[William Sommerwerck]

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset.
Does anybody remember Telarc?

I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

You should certainly remember the recording of Holst's band music.

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck writes:

That's true, but it's not the same thing as being perfect. I won't
disagree
that digital represented a significant improvement over analog, but the
idea
that early digital equipment was therefore necessarily perfect is an
invalid
conclusion. In fact, it's simple intellectual foolishness.

This sounds suspect to me.

In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits.

....Yes! Once everything is converted to numbers!

DUH! THAT is the issue.


If the conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that
point on.

I can't believe that someone is actually saying this.


I made simultaneous recordings with the Nakamich version of the PCM-F1
and the dbx 700. The recordings did not sound the same (the Sony was
harder and brighter-sounding), so they could not have both been perfect.

When I first started listening to CDs, I did notice that they sounded
harder
and brighter ... just like live music. It didn't seem like a defect to me.

WS finds wall and bangs head against it.

[Mxsmanic]

Arny Krueger writes:

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody remember
Telarc?

I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

That's true, but it's not the same thing as being perfect. I won't disagree
that digital represented a significant improvement over analog, but the idea
that early digital equipment was therefore necessarily perfect is an invalid
conclusion. In fact, it's simple intellectual foolishness.

This sounds suspect to me.

In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve. Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on. It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or sharp is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the whole
advantage of digital.

I made simultaneous recordings with the Nakamich version of the PCM-F1 and
the dbx 700. The recordings did not sound the same (the Sony was harder and
brighter-sounding), so they could not have both been perfect.

When I first started listening to CDs, I did notice that they sounded harder
and brighter ... just like live music. It didn't seem like a defect to me.

[Scott Dorsey]

Mxsmanic wrote:
William Sommerwerck writes:

That's true, but it's not the same thing as being perfect. I won't disagree
that digital represented a significant improvement over analog, but the idea
that early digital equipment was therefore necessarily perfect is an invalid
conclusion. In fact, it's simple intellectual foolishness.

This sounds suspect to me.

In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve. Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on. It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or sharp is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the whole
advantage of digital.

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Mike Rivers]

On 1/30/2012 3:49 PM, Mxsmanic wrote:

In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve. Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits.

Yes, but there are no native digital audio transducers. Air
has to move something. And assuming a conventional path with
A/D and D/A converters, the accuracy of converting to or
from numbers is what you're concerned with. It's getting
pretty good, and probably better than any analog transducer,
but it's not perfect.

When I first started listening to CDs, I did notice that they sounded harder
and brighter ... just like live music. It didn't seem like a defect to me.

The first thing I noticed about CDs was that there was no
surface noise. While I don't let the occasional tick bother
me, none was really an ear opener. Since I don't know what
it sounded like in the control or mastering room, I really
can't say anything about the accuracy.

--
"Today's production equipment is IT based and cannot be
operated without a passing knowledge of computing, although
it seems that it can be operated without a passing knowledge
of audio." - John Watkinson

http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com - useful and
interesting audio stuff

[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
news
Arny Krueger writes:

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody
remember
Telarc?

I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

Read about them and more at:
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/fine_dawn-of-digital.pdf

[Arkansan Raider]

Arny Krueger wrote:

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody remember
Telarc?


Some of the first classical music I ever bought in *any* format. A
Marine buddy got me started listening to it, reinforced by friends who
played it while we played role-playing games and while wargaming on the
sand table.

Telarc put out some damned fine material. My first was Tchaikovsky's
"1812 Overture," second was Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory." Yeah, I
was into the recorded firearms. ;^)

My gaming buddies got me into Wagner. That had me going to some Telarc
and a lot of Deutsche Grammophon, who put out some pretty danged good
digital conversions of analog recordings.

---Jeff

[Trevor]

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on.
It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or sharp
is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the whole
advantage of digital.

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Only if you actually bothered to specify the problem conversion step being
the sonic/mechanical/electrical one, rather than the electrical A-D/D-A one.
The latter is pretty easy these days.


Trevor.

[Trevor]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
news
Arny Krueger writes:

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody
remember
Telarc?

