Multimedia : Characteristics of a multimedia
presentation Multimedia refers to content that uses a combination of different content forms. This contrasts with media that use
only rudimentary computer displays such as text-only or traditional forms of
printed or hand-produced material. Multimedia includes a combination oftext, audio, still images, animation, video, or interactive content forms. Multimedia
can be recorded and played, displayed, dynamic, interacted with or accessed
by information content processing devices, such as
computerized and electronic devices, but can also be part of a live
performance. Multimedia devices are electronic mediadevices used to store and experience
multimedia content. Multimedia is distinguished from mixed media in fine art; by including audio, for example,
it has a broader scope. The term "rich media" is synonymous for interactive
multimedia. Hypermedia scales up the amount of media
content in multimedia application. Categorization of multimedia Multimedia
may be broadly divided into linear and non-linear categories.
Linear active content progresses often without any navigational control for
the viewer such as a cinema presentation.
Non-linear uses interactivity to control progress as with a video game or self-paced computer
based training. Hypermedia is an example of non-linear content. Multimedia presentations can be live or recorded. A recorded presentation may allow interactivity via a navigation
system. A live multimedia presentation may allow
interactivity via an interaction with the presenter or performer. Major characteristics of multimedia Multimedia presentations may be viewed by person on stage, projected, transmitted,
or played locally with a media player. A broadcast may be a live or recorded multimedia
presentation. Broadcasts and recordings can be either analog or digital electronic media technology. Digital online multimedia may be downloaded or streamed.
Streaming multimedia may be live or on-demand. Multimedia games and simulations may be used in a physical
environment with special effects, with multiple users in an online network, or locally with an offline
computer,game system, or simulator. The various formats of technological
or digital multimedia may be intended to enhance the users' experience, for
example to make it easier and faster to convey information. Or in
entertainment or art, to transcend everyday experience. A lasershow is a live multimedia performance. Enhanced levels of interactivity are
made possible by combining multiple forms of media content. Online multimedia is increasingly becoming
object-oriented and data-driven, enabling applications with collaborative end-user innovation and personalization on multiple forms of content over
time. Examples of these range from multiple forms of content on Web sites
like photo galleries with both images (pictures) and title (text)
user-updated, to simulations whose co-efficients, events, illustrations,
animations or videos are modifiable, allowing the multimedia
"experience" to be altered without reprogramming. In addition to
seeing and hearing, Haptic technology enables virtual objects to be felt.
Emerging technology involving illusions of taste and smell may also enhance the multimedia
experience. Reference:{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia}
Uses of Multimedia Multimedia finds its application in various
areas including, but not limited to, advertisements, art, education, entertainment, engineering,medicine, mathematics, business,
scientific research and spatial temporal applications.
Several examples are as follows: Creative
industries
Creative
industries use
multimedia for a variety of purposes ranging from fine arts, to
entertainment, to commercial art, to journalism,
to media and software services provided for any of the industries listed
below. An individual multimedia designer may cover the spectrum throughout
their career. Request for their skills range from technical, to analytical,
to creative. Commercial uses
Much of the electronic old and new media used by commercial
artists and graphic designers is multimedia. Exciting presentations are used
to grab and keep attention in advertising.
Business to business, and interoffice communications are often developed by creative
services firms
for advanced multimedia presentations beyond simple slide shows to sell ideas
or liven-up training. Commercial multimedia developers may be hired to design
for governmental
services and nonprofit services applications as well. Entertainment and fine arts
In addition, multimedia is heavily used in
the entertainment industry, especially to develop special effects in movies and animations(VFX,
3D animation, etc.). Multimedia games are a popular pastime and are software
programs available either as CD-ROMs or online. Somevideo games also use multimedia
features. Multimedia applications that allow users to actively participate
instead of just sitting by as passive recipients of information are called Interactive Multimedia. In
the Arts there
are multimedia artists,
whose minds are able to blend techniques using different media that in some
way incorporates interaction with the viewer. One of the most relevant could
be Peter Greenaway who is melding Cinema with Opera and all sorts of
digital media. Another approach entails the creation of multimedia that can
be displayed in a traditional fine arts arena, such as an art gallery.
