frequency response. Let’s see how, exactly.

## Dithering.

31/12/2013

This week, let’s discuss dithering, a technique based on error diffusion used in print and computer graphics to soften the effects of harsh color quantization. There are many types of dithering (sometimes called halftoning, despite techniques not being all of the same type), some optimized for monochrome or color screen printing, some merely convenient to use in computer graphics.

When we quantize an image to a very small number of colors, all kind of artifacts appear: false contours resulting from two too different colors that aught to be smoothly faded, noticeable color changes, etc. Dithering tries to alleviate this problem by mixing colors using random-looking dot patterns, replacing color resolution by sampling aliasing. Despite the image being composed of dots of very different colors, we still perceive the color mix, and that effect, while not adding any objective quality to the image, does augment the perceived quality of the image.

## Getting Documents Back From JPEG Scans

06/07/2010

We’re all looking for documentation, books, and papers. Sometimes we’re lucky, we find the pristine PDF, rendered fresh from a text processor or maybe LaTeX. Sometimes we’re not so lucky, the only thing we can find is a collection of JPEG images with high compression ratios.

Scans of text are not always easy to clean up, even when they’re well done to begin with, they may be compressed with JPEG using a (too) high compression ratio, leading to conspicuous artifacts. These artifacts must be cleaned-up before printing or binding together in a PDF.

## Channel Mixing and Pseudo-Inverses

29/12/2009

Let’s say we want to mix three channels onto two because the communication device has only two available channels but we still want to emulate a three channel link. If we can afford coding, then it’s not a problem because we can build our own protocol so add any number of channels using a structured data stream. But what if we cannot control the channel coding at all? In CDs, for example, there’s no coding: there are two channels encoded in PCM and a standard CD player wouldn’t understand the sound if it was encoded otherwise.

The solution is to mix the three channels in a quasi-reversible way, and in a way that the two channels can be listened to without much interference. One possible way is to mix the third channel is to use a phase-dependant encoding. Early “quadraphonic” audio systems did something quite similar. You can also use a plain time-domain “mixing matrix” to mix the three channels onto two. Quite expygeously, let us choose the matrix:

$M=\left[~\begin{array}{ccc} \frac{2}{3} &0&\frac{1}{3}\\ 0 &\frac{2}{3}&\frac{1}{3}\end{array}~\right]$

## Filtering Noise (Part I)

25/08/2009

If you own a car, you probably noticed that the speedometer needle’s position varies but relatively slowly, regardless of how the car actually accelerates or decelerates. Unless your speedometer is some variation on the eddy current meter, maybe the noise from the speed sensor isn’t filtered analogically but numerically by the dashboard’s computer.

Let us have a look at how this filtering could be done.

## Deriving the 1 bit = 6 dB rule of thumb

09/12/2008

This week, a more mathematical topic. Sometime ago, we—friends and I—were discussing the fidelity of various signals, and how many bits were needed for an optimal digitization of the signal, given known characteristics such as spectrum and signal-to-noise ratio.

Indeed, at some point, when adding bits, you only add more power to represent noise in the signal. There’s a rule of thumb that say that for every bit you add, you can represent a signal with $\approx 6 dB$ more of signal to noise ratio. Let me show you how you derive such a result.

## Debouncing using Binary Finite Impulse Reponse Filter

20/08/2008

In digital systems, we expect input signals to be noise free, but that is not always realistic. For example, let us think about an embedded device with a series of push buttons. The user interacts with the device by pressing the buttons, and we would expect, quite naively, that the micro-controller receives either one or zero depending on whether the button is pressed or not.

However, when the user presses a button, there is a short time during which the micro-controller cannot tell for sure whether the button is pressed or not. During this short time, the mechanical switch under the button establishes the contact and (electronic) noise is read. To the micro-controller, this noise appears as a short burst of random ones and zeroes between the button-not-pressed state (or zero) and the button-is-quite-pressed state (or one). The micro-controller has to decide through that burst of random bits when—and if—the button is pressed. The same thing occurs when the button is released.

The noise from the contact is usually somewhat smoothed by a small capacitor-based circuit called a debouncer. The debouncer makes sure that the signal rises smoothly from 0 (not pressed) to 1 (pressed). But even with a debouncing circuit, the signal must go through a phase where its level isn’t quite zero nor quite one, and the micro-controller’s I/O port may read either levels; resulting in multiple, rapid contacts instead of a single, longer, contiguous contact. Naturally, this situation must be avoided; if not by hardware, by software.