16 Apr
2012
16 Apr
'12
2:33 p.m.
On 2012 Apr 14, at 2:04 PM, Mouse wrote:
Some of the analog designers of the past were amazingly clever. Just
today I visited someone who has a Hammond organ with a Leslie.
Apparently we are only now learning how to digitially produce the kind
of effects the Leslie generates with little more than a motor and a
speaker.
The Leslie is a neat effect, but trying to digitally mimic (model in
real time) a specific effect is a very different problem than hacking
around in the analog domain and coming up some effect originally.
What I was getting at is that for problems that can be
solved in
both domains, doing so in the digital domain (generally via
software) allows the designer to focus on the problem and far less
so on the physical implementation.
I think this depends -- a lot -- on how the
designer thinks.
Certain;y I find hat for myself going over to the digirtal domain for
what are essentially analopgue problems makes them harder to
understnad. And look at the way the early DTMF telephone designers
got two tones
out of a single transistor. Not that doing that today would be all
that valuable, but the degree of analog insight necessary to create
that circuit is pretty impressive. Well, to me, at least.
It is very cute and impressive in its minimalism (I was surprised by
the simplicity when I first received such a phone and reverse-
engineered it), but it's just a Hartley oscillator with dual resonant
circuits, integrated into the line circuit. I wouldn't say it was
conceptually so far out. Simple transistor radios starting in the
50's used a single transistor to form the superhet mixer/oscillator
functions and multiple-actions-from-a-single-active-device ideas go
back to the reflex radios of the 20s.