I'd really encourage reading that North Coast article, and not only because I wrote it. ![;)]( "wink")
This point is specifically addressed there.
Clicks do not only happen in legato playing. Clicks (or similar transients even if you want to give them a different name) happen any time the spectrum changes suddenly. The spectrum of a signal is not meaningful, and does not even really exist, just at one moment. It takes a certain amount of time for anything that responds to the spectrum, including an analog circuit, a digital circuit, or a human ear, to register a new spectrum. During that transitional time, the responding thing will inevitably guess wrong about the new spectrum and will perceive a burst of frequencies that won't turn out to be present anymore when the new spectrum is fully established. That's your "click."
This is also the reason that I'm annoyed by people citing "latency" as an important disadvantage of digital systems. Analog systems have "latency" too, but we usually call it "group delay" when it's analog. Either way, any system that responds differently to different frequencies is going to have a delay between input and output. You can't get rid of the delay while keeping the frequency response.
Spaces between the notes will not eliminate the click, though they may make it less annoying. Switching at zero crossings will make it less perceptible too, and may be enough to satisfy listeners, but zero-crossing switching won't really eliminate it either.
To reduce the effect further you really need to slow down the spectral transition. Applying a slower envelope works; passing it through an all-pass filter to smear out the different frequencies over time also works. Each of these will have some audible effect, but that's kind of the point - if you don't like the sound of a fast spectral transition, then you want a different sound. And a click really is what a fast spectral transition sounds like. It's not something extra that you can remove separately while keeping the fast spectral transition.
This point is specifically addressed there.Clicks do not only happen in legato playing. Clicks (or similar transients even if you want to give them a different name) happen any time the spectrum changes suddenly. The spectrum of a signal is not meaningful, and does not even really exist, just at one moment. It takes a certain amount of time for anything that responds to the spectrum, including an analog circuit, a digital circuit, or a human ear, to register a new spectrum. During that transitional time, the responding thing will inevitably guess wrong about the new spectrum and will perceive a burst of frequencies that won't turn out to be present anymore when the new spectrum is fully established. That's your "click."
This is also the reason that I'm annoyed by people citing "latency" as an important disadvantage of digital systems. Analog systems have "latency" too, but we usually call it "group delay" when it's analog. Either way, any system that responds differently to different frequencies is going to have a delay between input and output. You can't get rid of the delay while keeping the frequency response.
Spaces between the notes will not eliminate the click, though they may make it less annoying. Switching at zero crossings will make it less perceptible too, and may be enough to satisfy listeners, but zero-crossing switching won't really eliminate it either.
To reduce the effect further you really need to slow down the spectral transition. Applying a slower envelope works; passing it through an all-pass filter to smear out the different frequencies over time also works. Each of these will have some audible effect, but that's kind of the point - if you don't like the sound of a fast spectral transition, then you want a different sound. And a click really is what a fast spectral transition sounds like. It's not something extra that you can remove separately while keeping the fast spectral transition.
Statistics: Posted by mskala — Thu Jul 18, 2024 7:37 am