Although multimedia display material may be volatile, the survivability of
the content is as strong as any traditional media. Digital recording material
may be just as durable and infinitely reproducible with perfect copies every
time. Education
In Education,
multimedia is used to produce computer-based
training courses
(popularly called CBTs) and reference books like encyclopedia and almanacs. A
CBT lets the user go through a series of presentations, text about a
particular topic, and associated illustrations in various information
formats. Edutainment is the combination of
education with entertainment, especially multimedia entertainment. Learning theory in the past decade has
expanded dramatically because of the introduction of multimedia. Several
lines of research have evolved (e.g. Cognitive load, Multimedia
learning, and the list goes on). The possibilities for learning
and instruction are nearly endless. The idea of media convergence is also
becoming a major factor in education, particularly higher education. Defined
as separate technologies such as voice (and telephony features), data (and
productivity applications) and video that now share resources and interact
with each other, synergistically creating new efficiencies, media convergence
is rapidly changing the curriculum in universities all over the world.
Likewise, it is changing the availability, or lack thereof, of jobs requiring
this savvy technological skill. The English education in middle school in
China is well invested and assisted with various equipments. In contrast, the
original objective has not been achieved at the desired effect. The
government, schools, families, and students spend a lot of time working on
improving scores, but hardly gain practical skills. English education today
has gone into the vicious circle. Educators need to consider how to perfect
the education system to improve students’ practical ability of English.
Therefore, an efficient way should be used to make the class vivid.
Multimedia teaching will bring students into a class where they can interact
with the teacher and the subject. Multimedia teaching is more intuitive than
old ways; teachers can simulate situations in real life. In many
circumstances teachers do not have to be there, students will learn by
themselves in the class. More importantly, teachers will have more approaches
to stimulating students’ passion of learning. Journalism
Newspaper companies all over are also
trying to embrace the new phenomenon by implementing its practices in their
work. While some have been slow to come around, other major newspapers like The
New York Times, USA Today and The
Washington Post are
setting the precedent for the positioning of the newspaper industry in a
globalized world. News reporting is not limited to
traditional media outlets. Freelance journalists can make use of different
new media to produce multimedia pieces for their news stories. It engages
global audiences and tells stories with technology, which develops new
communication techniques for both media producers and consumers. The Common
Language Project, later renamed to The Seattle Globalist, is an example of
this type of multimedia journalism production. Multimedia reporters who are mobile
(usually driving around a community with cameras, audio and video recorders,
and laptop computers) are often referred to as Mojos,
frommobile journalist. Engineering
Software
engineers may
use multimedia in Computer
Simulations for
anything from entertainment to training such as military or
industrial training. Multimedia for software
interfaces are
often done as a collaboration between creative
professionals and
software engineers. Industry
In the Industrial sector,
multimedia is used as a way to help present information to shareholders,
superiors and coworkers. Multimedia is also helpful for providing employee
training, advertising and selling products all over the world via virtually
unlimited web-based technology. Mathematical and scientific research
In mathematical and scientific research,
multimedia is mainly used for modeling and simulation. For example, a scientist can look at a molecular
model of
a particular substance and manipulate it to arrive at a new substance.
