Page 127 - The Master Handbook Of Acoustics

102 CHAPTER FIVE

Kilocycles harmonic number

16
7
14
6
12
5
10
4
8
3
6
2
4
1
2
0
Flute Clarinet Oboe Trumpet Trumpet Violin
mouthpiece
Tone: middle A (440 cycles)
FIGURE 5-10

Spectrogram comparison of the harmonic content of woodwind instruments and the violin as middle A (440
Hz) is played. The differences displayed account for the difference in timbre of the different instruments.
AT&T Bell Laboratories.

above the ambient background noise in the hall, hence the emphasis
on adequate structural isolation to protect against traffic and other out-
side noises, and precautions to ensure that air-handling equipment
noise is low.
For those not present in the music hall, AM or FM radio, television,
magnetic recordings, or disc recordings must suffice. These conven-
tional media are unable to handle the full dynamic range of the orches-
tra. Noise at the lower extreme and distortion at the upper extreme
introduce limitations. In the case of broadcast media, there are the
added regulatory restrictions prohibiting interference with adjacent
channels.
Digital audio has brought some major revisions of our thinking in
regard to dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio. The dynamic range
in a digital system is directly related to the range of binary digits (bits).