I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

I've still got dozens of them. Their 1812 Overture was my first CD. Enjoyed
the Eric Kunzel "Pop Symphonic" stuff too.

Trevor.

[Arkansan Raider]

Trevor wrote:
"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
news
Arny Krueger writes:

There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody
remember
Telarc?
I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

I've still got dozens of them. Their 1812 Overture was my first CD. Enjoyed
the Eric Kunzel "Pop Symphonic" stuff too.

Trevor.



Yeah, I forgot about the Eric Kunzel one. I have that one, too.

Back then I wasn't all that into classical music, other than
experimenting with some of the stuff that was somewhat familiar to me
from movies and such, but it kind of grew on me. Then when I started on
the path to my music degree, I found that I was getting to truly enjoy it.

I'm still primarily a rock/blues listener, but I'll listen to just about
any genre at this point because of that experience. And I'm still a huge
Richard Wagner fan--enough to make him the subject of a few term papers.
Let me correct that--I'm a huge fan of his *music* but his personal life
was not one I'm interested in emulating. It looked, ummmmmmm... Painful.

---Jeff

[geoff]

Scott Dorsey wrote:

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be
really pretty hard.

Harder than dragging a bouncing rock through medium-hard plastic, all on
resonant mechanical equipment ?

geoff

[Trevor]

"Arkansan Raider" wrote in message
...
There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody
remember
Telarc?
I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.

I've still got dozens of them. Their 1812 Overture was my first CD.
Enjoyed the Eric Kunzel "Pop Symphonic" stuff too.

Yeah, I forgot about the Eric Kunzel one. I have that one, too.

ONE? I have seven, and I'm sure there were probably more.

Trevor.

[PStamler]

On Jan 30, 9:51*pm, "Trevor" wrote:
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message

...

In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on.

[Trevor]

"PStamler" wrote in message
...
No, it's still hard. But some smart designers have succeeded in doing
it well even though it's hard. So they make it look easy -- but it's
still hard.

Well nearly everything is hard using that logic, BUT since the hard work has
been done, and off the shelf harware is more than good enough now, it is no
longer a problem USERS need to worry about. (beyond avoiding whatever crap
may still be available)

Trevor.

[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"Trevor" wrote in message
...

"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
...
In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on.
It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or sharp
is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the whole
advantage of digital.

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Only if you actually bothered to specify the problem conversion step being
the sonic/mechanical/electrical one, rather than the electrical A-D/D-A
one. The latter is pretty easy these days.

And that is the point. The best minds in the industry decided in the 60s and
70s that vinyl LP technology was pretty much at its zenith, and could not be
materially improved at any cost.

Any number of alternative technologies were tried, including several flavors
of FM coding, but none were adequate. Analog media and media contact-based
playback had to go.

By the time the CD came out, its key technologies had already been proven
over several years in the form of the Laserdisc.

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck writes:

...Yes! Once everything is converted to numbers!
DUH! THAT is the issue.

A conversion can only be so good.

Precisely. It's possible to transmit digital information "perfectly", but
that has nothing whatever to do with whether the conversion was itself
perfect. Don't you understand?

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Scott Dorsey writes:

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. Since the accuracy of digital is
finite,
there will be some possible analog system that can fully exploit whatever
accuracy it provides. Beyond that, no improvement in the conversion is
possible.

But you claimed that digital conversion is or can be perfect. Read what you
wrote!

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...

For any waveform, no matter how complex, there is a single, optimal
conversion
to a given implementation of the digital domain. Once you achieve that
optimal
conversion, no further improvement in the conversion is necessary or
possible.

And your proof that such conversion is possible, is...?

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Arny Krueger wrote:
wrote in message
...

"Scott wrote in message
...
In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point on.
It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or sharp
is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the whole
advantage of digital.

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Only if you actually bothered to specify the problem conversion step being
the sonic/mechanical/electrical one, rather than the electrical A-D/D-A
one. The latter is pretty easy these days.

