[Arpiben]

For those less reluctant to learn the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC) tests and certifies Mechanical Movements watches during 15 days
https://www.cosc.swiss/en/certification/mechanical-movements
https://www.cosc.swiss/en/certification/methods-measurement

Time measurements for labs, Telecommunication networks, GPS, etc are much more complicated and time consuming than adding less then 20 harmonics power in a THD!

 

[tansand]

I could do it with a stick, a rock, a book, and the sun. No harmonics. I'm trying to get a patent though so whatever you do, do NOT google 'one weird trick for telling time with the sun'.

 

[JaeYoon]

I probably shouldn't join into this and stay lurking....but there are Mechanical watches that can contain hundreds to thousands of moving parts which is a big thing for watch enthusiasts. (Going for a Omega Seamaster soon). Just the novelty of amount of machinery on someone's wrist that is moving and beating is a big thing for watch fans.

Check this out
https://animagraffs.com/mechanical-watch/

 

[bigshot]

My Dad left me a Swiss watch that belonged to his Uncle. I just knew it as the watch my dad wore every day, but when I took it to the jeweler to be cleaned his eyes got wide. He convinced me to completely overhaul it so it would run another 75 years. Cost a fortune. It's got a gazillion jewels.

I use my phone to tell what time it is...

 

[JaeYoon]

My Dad left me a Swiss watch that belonged to his Uncle. I just knew it as the watch my dad wore every day, but when I took it to the jeweler to be cleaned his eyes got wide. He convinced me to completely overhaul it so it would run another 75 years. Cost a fortune. It's got a gazillion jewels.

I use my phone to tell what time it is...

Phones are definitely eating through the Swiss mechanical watch industry too.

That's the downside of Mechanical watch when it fails, It doesn't run on batteries but as all moving parts will eventually fail and fall into disrepair. The jeweler will have to replace parts and do a lot of cleaning. Usually the full replacement service is very expensive for mid to top costing brand watches.

 

[Arpiben]

Hopefully Gravitational Waves (perturbations of space time metric) are not measured with @tansand's methods.
Gravitational Waves are chirps or frequency modulated signals.
A chirp with small duration is a transient signal. Chirps are found in nature: birds (song),bats/dolphins/whales ( language and sophisticated ultrasonic sonar system).
As a short lived large band signal, standard Fourier analysis can not extract those transients from white noise.
Time - Frequency Wavelets analysis is the mathematical tool for such, cf : Y. Meyer, I. Daubechies.
They are widely used in Audio compression (mp3), Image compression (Jpeg), Facial recognition, etc.....
They are also used for gravitational waves detection.

Back to the thread.
R.Watts emphasizes the transient timing and alignment in his DACs designs: WTA Watts Transient Alignment ( or something similar).
To be honest, even after marketing noise removal, I never really understood the real meaning.

@gregorio can develop better than me, but Audio chirps/transients are in the 5-10 ms range. Nothing to worry about even with 16/44.1.
By comparison the first gravitational waves detection in September 2015 generated a 10 (-21) m length change in between 4 km spaced mirrors.

 

[gregorio]

My Rolex is very accurate, which goes to show that generalizations can't be made about accuracy of mechanical watches.

Just saying your Rolex is "very accurate" does not "goes to show" anything at all. Especially considering that your Rolex is in reality horrendously inaccurate! Most probably your Rolex is accurate to within about 4 secs a day, possibly about 2 secs a day if it's just been serviced. Your Rolex is about a hundred times less accurate than a high accuracy quartz watch and about a hundred trillion times less accurate than the most accurate clock! All of which goes to show that generalisations absolutely CAN be made about the accuracy of mechanical watches!!

G

 

[gregorio]

@gregorio can develop better than me, but Audio chirps/transients are in the 5-10 ms range. Nothing to worry about even with 16/44.1.

Transients vary greatly, depending on not just the instrument but even just very small variations in how an individual instrument is played. Transients can be anything from around a millisecond, up to around 300ms or so. An oft stated argument against 44.1kHz is that it's 22microSec sample interval is inadequate for the rise time of transients. The response to this argument is "the rise times of what transients?". It's inadequate for certain specifically designed transient signals, such as certain Dirac pulses for example but not for anything we encounter in music. The fastest rise time I've ever seen was from a claves hit with a rise time of about 30microSecs. I've often seen a snare drum rimshot quoted in this regard but the fastest rise time I've ever seen from a rimshot was about 80microSecs and typically they're around 120microSecs.

