* Posts by IJD

72 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2016

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Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

IJD

Re: What's in a name?

skwoo dwivuh... ;-)

https://images.app.goo.gl/N6r48J7T1b3jZxmq6

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

IJD

Re: I was the problem luser

My father-in-law (W W Chandler) was trying to debug a persistent fault in the first Colossus II (which he built most of) in early June 1944 at Bletchley Park, and stayed overnight to try and fix it after everyone else had gone home. The rain started and then got heavier, the roof leaked, and a pool of water started spreading across the floor to where he was working on live 500V valve circuits.

Not being easily discouraged, he put his wellies on and carried on working standing in the water. Found the problem (a parasitic oscillation IIRC) about 3am and fixed it, went home.

Next morning (June 4th?) it successfully ran for the first time and cracked the German High Command codes which confirmed that they'd fallen for the Calais feint, and D-Day was authorised as a direct result.

If is wasnae for his wellies... ;-)

4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues

IJD

Obligatory XKCD Mars rover

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

IJD

Give me an A380 any day. Quietest and most comfortable plane I've ever been on...

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

IJD

He was a fellow student, not one of mine. And no, it wasn't me, but even after 45 years or so I'm not going to name him just in case he's still around in the industry... ;-)

IJD

Not an unplugging story, but an idiot student story with very much the same effect...

The heavy electrical engineering lab at Cambridge had a massive paired 3ph AC motor-generator set used for efficiency measurements -- the kind of thing where each one is maybe 4' diameter and 6' long, can't remember the exact power figure but at least 1MW each springs to mind. The idea was to use the motor to power the generator with both connected to the mains, which therefore only has to supply a few percent of the power -- for example 1MW into the motor and 950kW back out of the generator means only 50kW net load.

All fine until some numpty student had a bright idea while running the test -- "Hey, I wonder what happens if I reverse the field coil polarity?"

<dumph> all the lights and lab equipment go out. As does the whole of the engineering labs. As -- so I was told -- did a large part of East Cambridge.

Cue Bill -- the guy who ran the lab -- running into the room screaming "Which one of you f*cking morons reversed the field coils?!?!?"

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

IJD

Re: Concorde, so loud

We once moored a narrowboat overnight on a nice quiet remote stretch of the Oxford Canal. We woken up at 7am by an F111 on afterburners taking off a few feet above our heads, then another one a few seconds later. Never heard anything like it, we thought the end of the world had arrived. With hindsight, mooring at the end of the Upper Heyford runway wasn't such a smart move... :-(

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

IJD

2.5MJ fusion energy out for 2MJ laser energy in sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?

Shame about the 200MJ needed to power the lasers though... :-(

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

IJD

We had someone who nicked a laptop from work and tried to flog it on Ebay, complete with pictures.

He's probably have got away with it if not for the fact that the company asset tag complete with ID code was clearly visible in one of the photos...

China seems to have figured out how to make 7nm chips despite US sanctions

IJD

Re: Parallel development

The TU144 wing bore no resemblance to the Concorde wing except that it was superficially a delta -- but with a completely different shape and hugely inferior performance, which the canards tried (not very successfully) to fix. Any serious Russian attempt to use spying to copy Concorde's wing would have looked much more similar in shape with better performance than the TU144.

The same applied to the engines and especially their intakes, which was why Concorde could cruise without reheat and the TU144 couldn't -- hence the appalling noise levels inside, and terrible range.

Samsung beats TSMC to be first to produce 3nm chips

IJD

Unfortunately for Samsung their 3nm GAA/nanosheet process had worse PPA (power performance and area) than TSMCs 3nm FinFET process, as well as having lower yield.

So good for bragging rights, but not customers or business...

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

IJD

At uni in the early 80s I managed somehow to end up specifying and then running the group PDP11/44, which was shared between a heap of postgrads doing signal and image processing (including me). 64kB of RAM, two 20MB hard disks and a tape drive, which was supposed to be used for regular backups but often wasn't.

