Yeah I don't agree with that assertion either. Microsoft will produce hardware to show the art of the possible with their software. It largely comes out of a situation where the PC/device manufacturers were doing a sh* job of it.
I've worked on teams using trunk based development before and I ended up being the one having to fix other people's messes, deal with them losing work, and the absolute hell of trying to find where a bug was introduced.
The only people I really want on my team are those that understand Git. And even when there are team members that don't understand Git, I sure do and can pretty easily un-eff any situation someone gets themselves into.
Seriously, Git is actually simple and it should be a fundamental CS class taught at all universities.
One of the giants in this industry, Lionel, has been struggling for the last 30 or so years to stay alive. It’s been through several sales and I think two bankruptcies.
One thing about them though is they continue to innovate with new ways to put effects into their locomotives. Other companies have contributed as well, like MTH, ESU LocSound, SoundTrax, Broadway Limited, and others.
Model trains have a pretty loyal following, but the industry continues to narrow year after year.
IMHO all of these companies, but particularly Lionel and MTH missed out big time in the “maker movement” due to their closed, proprietary command and control systems. The patents have expired though, and many people have started to reverse engineer everything about them.
I think they also have completely failed on the marketing aspects of their businesses. Model trains have so many educational opportunities, and pitting this against video games could be a big win for them IMHO. The great thing for programmers and engineering types is it’s low threat to us since there is still a lot of software and hardware that could be built around model train products in the form of control and automation, and maybe even gamification of the operations of a model railroad.
But all of this is coming from a long time model train (and real train) enthusiast who is software engineer by day, so I’m biased.
He had a hand the design of the BassTech 7 servo drive subs as well. Their not being made anymore as I think they went out of business 20 years ago or so. All the reports I've read about those indicated that those subs were a pinnacle of rock concert audio technology and were devastatingly loud, lol.
Once BassTech folded, he worked with an online forum known as the Live Audio Board (LAB) to open source the design and replace the servo based driver with a conventional voice coil and cone driver.
The resultant design became known as the LAB Sub. A friend of mine built 12 of these beasts ~ 45x45x22 inches and let me tell you, they were amazing performers, that you could build yourself for around $500 (at the time).
Mr. Danley truly is a treasure to audio engineering and loudspeaker design.
>PCM is also a lossy compression due to the quantization step
Wrong, especially today. Modern ADCs use oversampling to push quantization noise into the inaudible range, and then filter it out before decimation to standard PCM.
This used to be somewhat true, but modern digital often uses such high internal rates that converting between the two is near lossless. For instance, the least common multiple of 44.1k and 48k is in the 7MHz region. Realtime conversion between them is pretty doable today. We've been doing it by using decimation with much simpler hardware for a few decades before that.
This is a great example of why I prefer lossless source material. I can tell an MP3 from a CD nearly every time (on recordings of good original quality) once it's sent through Bluetooth.
Agreed on the 44.1k 16-bit is all you need as a delivery medium for a final audio product.
However higher bit rates and sample rates are needed for multi track recordings so that during the mixing stage and mastering, the fidelity is preserved when _math_ causes rounding errors and what not. Unless, you are using nondestructive editing.
As for listening to the final product, i.e. store bought CDs and their equivalent MP3 and AAC rips... I can often hear the difference in specific recordings, no matter the bit rate, because the perceptual encoding schemes often butcher certain recordings.
For example, on RUSH's Red Barchetta from Moving Pictures, there is a synth intro that slowly vamps in volume. Every MP3 encoder (that is normally worth it's salt) I've ever tried encoding that with outputs a garbled, distorted, electronic sounding distortion. It clears up immediately once it reaches full volume, but during the crescendo it falls on it's face.
AFAIK, 48k was preferred over 44.1k in movie and cinema recordings because it divides evenly by 24. Both 44.1k and 48k are evenly divided by 30 and 60 fps. However, none of that really matters for TV where the actual frame rates are 59.97 and 29.98 to reduce flicker with US household mains frequency.
In the early days of digital audio, and before oversampling was possible, the anti aliasing filters were analog circuitry.
It's very difficult to cheaply implement a 20kHz brick wall filter with a 2kHz sideband.
Doing it in 4kHz yielded better results at the cost of slightly faster ADC designs.
I believe this is why 48kHz designs got the foothold in professional audio circles. The analog parts of those designs were WAY better sounding.
Once oversampling became common and affordable, the anti aliasing filters where implemented much more easily in the digital domain.
That's not how it works. Each bit of sample size yields about 6db of SNR. If you amplify a source to 120db SPL that was recorded with 4-bit samples the quantization noise would be about 96db SPL.
Most professional (i.e. cinema or public address) amplifiers have an SNR of around 108db. A properly functioning amplifier is never a likely source of noise.