Representative research can be found in journals such as the Journal
of Multimedia. Medicine
In Medicine, doctors can get trained by
looking at a virtual surgery or they can simulate
how the human body is affected by diseases spread by viruses and bacteria and then develop
techniques to prevent it. Multimedia application like virtual surgeries also help doctors to
get practical training. Document imaging
Document imaging is a technique that
takes hard copy of an image/document and converts it into a digital format
(for example, scanners). Disabilities
Ability Media allows those with
disabilities to gain qualifications in the multimedia field so they can
pursue careers that give them access to a wide array of powerful
communication forms. REFERENCE {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia#Usage_.2F_Application }
Types Of Texts - Glossary
Term Classifications according to
the particular purposes they are designed to achieve. These purposes
influence the characteristic features the texts employ. In general, in the Australian
Curriculum: English, texts can be classified as belonging to one of three
types: imaginative, informative or persuasive, although it is acknowledged
that these distinctions are neither static nor watertight and particular
texts can belong to more than one category. Imaginative texts – texts whose
primary purpose is to entertain through their imaginative use of literary
elements. They are recognised for their form, style and artistic or aesthetic
value. These texts include novels, traditional tales, poetry, stories, plays,
fiction for young adults and children including picture books and multimodal
texts such as film. Informative texts – texts whose
primary purpose is to provide information. They include texts which are
culturally important in society and are valued for their informative content,
as a store of knowledge and for their value as part of everyday life. These
texts include explanations and descriptions of natural phenomena, recounts of
events, instructions and directions, rules and laws and news bulletins. Persuasive texts – whose
primary purpose is to put forward a point of view and persuade a reader,
viewer or listener. They form a significant part of modern communication in
both print and digital environments. They include advertising, debates,
arguments, discussions, polemics and influential essays and articles Unicode
Standard Unicode is a computing industry
standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed
in most of the world's writing
systems. Developed in conjunction with the Universal Character Set standard
and published as The Unicode
Standard, the latest version of Unicode contains a repertoire of more
than 120,000 characters covering
129 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets. The standard
consists of a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding method and
set of standardcharacter
encodings, a set of reference data files, and a number of related items, such as character
properties, rules fornormalization, decomposition, collation,
rendering, and bidirectional display
order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts,
such as Arabic and Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).[1] As
of June 2015, the most recent version is Unicode
8.0. The standard is maintained by the Unicode
Consortium. Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to
its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer
software. The standard has been implemented in many
recent technologies, including modern operating
systems, XML, the Java programming language, and the Microsoft .NET
Framework. Unicode can be implemented by
different character
encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and
the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for
any ASCII character,
all of which have the same code values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and
up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit (two 8-bit
bytes) for each character but cannot encode
every character in the current Unicode standard. UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using
one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two
16-bit units (4 × 8 bit) to handle each of the additional
characters. Text
Compression Text is a very big part of most files that
digital technology users create. For example, these files could be: Word or PDFdocuments, emails,
cellphone texts (SMS format)
or web pages. Therefore being able to compress text for storage or
transmission is extremely important. Fortunately files containing mainly text
can be significantly compressed. Like image compression there are many
algorithms or methods that have been devised to do this. There is one
important point to note about text compression and that is it needs to use a
lossless method. This means the method must not discard any data when it
compresses the data. If this was so, the data when it is uncompressed would
be incomplete. REFERENCE {https://sites.google.com/site/dtcsinformation/data-compression/text-compression
}
Audio-Components of an audio system A stereo system consists of a number
of components. I'll try to say what these are here, and make a few general
comments about how high-end versions of such components differ from the
typical consumer models. Speakers Everyone knows what speakers are. Their job is to convert the electrical signal
coming from the amplifier into acoustic energy. There are many different
sorts of designs of speakers, because there are so many different ways to
accomplish this task, and different sorts of speakers have different strengths
and weaknesses. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, individual preference
is what decides what is "good": The trade-offs that have to be made
in actually producing a speaker, at any price point, are numerous; different
designers will make different choices, which may or may not match your own
personal inclinations. One thing which should be said about
high-end speakers is that they are often small, and can sound a bit lean in
the bass, especially at the lower price points. There are two simple reasons
for this. First of all, most widely available consumer speakers have a lot
less deep bass than they seem to have: What they have is lots of mid-bass; it is easy to be
fooled into thinking one is actually hearing really deep bass when all one is hearing is lots
of inarticulate booming. High-end speakers do not play that game: They
reproduce what they can and don't attempt to hide their failings by skewing
their frequency response. (At least, they shouldn't: If they do, then by my
definition, they are not truly 'high-end'.) Second, making a speaker which
does have really deep bass, without making that bass ludicrously muddy, is an
expensive proposition. Physics tells us, for reasons I do not entirely
understand, that one can only get deep bass out of a large cabinet (unless
one is willing to pay an enormous penalty in efficiency, i.e., require huge
amounts of power to produce reasonable volume). But one gets tight, solid
bass only if that cabinet is largely non-resonant, well-braced and made of
relatively rigid materials. The larger the cabinet, the harder, and more
expensive, that is to pull off. So most high-end designers of lower-cost
speakers make this compromise: They build small, rigid cabinets, sacrificing
really deep bass for tightness, and putting the money they would have spent on a big box
into drivers that will produce a musical midrange and smooth treble. That,
after all, is where most of the musical information is. You can't hide bad
midrange. Of course, the quality of the
drivers themselves (the woofer, tweeter, mid-range, and such) is also
important: There have been many advances in driver-technology in recent
years, and good drivers can be expensive to build. Another factor is the
nature and quality of the crossover, which is a bit of electronics which
directs the correct parts of the signal to the different drivers (sending the
bass to the woofer, the high frequencies to the tweeter, and so forth). Since
the signal itself is passing through these electronics, it is important to
use high-quality parts, built to tight tolerances; and here too the designer
can incur significant expense. Amplifiers A standard receiver is actually
three or four components in one. It contains a tuner, which is what you use
to listen to the radio. It contains a pre-amplifier,
which accepts the signal from your other components, allows you to select
among them, lets you set the volume, and provides some degree of (mostly
current) amplification; and it contains apower amplifier, which
accepts the signal from the pre-amplifier and produces the signal that
actually drives the speakers. If the receiver has a phono input (few do
nowadays), then it also contains a phono
pre-amplifier, which accepts the very low-level signal from the
turntable, applies RIAA correction, and then amplifies it to a level suitable
for the main pre-amplifier to handle. Power Amplifiers First, then, the power amplifier.
