Common cents?

[Pilgrim]

I've read occasional discussions about tuners for some time.  It appears that to some people, it's REALLY a big deal that tuner A has accuracy of 1 cent +/-, while another (lowly) tuner has only 3 cents +/- accuracy. 

The term "cents" was not familiar to me, so I looked it up in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_%28music%29

Turns out that the interval between two notes on the piano is 100 cents, and the spread of one octave in music is 1200 cents. The site asserts that the minimum interval (the "just audible" interval) that most people can year is about 6 cents, which seems to render moot the accuracy differences between tuners which are more accurate than +/- 3 cents.

About halfway down the page there are links to some files which play a tone, a shifted version, then both. These play at intervals of one cent, six cents and ten cents.

I played them and discovered that the only one in which I can tell any difference is the ten cent sample...and even that one only sounds different to me when both tones are played together.  I wouldn't hesitate to play an instrument tuned with that degree of accuracy, and in fact I doubt that after 60 seconds of playing, most stringed instruments are tuned with accuracy anywhere near ten cents.

All of this is to say that my good old TU-2 tuner with +/- 3 cents accuracy isn't going anywhere soon.  It's more accurate than my hearing!  Some days my body - including my ears - reminds me that I'm not 18 any more.

Discuss.........

[Denis]

Sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo and black magic. But that's just my two cents. 

[uwe]

Pitch is important, but let's not get carried away with it. A mathematically-perfect-evenly tuned piano sounds disharmonic to human ears in most keys. Bands like Wishbone Ash would ever so slightly distune their two leads guitars because the end result would sound more harmonic.

Read this for more headaches:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

[Pilgrim]

My original post is the polite one.

My opinion is that there's a lot of obsessing and agonizing about stuff that most musicians can't hear (especially after they've stood in front of amplifiers for a few years), and the audience darn sure can't hear. 

[Psycho Bass Guy]

People who are that obsessed with harmonic accuracy should already be able to tune by ear, rendering their bitching about tuners moot.

[patman]

You can't detect pitch that well in bass notes anyway

violin, yes...not bass

[rahock]

Years ago I was shopping for a power amp and reading up on all the specs to make the best decision.  A salesman that I was talking to pulled out a bunch of specs which had distortion rate comparisons that went down to something like one tenth of a percent , actually I think it was less than that. There were comparisons of all kind of things that were broken down to such miniscule fractions it was ridiculous. Based on what I was reading Crown equipment was absolute bottom of the barrel. They were rated one tenth of a percent  worse then a  half a dozen others in distortion, and two tenths of a percent worse in another category, and a whopping nine tenths of a percent worse in something else, and so on. The fact is that none of the things mentioned in the amounts that were mentioned were anything near audible to the human ear. Based on the lower rating that they received in so many categories it appeared that only an idiot would by a piece of Crown equipment. Fact of the matter was, to my ears the Crown stuff sounded head and shoulders above  all the stuff that outscored it on the spec sheet. I still always check the specs but they seldom tell the whole story.
Rick

[Highlander]

True tune one - everything else is harmonics on the 5th and 7th - nothing but the ear is the rest with the fretless - I never worry about the spot-on-ness of the rest as my little herd is fairly true...

[Pilgrim]

Until the early 2000's I tuned the G string with a pitch pipe, then used a finger on the 5th fret of each descending string to tune the D, A and E.  It never failed me, and that same process never failed me with I played upright bass in orchestra.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

Years ago I was shopping for a power amp and reading up on all the specs to make the best decision.  A salesman that I was talking to pulled out a bunch of specs which had distortion rate comparisons that went down to something like one tenth of a percent , actually I think it was less than that. There were comparisons of all kind of things that were broken down to such miniscule fractions it was ridiculous. Based on what I was reading Crown equipment was absolute bottom of the barrel. They were rated one tenth of a percent  worse then a  half a dozen others in distortion, and two tenths of a percent worse in another category, and a whopping nine tenths of a percent worse in something else, and so on.

That "spec sheet" was a sales tool distributed by QSC when their PLX amps came out. It was bullshit anyway.

[rahock]

That "spec sheet" was a sales tool distributed by QSC when their PLX amps came out. It was bullshit anyway.

If the PL in PLX stands for Phase Linear you hit the freakin' nail right on the head .
That was a long time ago man. If that's what it was, you have definately impressed me once again .
Rick

[nofi]

one of my old bands had four crown amps in the p.a. i didn't realise what idiots we were. thanks for that info.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

Lemme put it this way; I don't buy new power amps. If I need one, I go looking for old Crown MA or MT or the lower-market versions of those amps (PowerBase, PowerTech.. etc). Since Harmon International aquired Crown, they killed off all their good amps and started making copies of everyone else's whiz-bang crap. Old QSC amps are good too; the MX series was their counterpart to Crown's MA and their USA amps are decent too, just be aware that the input polarity is reversed.

QSC got in bed bigtime with Guitar Center around the time I worked for them. That's when they debuted the PLX switching power supply amps as cheaper versions of their Powerlight series. They marketed them heavily and put out all kinds of bogus "specs" about how their amp that weighed a third of the Crowns' and cost about half put out 30-60% more power and sounded better. Obviously they don't. I did a head-to head A/B test with a PLX3402, rated at 3400 watts into 4 ohms bridged against a Crown MA2402, rated 2400 watts bridged into 4 ohms through a JBL SR series 2x18 subwoofer. It wasn't even close; the Crown ATE the PLX in volume, punch and depth, which is no surprise; you can't get more than 2400 watts out of 20 Amp wall circuit anyway!

When I posted that on TB years ago, the QSC rep who lived there tried to discredit it every way he could, first accusing me of not matching their input sensitivity (which I had), then of not matching the input gains (which I did), finally, he just outright accused me of lying. He was one of the reps who was very glad to see me banned from there because not only could I call out he and other reps on their BS, they couldn't snow me with fake tech talk.