IIRC the OS was RSX/11 which only had 2 categories of user, normal (restricted) and super (who could do anything) -- but to get access to the image acquisition hardware you needed to be a superuser, so most of the postgrads were. Late on day (Friday, obviously...) there was a major panic as everyone's VT100 stopped responding to commands, including directory listings. It turned out one idiot had decided to clean out his (multiple) directories, and entered RM [*,*]*.*;* (or the equivalent) and deleted not only all his own files but also everyone else's, and also the entire OS which is why no commands worked any more... :-(

(and of course there wasn't a backup HDD since they'd both been used, and it turned out that the last tape backup was several months old...)

In a stroke of luck the tiny little system debugger was sitting in memory because I'd been using it to try and track down a problem, and this quickly showed that all the HDD files had been deleted -- but the FAT was still there undisturbed since the disaster stopped anybody doing anything, just every block on the disk had been marked as unallocated. The debugger allowed the FAT (which included block number, filenames and used ID) to be inspected, and fortunately it could also drive the line printer directly since even the print command had gone.

Which meant I could print out the contents of the FAT, hand it to the miscreant, and tell him to manually reallocate every block on the HDD, which included the OS. IIRC there were 20480 1k blocks -- almost all used, which was why the attempted file clearance had happened -- and this took him all weekend, since the debugger could only work on on block at a time. Amazingly pretty much everything came back undamaged...

A close escape, all the PhD students would have lost months of work if not for the lucky fluke of the debugger still running.

There still wasn't any way to stop this happening again, except giving everyone an absolute b*llocking -- oh yes, and backing up to tape regularly...

Sony launches a space laser subsidiary (for comms, not conflict)

IJD

SpaceX are already using lasers for wideband inter-satellite comms links. Laser links from satellites to ground have an obvious and fundamental problem -- there aren't any clouds between satellites but there are above the ground...

Synopsys, Juniper Networks fuse to tackle silicon photonics

IJD

The real problem is that the companies who are successful in silicon photonics -- including the one I work for -- all have their own "secret sauce" designs and layouts which they've invested a lot of time and money developing, often including tweaks to the fundamental process, to get improved performance or lower power consumption -- you really have to dig down deep into the process, it's not like assembling digital gates or even analogue designs using transistors, more like designing your own transistor from scratch including all the dopants and implants.

As soon as you go to a standard process/design kit anyone can do it but also a lot of the ability to differentiate also disappears.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

IJD

Re: You were lucky

My father-in-law designed and built the optical tape readers for Colossus (and built and debugged most of the rest of the hardware). When they were trying to see how fast the readers could go he pushed the tape speed up *way* beyond the normal speed, IIRC he got it up to about 80mph before the inevitable happened. They were picking bits of confetti out of everything in the room -- including the Colossus racks -- for several days...

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

IJD

We had UPSs for the servers with about an hour or so of battery life, enough to allow for short-term power failures and give us enough time to shut down gracefully.

One day the power went off and stayed off as we watched the % capacity numbers on the UPS spool down, hoping we wouldn't need to shut the servers down because a chip tapeout was imminent and this would put us back be several days. Unfortunately didn't happen, it was several hours before the power came back on.

The problem turned out to be in the local substation (11kV? 33kV?) supplying the industrial estate, where it seems that an inquisitive cat had found some nice warm busbars to sit on (it was January) with inevitable consequences. Leastways they think it was a cat, difficult to tell from what was essentially charcoal...

When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE

IJD

Re: reminds me of a song

From Mike Harding:

"Best Universal Grit Grime and Effluent Remover -- best ever marketing slogan...

If OMO won't whiten it and DAZ won't brighten it -- BUGGER it!"

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

IJD

The Ballad of Lidl & Aldi...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL7jyXCQ2Zc

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

IJD

Re: Sometimes there is some good news...

Our Neff double oven has a dodgy selector knob on one oven, so doesn't like selecting some common functions -- it's basically a rotary multi-layer cam driving a load of switches, and the cam is worn.