Its job, as said, is to produce the signal that will actually drive the
speakers. There are lots of ways to do this, too: Tubes vs transistors marks the first, and
most obvious, division. But I'll not go into that here. Be advised, however,
that there are many very good tube amps available nowadays,
of all sorts of different kinds, and that many listeners find the sound of a
good tube amp irresistable. One often hears a lot of talk about
watts: Perhaps one of the things that most surprises people when they start
to encounter high-end gear is that the amplifiers aren't 5000 watt monoliths.
One of my very favorite high-end amps, for example, is the Pass
Aleph 3, a tiny
little box that produces 30 watts per channel. There are some very expensive high-end amps that produce
less than ten watts, in fact. (These sorts of amps
generally require extremely efficient speakers.) Now, there are two major differences
between high-end and consumer amps. First, high-end amps are actually
designed to drive speakers, not just to produce impressive measurements on
the test bench. Watts don't matter very much. What is much more important is
the amount of current an amplfier is capable of
delivering, given the requirements of the speaker, and how much control the
amplifier has over the load it is driving. (The speaker itself is fighting
the amplifier all the time: It's a resistive, and sometimes reactive, load.)
A good high-end amp will typically deliver a great deal more current than a
consumer one, providing it with much more control over the behavior of the
speaker (and a greater ability to react properly to variations in the
impedence presented by the speaker). And even waiving that point, 50W is
usually more than sufficient to drive a moderately efficient pair of speakers
to decibel levels that your neighbors would not appreciate. (One of my amps
produces 60W into an 8 ohm load, and my speakers are not insanely efficient.
Yet it produces more than enough volume in my room.) In a high-end power amplifier, much
of the cost is actually absorbed by the power supply, by what provides the
raw current to the circuitry. This raw current is crucial. It is by
modulating this current that the amplifier does its job, so every anomaly
present in the current delivered by the supply is there in the output. (Think
of the amplifier as trying to project the path of a small signal onto that of
the large, flat—i.e., DC—current.) Every effort is made to produce a clean,
steady flow of raw current: That means taking special care to filter out
unwanted contaminants from the AC line, which will otherwise find their way
into the signal sent to the speakers; to keep additional contaminants from
being introduced; and to prevent the sudden draw which a musical transient
causes from causing a drag on the power supply and interfering with its
ability to provide the raw current. In fact, for these reasons, in any high-end component, much of the cost
is in the power supply. Pre-amplifiers The pre-amplifier is the 'control
center': It accepts inputs from source components, allows you to choose among
them, and allows you to set the volume. Typically, it provides some
amplification (usually current amplification), so the signal will be strong
enough to drive the power amplifier (and the cables on the way). High-end pre-amplifiers are often minimalist,
compared with (the relevant part of) what one finds in a typical rack system.
