Below. On May 6, 2009, at 6:36 PM, Fred Sturm wrote: > On May 4, 2009, at 3:19 PM, Kent Swafford wrote: > >> Early on, I realized that the characteristic OnlyPure sound >> depended upon, among other things, very clean unisons. I also >> realized that the unique accuracy of the OnlyPure display lent >> itself very, very well to fine unison tuning. > > Hi Kent, > I think you are on to something here. One thing that struck me > about your description of Stopper's software was the delay in time > between playing the note and seeing it displayed. I wonder if he has > it set up to "skip the prompt tone" and just listen to the sustained > tone in some fashion. A lot of the confusion in reading displays > comes down to the prompt tone being different (usually noticeably > sharp), so you see one thing, and then it shifts gears and shows you > something else. Not very intuitive to follow. You can learn to > ignore the prompt display, but it is hard to control reflexes. Right. In effect, I think most ETD's probably discard the "prompt" in favor of the "sustain". But if OnlyPure listens to more cycles before it "commits itself", then by design it is listening to more sustain, less prompt. > You also note that the display is very stable. I speculate that the > software does some kind of smoothing operation, which could be in > the form of averaging over very short spans of time, or perhaps > throwing out pitches it identifies as anomalous. Jumpy display > syndrome is the bane of the ETD. Agreed. > We learn (some of us, anyway) to "read through" and interpret, but > it sure would be nice if the machine calculated and figured out what > we wanted to be listening for, and displayed it. So maybe Stopper > has figured out how to do that, in which case a big bravo to him! OnlyPure brings a big incremental improvement, a big step towards "figuring out what we want to be listening for, and displaying it". However, in the strongest possible terms I need to emphasize that interpretation is still necessary with the OnlyPure display. The display is slow enough, graceful enough, that I have been able to get the display to do a very similar thing for every string. This is why I had to work so hard to improve my hammer technique, to take full advantage of my being able to make most strings exhibit the same movement in the display. There is a consistency in the display that, with a practiced eye, allows the strings to be tuned very, very accurately. The reason that I am so eager for there to be more 'PureTuner users is that I want to know how other techs will interpret the display. Maybe someone will come up with something better than I have. But there is a definite learning curve. When others have watched me tune, I have gotten the idea that the display is so slow that others watching cannot connect what they hear with what they are seeing. It will take some time. Kent
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