The one for the other oven has 12 positions (probably common across several models) and is available from Neff (and elsewhere) for about £70.

The dodgy one has 11 positions and is unavailable from Neff or anywhere else... :-(

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

IJD

There's an essential big-money-making feature to Starlink that they're kind of keeping quiet about, which is high-frequency trading. There's a straight-line subsea cable from London to New York being installed at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to shave a few tens of milliseconds off the latency compared to the more wiggly existing cables, because this makes big bucks for traders.

The propagation delay to and between Starlink satellites is the speed of light so about 50% faster than optical fiber; even allowing for the other latencies, Starling will be able to offer considerably shorter latencies than even the straight-line cable, and they can do it between anywhere and anywhere else -- so, all the financial trading centres. The trading houses will pay *huge* fees for such links, because they can make stupendous amounts of money by being that little bit quicker.

There was a number floating round, and IIRC it was tens of billions of dollars...

Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s

IJD

There's already a standard for 400G Ethernet over SMF up to 80km, it's defined by the OIF and is called 400G-ZR, and pluggable modules supporting it are already available. The Ethernet Alliance is behind the times again...

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

IJD

Re: hydraulic computers

You can build an entire computer out of air-driven "gates" -- and the USSR did...

We did some design work for an Israeli company back in the 90s and they had a Russian guy on the project -- yes he was called Igor. Before he left the USSR he'd been working on the control computer for one of their nuclear plants (might have been military?) which was controlled by a computer powered by compressed air, he said it made about the same amount of noise as a jet engine.

To avoid reliability problems, every "gate" was built using triple-voting-redundancy, as were modules -- he said the best thing about it was that if a fault occurred (the modules indicated this) you could unplug the faulty module and plug in a replacement *while the system was running*. Try that nowadays...

Why do all this? Well, if you have some kind of nuclear accident it's quite helpful if the control system is totally immune to radiation and carries on running even during a meltdown. Which gives you some idea of how big an accident they were planning for, Chernobyl wasn't in the same league :-(

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

IJD

Re: Not quite a straightforward bribe

I think this may indeed have been a bribe in disguise...

I travelled to Yugoslavia with my parents by car many times in the 70s and 80s and I don't remember this ever happening to us. Maybe because my dad came from a little village near Bihac... ;-)

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

IJD

GPS signals are indeed way below the noise floor and extracted by correlation. Which means you only need a low-powered jammer to block them by raising the receiver noise floor, you don't need to overload it. I remember our GPS chipset test receiver being driven round to test accuracy, and in one particular area it sometimes went haywire -- but not all the time. Speculation was that there was some machinery chucking out RF noise but only when it was turned on. Never did track down what it was...

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

IJD

Slugs conduct mains and so does their slime. Found this out when one crawled up inside our dishwasher and committed suicide on the back of the big multi-terminal rotary programmer switch. Impossible to clean the resulting fried slug/slime off, had to replace the entire switch at a cost of more than fifty quid...

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

IJD

I was told by a member of the Royce family (a fellow engineer) that the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was originally going to be called the Silver Mist, and it was only days before its launch that somebody who spoke German pointed out the problem with this. All the ready-printed publicity material and the badges on the show cars had to be redone, just in time...

Honey, I shrunk the iPhone 12: Mini teardown reveals same components, only smaller

IJD

Apple make the back out of glass to double the chance of the phone smashing when you drop it so you have to pay them a fortune to repair it ;-)

To be fair to Apple, they're not the only manufacturer to go down this stupid path...

They’ve only gone and bloody done it – yawn – again! NASA, SpaceX send four to ISS

IJD

I see that landing reusable boosters on a drone ship -- science fiction or "won't ever work" not so long ago -- is now so humdrum and routine (for SpaceX) that it doesn't even get mentioned any more...

Seeing as real 5G isn't even here yet, you could just get a OnePlus instead of an iPhone 12 and save loadsamoney

IJD

My OnePlus 3 is still going just fine after more than 4 years...

Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment

IJD

The problem for Intel is that nobody now believes that they can deliver on their roadmaps for any CPUs beyond 14+++++, compared to AMD where nobody doubts this any more as TSMC keep hitting (or beating) all their targets for rolling out new high-yielding process nodes.

Intel stuck with inhouse fabs and lots of different big monolithic chips because they could afford it and this is what always worked for them in the past, and ignored the oncoming train wreck. AMD were forced to go to foundries because unlike Intel they had no choice, and they went to chiplets partly because they couldn't afford to do multiple foundry tapeouts for different monolithic-die SKUs.

In hindsight, these look like two of the smartest decisions AMD had no choice but to make, and two of the dumbest decisions Intel made out of pig-headedness ;-)

China’s preferred Linux distro trumpets Arm benchmark results

IJD

The problem we have competing with China is explained by what happened in the USA...

The USA became dominant in semiconductors (and other high-tech areas) by investing huge amounts in fundamental R&D and having a lot of skilled scientists and engineers working on technology, and then a spending a lot more money and having a lot of creative engineers designing on hardware based on it. The fundamental R&D has now largely disappeared because it's expensive and doesn't deliver short-term profits, and most of the engineering talent has moved from hardware into software (or services, or apps...) because it delivers more profits (and higher salaries) more quickly. It's why places like Bell Labs and the other big research centres that used to drive technology are no more.

Meanwhile places like China are pouring huge amounts of money (and talent and engineers) into both R&D and technology/hardware development because a) they've got the money b) they see it as essential to China's future success c) they're not so obsessed with stock prices and short-term profits. Yes they're still behind in several areas (especially process technology) but are catching up fast, and spending money like it's going out of fashion to do so. When I talked to someone from Huawei a few years back, they were planning to expand R&D resources by hiring 16000 new graduates that year alone...

So the sad truth is that losing our technology lead is basically down to short-termism and obsession with the next quarter's stock price, coupled with the fact that software/services is a faster way to make more money than hardware and fundamental technology -- ignoring the fact that software needs hardware to run on and communicate through, somebody else can do that, it takes too long and doesn't make enough money. Having your technology businesses dominated by the desire to make lots of money as fast as possible to pump up the stock price goes directly against what is needed to stay as a technological leader, especially in expensive areas like semiconductors.

Blaming China for this is looking in the wrong direction, the damage is basically self-inflicted by Western business strategy... :-(

Hey, Boeing. Don't celebrate your first post-grounding 737 Max test flight too hard. You just lost another big contract

IJD

Re: Learn from the smaller world...

Even with a new type rating and simulator training the Max couldn't have been flight certified without MCAS, because the rules say that required elevator force to preserve attitude must always increase as angle of attack increases, and without MCAS the Max breaks this rule -- it's not that the plane is unstable or will stall, just that the pilot would have to pull less hard on the column and this is verboten.

If Boeing had a proper FBW system like Airbus this wouldn't be a problem because the "feel" is artificial anyway and could easily be corrected, but what they actually have is a 50 year old mechanical flight control system with some electronic bodges added on -- one of these bodges being MCAS...

But there still wouldn't have been a problem if either the MCAS bodge had been done properly so it was reliable (redundant sensors with voting and fail-safe), or it hadn't been designed with enough control authority to override the pilots (4x more than the FAA was told), or the pilots had been properly trained about what to do if MCAS went wrong.

Unfortunately all these options would have cost Boeing a lot of money and possibly sales, so they opted to save the money, design a crappy MCAS, and hide it from the pilots and the FAA -- result, 300 dead passengers. There really is no excuse and the Boeing execs responsible should be jailed for corporate manslaughter...

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

IJD

We lost all power at work a few years ago, all the UPS kicked in fine but they only had about 30mins capacity. We had some long simulations running (a week or so) which we didn't want to abort, so sat and watched the UPS capacity lights gradually ramp down to zero while repeatedly calling the power company. Turned out to be caused by a cat vs. 11kV argument in the local substation just down the road -- leastways that's what they thought it was, it's difficult to identify species after they've lost an argument with 11kV...