For example, there are usually no tone controls (bass, treble, and assorted
buttons). This is consistent with the Audiophile Ideal: Tone controls provide
one with only the grossest ability to shape the sound; if one is interested
inaccurate reproduction,
it is not a good idea gratuitously to alter the overall frequency response of
the system. More importantly, tone controls insert otherwise unnecessary
components into the signal path: This tends to result in the introduction of
colorations, even when the controls are set to 'flat'. There are, again, many sorts of
pre-amplifiers: Tube and transistor, and even so-called hybrid models, which
contain both. There are also so-called 'passive' pre-amplifiers (something of
an oxymoron), which provide for source selection and volume control, but
provide no amplification of the signal at all. In the right system, such
passive pre-amps can be wonderful: They really do get out of the way. But in
many cases, the amplification a conventional pre-amp provides just is needed
for the power amplifier to be properly driven (especially if you want to use
long cables between these components). A compromise here is a
"buffer", such as the First Watt B1, which you can actually build yourself, if you can solder at all. Only a
lot of experimentation can tell you what will work in your system, but there
are general guidelines which a good sales person can explain. Phono Pre-amplifiers A phono pre-amp takes the very
low-level signal from the cartridge, it applies RIAA correction (records are
cut with the bass lowered in level and the treble boosted), and it amplifies
the signal to a level that the pre-amp can handle (line level). A good phono
pre-amp is essential if one is going to get good reproduction from vinyl: The
signal is so low in level when it emerges from the cartridge (about 5 millivolts,
usually, often much lower) that very special care needs to be taken with it;
tiny errors, which might be inaudible in other cases, can be disastrous here.
The quality of the power supply is critical. Phono-preamps are often just boxes:
There are no visible controls; many of them don't even have on-off switches.
But there are some controls it is useful to have, and different pre-amps
provide one with different levels of flexibility. First of all, it can be
very useful to be able to set the gain on such a unit: Different cartridges
have different levels of output and need different amounts of gain to produce
a listenable signal. For my money, I insist that my phono pre-amp at least
allow me to choose between moving magnet and moving coil gain: If it doesn't,
I risk having to buy a new one just because I decide to change catridges.
Secondly, cartridges often respond in different ways to 'loading', that is,
to the input impedence (and even capacitance) of the pre-amp. It is nice to
be able to experiment with this: I found, for example, that one of my old
cartridges, a Sumiko Blue Point Special, sounded its most lush when run into
100 ohms; although that cost me something by way of gain, the BPS had a
high-enough output that it didn't matter, in the end; one can often
compensate for that by setting the pre-amp to a higher gain, anyway. (One
needs to be a bit careful with this, though, as the higher-gain settings can
introduce noise.) Integrated Amplifiers An integrated amplifier combines all
of the above parts into one box (possibly expcepting the phono pre-amp).
There are sonic costs associated with this integration, largely deriving from
the fact that the sort of power supply a pre-amp needs is quite different
from the sort of power supply a power amp needs, and due to potential
corruption of the signal in one section by what is going on in the other.
That said, however, compromises must always be made and, especially at the
lower price-points, integrated amps can make a great deal of sense. Those looking to get into high-end
audio might well consider an integrated first. It is well to be aware,
however, that doing so can make one's upgrade path more difficult: One will
have to buy a separate pre-amp and power amp at once, when (or if) one
decides to upgrade one's system. Unless,
that is, one buys an integrated which has a pre-out jack on the back,
allowing the integrated to be used as a pre-amp, driving a separate power
amp. Many of the low-cost integrateds made by high-end companies do come with
this sort of feature. I myself took just this route some years ago, with an
NAD 3225. Source Components CD Players and Assorted
Accoutrements The main source component of many
audio systems nowadays is the CD player or equivalent. Any CD player in fact
consists of (at least) three parts: A transport, which spins the disc and
delivers the bits; a digital-analogue converter, or DAC, which converts the
bits into an analogue signal; and an analogue amplifier, which produces the
current needed to drive the pre-amp. The last two, of course, go together
more so than do the first two: The DAC is pretty useless unless there is
enough power in the signal to get it to the pre-amp. Some CD players actually contain
more serious analogue stages, and a volume control, so that they are capable
of driving a power amplifier directly. If one is happy with a digital-only
audio system, this can dramatically improve the sound of a system (by
eliminating the pre-amp, which is one potential source of sonic degradation,
as well as a set of cables) and save money in the process. Some time back, high-end audio
companies began to abandon the concept of the 'single box' CD player in favor
of separate transports and DACs, connected by a digital link. However, in
recent years, this strategy has fallen into some disfavor: It turned out that
the process of getting the digital signal from the transport to the DAC
itself introduced certain sorts of digital artifacts (jitter, as it is
known), which, even in relatively small amounts, could be musically
disastrous. In response to this, people starting making 'jitter reduction'
boxes, which one inserted between the transport and the DAC. Really crazy
audiophiles sometimes used more than one of these. But a different solution
is to abandon the concept of separates and return to the production of
single-box units, which is what many high-end companies have done. As with other sorts of components,
high-end CD players tend to be somewhat more minimalist than consumer models.