If I remember correctly, Rob Watts' argument about transient alignment/timing was also along the lines of transients which start between the sample boundaries of 44.1kS/s and are therefore not captured, only partly captured or somehow moved. The only potential part of a transient which is not captured is any component beyond Nyquist, the rest of it, no matter where it starts relative to the sample boundaries, is perfectly captured. This is relatively simple to test this for yourself. Take a recording at say 96kS/s, nudge a transient so it starts on an odd numbered sample and convert it down to 44.1kS/s. The start of that transient should now be between the sample boundaries of 44.1kS/s and should not, according to Rob Watts, be captured accurately. However, convert that 44.1kS/s back to 96kS/s again, compare it with the original and the transient is exactly where it was to begin with, it's not lost or been moved. This is entirely in line with the Nyquist/Shannon Sampling Theorem, which in effect Rob Watts is trying to contradict. He's apparently fallen into the beginner's trap of thinking that the reconstructed waveform is a stair-step or a sort of "join the dots" with a line between the sample points but in reality of course the dots are not joined by drawing a line between the sample points, they're joined by a sinc function, which effectively recreates ALL the detail between the sample points. Or, maybe he hasn't fallen into the beginner's trap but is counting on the overwhelming likelihood that gullible/ignorant audiophiles reading his marketing BS, will?

G

 

[Phronesis]

Just saying your Rolex is "very accurate" does not "goes to show" anything at all. Especially considering that your Rolex is in reality horrendously inaccurate! Most probably your Rolex is accurate to within about 4 secs a day, possibly about 2 secs a day if it's just been serviced. Your Rolex is about a hundred times less accurate than a high accuracy quartz watch and about a hundred trillion times less accurate than the most accurate clock! All of which goes to show that generalisations absolutely CAN be made about the accuracy of mechanical watches!!

G

You omitted the first part of what I said, and have also now completely contradicted yourself. Do you just like to argue, even with yourself?

 

[Arpiben]

Digital signal processing progress those last decades make me wonder why some still use 'infinite' or better say very long time sinc interpolation (million taps) when more efficient methods or transforms are available.Wavelets is only an example among others.
The last video,is probably more accessible since less maths and nice slides:
Professor Emmanuel Jean Candès, Stanford University:
Wavelets, sparsity and its consequences
http://www.abelprize.no/nyheter/vis.html?tid=69665

 

[bigshot]

One of things I find most amusing about this forum is how people can start out talking about home audio equipment and in just a few replies mutate to discussing cosmic waves and dark matter particles.

 

[tansand]

The digression is strong in this forum, it's a favored tactic for pretending not to have lost a debate. And you don't even have to change your mind! It's perfect!

The other thing I commonly see is persons trying to turn the debate into one over the definition of words (semantics). Of course, there's that childish bleating noise as well.

It's just low rent, bad faith sophistry. I think the title of this subforum should have the word science removed, and replaced with something more accurate. There's very little science going on here.

Anybody got any ideas for a new name?

 

[Phronesis]

I think the title of this subforum should have the word science removed, and replaced with something more accurate. There's very little science going on here.

Anybody got any ideas for a new name?

Gear skepticism forum
or
Anti-subjectivity forum
or
Audio objectivity forum
or
Audio debate forum

 

[JaeYoon]

Gear skepticism forum
or
Anti-subjectivity forum
or
Audio objectivity forum
or
Audio debate forum

I think the Audio debate forum sounds good.

 

[castleofargh]

The digression is strong in this forum, it's a favored tactic for pretending not to have lost a debate. And you don't even have to change your mind! It's perfect!

The other thing I commonly see is persons trying to turn the debate into one over the definition of words (semantics). Of course, there's that childish bleating noise as well.

It's just low rent, bad faith sophistry. I think the title of this subforum should have the word science removed, and replaced with something more accurate. There's very little science going on here.

Anybody got any ideas for a new name?

half the content of your posts in the last pages are sarcasm and personal attacks so maybe ease up on the lecture Mr perfection. you know pot, kettle ...
it's been pretty obvious that you came to post on this topic simply because you thought you had one on Gregorio. let's not lie to ourselves. I don't know what's more problematic? that you're unable to notice your own faults, or that you think it's reasonable to blame the entire section for what you don't like in the actions of one member. I hope people don't think the all section is about Gregorio. I hope people don't think I'm the Sound Science section(I'm the sheriff's deputy at best). and I really hope people won't think you're the spokesperson for Sound Science.
we're in a public forum for amateur hobbyists, not the AES, not the National Academy of Science. the content will be whatever people post in it and the vast majority of the posters are no scientists.


in any case, I'm only letting this pompous post be, to warn you(again) to go easy on trolls and personal attacks. insulting a group is worst than attacking one person, in case that wasn't obvious for you. also I'm getting tired of having people complain about your posts. having to go through the same routine of asking to discuss ideas instead of people, having to lock you out of a topic because you just don't know when to stop. so here is secret tip n°78: when a modo tells you to calm down, that's really a good time to do so and make extra efforts on civility for a while.
and @gregorio : try also to leave the judgemental comments out of your replies. it takes 2 to tango.