SpaceX is about to launch its first Starlink internet satellite sporting a sun visor following complaints by astronomers

IJD

"It was the fifth trip into space for this particular first stage, suggesting the days of disposable boosters may well and truly be at an end."

Except if you're Airbus (Ariane) or Boeing (SLS) or Lockheed (Atlas) or Russian or Chinese or...

In other words, at an end for SpaceX, and maybe Blue Origin assuming they can catch up from being about 8 years behind SpaceX...

Ethernet standards group leaves its name in the dust as it details new 800Gbps spec

IJD

These 800G links aren't intended for PC to PC or even LAN links, they're intended for use within and between switches in data centres and in the Internet backbone where huge numbers of lower-speed Ethernet channels (400G, 200G, 100G, 50G, 25G, 10G...) are muxed together. In the longer-haul links (100s, 1000s or 10000s of km) many of these channels are multiplexed together on one optical fiber using different laser frequencies -- just like radio channels, except one channel is typically 50GHz wide (or more), the total "radio bandwidth" is about 5THz centred on 190THz, one fiber can carry getting on for 25Tb/s, and one cable (for example under the Atlantic) might have 8 fibers and be able to carry 200Tb/s.

Before anyone says "this is all pie in the sky, why would anyone want this?" these transceivers are aimed at hitting the market in 2022 when the next generation of switch chips (25.6Tbps in one chip) hit the market, all driven by the apparently unstoppable demand for more bandwidth at lower cost, which in turn is largely down to video streaming -- which is now mainly mainstream film and TV, not porn for once. How do I know all this? Because I've been working on 800G transceiver designs since last year...

More than a billion hopelessly vulnerable Android gizmos in the wild that no longer receive security updates – research

IJD

OnePlus 3, bought June 2016, last update was to Android 9, security patch level 1 Oct 2019. Seems just fine to me...

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

IJD

PDP11/44 at uni in the early 1980s which (as a PhD student) I somehow ended up (sort of) running because nobody else would. Users who had to access image capture hardware needed superuser rights (or whatever this was called, it was a *long* time ago). Some users had multiple IDs. One user -- no, definitely not me -- who had hogged too much disk space (2 x 20MB drives shared between a dozen or so users!) decided to save his data to tape and clear up his disk areas, DEL [*,*]*.*;* deleted all files for all users (not just him) including the OS (RSX-11?) -- or at least, deleted all the file allocation tables, the data was still there, but of course no OS commands worked any more since the commands ran from disk. And there were no proper backups, tape drives were mainly used for data storage, people were supposed to save programs on 8" floppies but rarely did. Months of work for multiple postgrads circled the digital drain...

Luckily the system debugger just happened to be loaded (in 64k of RAM!), and could talk to the disk and printer, and could print out (to the line printer) the absolute block address, owner and filename for each disk block. Said idiot user had to sit there and manually reallocate all blocks by hand to rebuild the FATs, took him most of a weekend, sweating all the time because if anything happened or the debugger crashed there was no way back except reformatting the disks, reinstalling the OS, and losing all the data.

Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse

IJD

Reverse case -- the first silicon of first chip I ever designed (an echo canceller for ISDN) didn't work. Looking down a microscope at it to see if I could see anything wrong (suspect was a comparator inside an ADC) as I moved the chip around on the stage it suddenly started to work. Turned out the problem was offset voltage in the comparator, the light from the microscope injected photocarriers into the input stage which cancelled this out so long as you looked at it *just* right -- you had to within a few microns of the "sweet spot", which was in a different place for each chip...

Cisco slips on a Tolkien ring: One chip design to rule them all, one design to find them. One design to bring them all...

IJD

Re: 15 to 1 ????

This is nothing to to with the cheap end-user GbE switches mentioned above, this is stuff that builds the Internet backbone and ships terabits or petabits around and comes with typically a six-digit price tag...

Mozilla locks nosy Avast, AVG extensions out of Firefox store amid row over web privacy

IJD

Avast is still free for the basic AV package...