The reasons are the usual ones: The provision of bells and whistles adds to
the price without adding to sonic excellence; and the electronics needed to
produce all of this can be a source of noise and hence sonic degradtion. I
have had the experience, myself, that turning off the display on my CD player
improves its sound. It may seem crazy, but that's how it sounds to me. Music Servers and Such More and more nowadays, though, CDs
look like dinosaurs. Many of us get much of our music online, through digital
downloads. But before I go any further, let me say this: You cannot get true high-end performance from
mp3, aac, or any other "lossy" format, and I don't care how high
the bitrate is. These sorts of compression throw away the very details high-end componments work so
hard to reproduce,
so if you just want to listen to mp3, then you're wasting your money on
high-end audio. Of course there are also lossless forms
of compression, such as FLAC. These are perfectly acceptable. You can rip your CDs to FLAC, and
you can nowadays download FLACs directly from the web. For example, my
favorite band, Widespread Panic, offers soundboard recordings of every show as FLACs, and HDtracks offers FLAC downloads of a lot of
great albums, and many of these are even at high resolution. This is one of the real advantages
of music servers. Standard CDs have a sample rate of 44.1kHz, and a bit depth
of 16 bits. Higher resolution formats typically have a bit depth of 24 bits.
The sample rate varies, but is typically 48kHz or 96kHz. I cannot tell you
how much better high resolution digital sounds. It's night and day. Of
course, high resolution music has been available for a while on SACD and
DVD-Audio, but there hasn't been much of it (SACD is looking rather like BetaMax, another great idea from the people
at Sony), and you can't get the high resolution stuff off a DVD-A with a
normal DVD player. You can rip them to FLAC, however, using a program called
DVD Audio Explorer, which can be found on the web. (You should not use DVD Audio Extractor, which has
major security issues, as I explain here.) So let's say we want to rip our CDs,
download FLACs, etc. How will we play them? The simplest way is to use a
so-called USB DAC that you just plug into your computer. What I'm using are Logitech Transporters, which allow me to access all the
files stored on my music server from two different systems. (And I've got
other Squeezebox-like devices in other parts of the house, too.) Another
option very much worth exploring is the new music server from Auraliti. But, honestly,
there are so many options here, and more every day, that anything I write now
(at the end of 2011) will shortly be out of date. If you want to explore this
kind of thing, drop me a note. DACs, Again That said, the rise of music servers
has made DACs relevant again. A DAC, or digital-analogue converter, does
precisely what its name says: It takes a digital signal and converts it to an
analogue one, which you can actually listen to. Of course, there are many ways
to do this, and DACs exist at many price points. My own experience lately is
that, in some respects, we have reached near perfection with DACs. Really
good DACs all sound more or less the same to me now, at least on CD-standard,
44.1/16 material. This price point seems to be around $3000, but you can get
outstanding sound for a lot less. There are some older DACs, too, such as the
Adcom GDA-600 and GDA-700, that are really amazing, though they won't handle
96kHz signals. (My GDA-600 will play 48/24, even though it claims only to be
a 20-bit device. Maybe it's discarding the last four bits?) These can be had
on the used market for $200-$300. Turntables and Assorted
Accoutrements Many people are surprised to hear
that there are people who still listen to records. They are even more
surprised to hear that it is still possible to buy new records. But they do,
and it is, and some of us still think that a nice, clean record, played on a
well-set-up, high-quality 'table sounds much, much better than even the best-produced
CDs played on the finest player. This is particularly true as regards older
recordings. For all the work that went into it, the 50th anniversary CD of Kind of Blue was made from tapes that were nearly
fifty years old. The state of the tapes at the point simply can not be what
it was in 1959, and the quality of the CDs one gets reflects that. But even
with current recordings, I hear major differences: The sound of a record is
simply much more musical than that of a CD. To my ear, a
guitar usually sounds more like a guitar when reproduced by vinyl; cymbals,
in particular, sound much more realistic. Even more dramatic differences
accompany the spatial aspects of a recording. High
resolution digital is a lot better, and is getting pretty darn close to analog. There are still some who think that
vinylphiles are crazy, victims of wishful thinking, or what have you: One can
only invite the skeptic to listen for himself. What is usually called a 'turntable'
(or, if you're really old school, a 'record player') consists of three parts:
The turntable proper, whose job it is to spin the record, at the prescribed
