Quote from: Ryex on November 09, 2011, 03:16:29 pm
@Sub
weird thing about sound processing. it really can;t get much better. as opposed to graphics where we are trying to reach photo realistic rendering in real time we can only get so good at sound processing. hardware to day is essentially the same quality it was 40 years ago just a bit smaller. there is no point extending the range of frequencies we can process because we can't hear them anyway, and there is no point making it faster because we already have it mixing 20+ inputs and adding filters in real time. we can't really improve the hardware. just the speed and complexity of the filters.
Well, honestly, my point of view is a bit different. We *could* get better, but we aren't. Why? Because we're stuck in nostalgia. Digital gear is trying to emulate analogue sound, but will never be as good, because of the limitation of computers - only being able to calculate with absolute values. There is no such thing as the theoretical endless amount of values analogue gear has. An analogue sound basically contains a "perfect sine wave", wheras a digital sound tries to get as close to it as possible using a high amount of values. In that way, digital gear will always be inferior to analogue gear.
Now, for things to get better, there would be 3 possiblities:
1. Go back to building analogue, which, though, would mean ditching the good parts of digital audio.
2. Staying with digital, but stopping to try to emulate analogue gear and go beyond that, using the full capacities of digital processing.
3. Having a hybrid of both. Bad thing about it is though that with every conversion from A to D or D to A, quality is lost.
I'll stop this rant for now.