A bridge over troubled water: Intel teases Ponte Vecchio, the GPU brains in US govt's 1-exaFLOPS Aurora supercomputer

IJD

Re: We'll burn that bridge when we come to it

The TSMC process dates are the wrong way round -- 5nm (lots of EUV) is first, then 6nm (which is a shrunk 7nm with 1 more EUV layer), then 3nm. Exact dates depend how you define them, I believe some customers already have working 5nm silicon.

Either way there's no doubt Intel is well behind, at least 12 months even if things go well for them on 10nm (7nm TSMC) and 7nm (5nm TSMC) -- they really dropped the ball on 10nm and managed to convert a 1-2 year process lead into a 1-2 year lag, which takes some doing...

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

IJD

Re: Not Just Mice

I can beat that -- a chip that didn't work unless you looked at the problem circuit through a microscope and moved it to *just* the right place in the field of view, and this was different for each chip. The light-generated current was adjusting the (random) offset voltage of a comparator to zero if you got the right amount of light falling on each side of the input pair...

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

IJD

But not as amusing as:

"WARNING -- do not look into the laser with your remaining eye"

-- seen on a big optical bench at the NPL when I went to do some equipment calibration...

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

IJD

Re: Hydrogen

More likely to have been a tank of hydrogen fluoride (HF) which is used for all sorts of things in wafer processing and is *incredibly* nasty stuff...

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

IJD

Re: so easy to get in

Mate of mine years ago was a security guard for a construction equipment company. Turned up one Monday morning to find everyone in headless chicken mode because an entire tower crane was missing -- you know, those tall things that lift stuff, and are worth several hundred thousand quid each.

When they rang the police they already knew -- the thieves had turned up at the weekend complete with low loaders and lifting gear, loaded up the crane (they're modular, bit like Meccano), and then got the police to hold up the traffic while they got the awkward loads out of the yard...

Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest

IJD

Re: Also

Thta's one of the excuses the anti-wind-power lobby used in the UK, that tens of thousands of birds would be killed. When it was pointed out that their beloved pet moggies kill tens of millions, that argument went quiet...

Register Lecture: Hidden heroes of Alan Turing's Enigma

IJD

You'd think with modern technology it would be possible to do something like streaming the lecture live, or failing that recording it and making it available online afterwards. Millions of vloggers seem to be capable of doing this, surely it can't be beyond the wit of the organisers...

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

IJD

Re: I was just musing the other day that M$ might do this and low and behold!

How about mercury delay line memories, as used on UK's MOSAIC computer? (which my father-in-law Bill Chandler designed and built with Allen Coombs after Colossus). Five tons of mercury in a hundred steel tubes, kept temperature stable to better than one degree...

https://mraths.org.uk/?page_id=582

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

IJD

The first "mistake" Boeing made was building a safety-critical system into the 737MAX without enough sensor redundancy, because this would have cost more.

The second "mistake" was not telling airlines/pilots about MCAS because this would have needed pilot retraining which costs the airlines money and puts them off buying the plane, and such a change would have meant re-certification is needed which costs Boeing money.

"Mistake" in inverted commas because it appears that saving/making Boeing more money was the driving factor in both decisions. Hope they're still happy with that given the resulting body count...

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

IJD

Loudness wars

I've digitised quite a lot of my favourite old LPs, and apart from the amount of time it takes -- because really you need to get rid of any big clicks/pops/scratches before normalising the volume -- the most obvious difference is how *quiet* they sound compared to any modern CD. Not because the peak level is lower (digital full scale in all cases) but because they haven't had loads of compression and peak clipping applied to raise the average level. End result is you have to turn the volume up significantly, then turn on back down for a modern recording.

And I'm not talking about heavy metal or rock or pop here, I'm talking about acoustic or folk or classical or jazz recordings where you'd think this wasn't so prevalent. But it is, and this applies to every single "old vinyl" album I've transferred compared to any "new CD/digital" album. The difference is obvious when you look at either the waveforms or average levels in any audio tool...

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