speed; a tonearm, which carries the cartridge, and whose job it is to hold it
as steady as possible over the groove of the record; and the cartridge itself,
which contains the stylus, or needle, and the electronics which convert the
mechanical energy, created by the groove of the record, into an electrical
signal, which can be sent to the phono pre-amp. All of these parts are crucial. It
is easy to think that the most important part is the cartridge: After all,
that's where the sound is coming from. But many people think that the
cartridge is the least important part. Not, of course, that it doesn't need
to be good: It does; your 'table is not going to sound any better than your
cartridge. But the cartridge can not do its job unless it is held precisely
over the groove; it can not do its job if the tonearm is transmitting or
storing up resonant energy. And it can not do its job if the 'table itself is
transmitting all kinds of vibrations to the stylus, through the record
itself, or through the tonearm. Moreover, many of the most annoying
colorations one hears in poor turntables are actually caused by very slight
fluctuations in the speed at which the record is being played. (Such minor
variations can make a piano sound harsh and 'brassy', for example.) One
Audiophile mantra is: Nothing is unimportant. Nowhere is that more true than
with turntables. As important as the 'table itself is
is how it is set-up, in particular, how the cartridge is set-up. One can not
simply screw a cartridge onto a tonearm and expect to get good sound: The
cartridge has to be aligned properly, so that the stylus meets the groove at
the right sort of angle. This can not be done visually: The tolerances are
much too small for that to be possible; it can only be done with the right
sort of equipment. If you are buying a turbtable from a dealer, you can get
him or her to set it up for you: But you will probably want to have some kind
of system for yourself which will allow you to check, and reset, the
alignment from time to time. There are a number of inexpensive 'protractors'
(these are not what you used back in elementary school) which will allow you
to do this. And it is also worth having at least an inexpensive
stylus-pressure gauge (these can be had for as little as $15), to check the
tracking force of the cartridge. The little numbers on the counterweight are
rarely very accurate (when they're there at all). Unfortunately, there is one aspect
of alignment that really can not be set once and left: This is the vertical
tracking angle or VTA. Perhaps I'll add some thoughts about VTA later or
elsewhere. For now, I'll just mention it. REFERENCE
{http://rgheck.frege.org/audio/beginners/components.php }
Audio Processing software Audio editing software is
software which allows editing and generating of audio data. Audio
editing software can be implemented completely or partly as library, as computer
application, as Web application or as a loadable
kernel module. Wave Editors are
digital audio editors and there are many sources of software available to
perform this function. Most can edit music, apply effects and filters, adjust
stereo channels etc..with waveform editing views and many are freeware programs without any limitations. A digital
audio workstation (DAW) can
consist to a great part out of software. are usually software suites composed
of many distinct software components, giving access to them through a unified
graphical user interface using GTK+, Qt or some
other library for theGUI widgets. Audio data
can be characterized as digitized audio signal, cf. digital audio. For use with music Editors designed for use with music typically allow the
user to do the following: ·
The ability to import and export various audio
file formats for editing. ·
Record audio from one or more inputs and
store recordings in the computer's memory as digital audio ·
Edit the start time, stop time, and
duration of any sound on the audio timeline ·
Fade into
or out of a clip (e.g. an S-fade out during applause after a performance), or
between clips (e.g. crossfading betweentakes) ·
Mix multiple sound sources/tracks, combine
them at various volume levels and pan from channel to channel to one or more
output tracks ·
Apply simple or advanced effects or filters, including compression, expansion, flanging, reverb, audio
noise reduction and equalization to
change the audio ·
Playback sound (often after being mixed)
that can be sent to one or more outputs, such as speakers, additional
processors, or a recording medium ·
Conversion between different audio
file formats, or between different sound quality levels Typically these tasks can be performed in a manner that
is both non-linear and non-destructive. REFERENCE {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_editing_software}
Video color spaces A color space is a
specific organization of colors. In combination with physical device
profiling, it allows for reproducible representations of color, in both analog and digital representations. A color space may
be arbitrary, with particular colors assigned to a set of physical color
