Three speed automatic turntable replacement

There's no fallacy. That is, in fact, one way to cut a groove in a vinyl record that is a true, accurate square wave. Basically, you run the lathe like a circular plotter. It's sort of the limit case for the practice of half-speed mastering (which, done right, is a Very Good Thing to do).

Yup. Mathematics, now, can handle them just fine. But if you want to claim that a band-limited square wave still should be called a "square wave", I disagree. If the wave's fundamental is, say, 15 kHz, then what gets carved into the vinyl will be pretty close to a sine wave. And I think not a lot of folks would describe that as a "square wave".

Having compensated my share of "high bandwidth" 'scope probes (and built a few special-purpose probes along the way) I'd have to say, nope, those things with the horns on the edges (Gibbs' phenomenon) don't look very square to me.

Generally, that is true. There are situations, however, where the "functional bandwidth" of the DUT seems to predict one thing, while the "trouble-causing bandwidth" causes something rather different to happen. Ever see an audio amp that works (and measures) fine with the expected (and designed in) rolloff above the audible range, but then the gain pops back up again at a few megahertz (or more), which cause the thing to go all unstable under certain conditions?

One reason for testing with the fastest-edged waves you can get is to discover things like that.

Isaac

Reply to
isw
Loading thread data ...

I also think it was a Telarc disk. And the problem with it wasn't fast rise time, it was that the groove made a huge excursion -- so great that, on most pickups, the stylus just couldn't move that far. Usually, the ones that could track it did so because (as you point out) the arm mass was so low that the whole arm moved sideways, which cut the signal down, but kept the needle in the groove.

Isaac

Reply to
isw

In the real world, ALL SQUARE WAVES ARE BAND-LIMITED. All complex waveforms are band-limited. Period.

Do you argue merely for the sake of arguing? We are talking about a particular situation -- the use of a "real" square wave on an LP to get an idea of the pickup's mechanical characteristics.

If it's of any interest, I'm working on a fantasy screen play in which Josiah Gibbs appears.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

resonant

Stylus, stylus, stylus!

I worked in an audio store at the time, and the best arm for this disk was the Dynavector, which had very high lateral mass, with relatively low vertical mass.

Reply to
William Sommerwerck

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.