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Mike Rivers Mike Rivers is offline
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Default Skewed waveforms

On 1/24/2012 11:33 AM, Mxsmanic wrote:
What does it mean when the waveform of a sound is essentially symmetrical,
except that the positive excursions of the wave are bigger than the negative
excursions, so that it looks a bit lopsided?


That's a sign of non-linearity somewhere, but it's also
natural for a lot of things (including the human voice) to
not be symmetrical around zero.

And what does it mean when a wave form looks as though it has been raised or
lowered as a whole, so that what would have been the zero crossings are now
above or below zero?


That's a DC offset. Most converters have one, and it can be
calibrated out, or simply "fixed" by running the signal
through a high pass filter somewhere below 10 Hz (which is
usually what a "remove DC offset" function does).


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