swatches and corresponding assigned names or numbers such as with the Pantone system, or structured
mathematically, as with Adobe
RGB or sRGB. A color model is an abstract mathematical model
describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers
(e.g. triples in RGB or
quadruples in CMYK); however, a color model with no
associated mapping function to an absolute
color space is a more
or less arbitrary color system with no connection to any globally understood
system of color interpretation. Adding a specific mapping function between a
color model and a reference color space establishes within the reference
color space a definite "footprint", known as a gamut, and for a given color model this
defines a color space. For example, Adobe RGB and sRGB are two different
absolute color spaces, both based on the RGB color model. When defining a
color space, the usual reference standard is the CIELAB or CIEXYZ color spaces, which were
specifically designed to encompass all colors the average human can see. Since
"color space" is a more specific term, identifying a particular
combination of color model and mapping function, it tends to be used
informally to identify a color model, since identifying a color space
automatically identifies the associated color model, however this usage is
strictly incorrect. For example, although several specific color spaces are
based on the RGB color model, there is no such thing as the
singular RGB color space. Digital
Video Digital video is
audio/visual in a binary format. Information is presented as a
sequence ofdigital data, rather than in a continuous
signal as analog information is. Information in the natural world, received through the
five senses, is analog. That means that it is infinitely variable. Digital
A/V information, on the other hand, consists of discrete units of data that
are placed so close together that the human senses perceive them as a
continuous flow. Analog data, such as video recorded on tape, is transmitted
as electronic signals of varying frequency or amplitude that are added to
carrier waves of a given frequency. To make that information usable on a
computer or a modern media player, analog-to-digital conversion translates an analog signal to a
series of zeroes and ones, which represent, respectively,
"negative" and "positive," "off" and
"on," or "low" and "high." The opposite action, digital-to-analog conversion, recreates the analog signal for playback. Digital video offers a number of advantages over analog
video, including: ·
Ease of sharing and storage. ·
No degredation of data quality when copied. ·
Easy and inexpensive copying. ·
The capacity for multicasting. Digital video technology can also incorporate
analytical software for intelligent video, which enables capabilities such as video search, object tracking and
intrusion detection. REFERENCE {http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/digital-video } Video file formats. A video
file format is a type of file format for storing digital video data on a computer system. Video is almost always
stored incompressed form to reduce the file size. A video file normally consists of a container format (e.g. Matroska) containing video data in a video coding format (e.g. VP9) alongside audio data in an audio coding format (e.g. Opus). The container format can also
contain synchronization information, subtitles, and metadata such as title
etc.. A standardized (or in some cases de facto standard) video file type such as .webm is a profile specified by a restriction on which
container format and which video and audio compression formats are allowed. The coded video and audio inside a
video file container (i.e. not headers, footers and metadata) is called the essence. A
program (or hardware) which can decode video or audio is called a codec;
playing or encoding a video file will sometimes require the user to install a
codec library corresponding to the type of video and audio coding used in the
file. Good design normally dictates that a file extension enables the user to derive which
program will open the file from the file extension. That is the case with
some video file formats, such as WebM (.webm), Windows Media Video (.wmv),
and Ogg Video (.ogv), each of which can only contain a few well-defined
subtypes of video and audio coding formats, making it relatively easy to know
which codec will play the file. In contrast to that, some very general-purpose
container types like AVI (.avi) and Quicktime (.mov) can contain video and
audio in almost any format, and have file extensions named after the
container type, making it very hard for the end user to use the file
extension to derive which codec or program to use to play the files. The free software FFmpeg project's
libraries have very wide support for encoding and decoding video file
formats. For example, Google uses ffmpeg to support a wide range of upload
video formats for YouTube.[1] One widely used media player using
the ffmpeg libraries is the free software VLC media player, which can play most video files that end users will encounter. REFERENCE {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_file_format} |
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