And that is the point. The best minds in the industry decided in the 60s and
70s that vinyl LP technology was pretty much at its zenith, and could not be
materially improved at any cost.


But vinyl varied. Radically. Turntables/cartriges/stylii varied. When
I stopped getting Stereo Review ( in 1979) , these things were all still
in some state of R&D - or at least new products were being sold. there
were dedicated retail outlets for the technology even in smallish
towns.

But reading you say this - I realize I had been exposed to something
like propaganda for digital media since the mid '70s. And now the
propaganda seems like they* wish they could put the genie back in the
bottle.

*it's rather a different "they" now.


Any number of alternative technologies were tried, including several flavors
of FM coding, but none were adequate. Analog media and media contact-based
playback had to go.

By the time the CD came out, its key technologies had already been proven
over several years in the form of the Laserdisc.



And they still got it wrong in cases...

--
Les Cargill

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

...Yes! Once everything is converted to numbers!

DUH! THAT is the issue.

A conversion can only be so good. There is an ideal conversion to digital,
beyond which the conversion cannot be improved. It's not like pure analog,
where you can tweak infinitely. For any given analog waveform, there is an
optimal conversion to digital. Once a converter achieves that optimal
conversion, no further improvement is possible.

[Mxsmanic]

Scott Dorsey writes:

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. Since the accuracy of digital is finite,
there will be some possible analog system that can fully exploit whatever
accuracy it provides. Beyond that, no improvement in the conversion is
possible.

[Mxsmanic]

Arny Krueger writes:

By the time the CD came out, its key technologies had already been proven
over several years in the form of the Laserdisc.

The advantages of CDs were known long before there was any way to manufacture
them, And the advantages of digital recording in general have been understood
for a hundred years. It was just the engineering part that had to catch up.

[Mxsmanic]

Mike Rivers writes:

Yes, but there are no native digital audio transducers. Air
has to move something. And assuming a conventional path with
A/D and D/A converters, the accuracy of converting to or
from numbers is what you're concerned with. It's getting
pretty good, and probably better than any analog transducer,
but it's not perfect.

It can indeed be perfect, because it need only match the resolution of the
digital domain.

For any waveform, no matter how complex, there is a single, optimal conversion
to a given implementation of the digital domain. Once you achieve that optimal
conversion, no further improvement in the conversion is necessary or possible.
And it is possible to achieve that optimal conversion in the real world. So
beyond a certain point, converters work perfectly, and nothing better will
ever be possible or needed.

The first thing I noticed about CDs was that there was no
surface noise. While I don't let the occasional tick bother
me, none was really an ear opener. Since I don't know what
it sounded like in the control or mastering room, I really
can't say anything about the accuracy.

I recall my first experiences with CD, listening to a recording that had no
background noise. On a few early occasions I cranked up the volume on the
assumption that it was set too low, only to be blasted by the music when it
actually started. Unlike LPs, you could not guess at an appropriate volume
setting based on background noise, so sometimes you were surprised.

[Arny Krueger[_4_]]

"Les Cargill" wrote in message
...
Arny Krueger wrote:
wrote in message
...

"Scott wrote in message
...
In the digital domain, practical perfection is extremely easy to
achieve.
Once
everything is converted to numbers, you are no longer subject to the
tolerances and unpredictability of imperfect analog circuits. If the
conversion to digital is clean, perfection is trivial from that point
on.
It's
all ones and zeroes, and whether the ones and zeroes are blurry or
sharp
is
irrelevant, since perfection is the result either way. That's the
whole
advantage of digital.

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be
really
pretty hard.

Only if you actually bothered to specify the problem conversion step
being
the sonic/mechanical/electrical one, rather than the electrical A-D/D-A
one. The latter is pretty easy these days.

And that is the point. The best minds in the industry decided in the 60s
and
70s that vinyl LP technology was pretty much at its zenith, and could not
be
materially improved at any cost.

But vinyl varied. Radically. Turntables/cartriges/stylii varied. When
I stopped getting Stereo Review ( in 1979) , these things were all still
in some state of R&D - or at least new products were being sold. there
were dedicated retail outlets for the technology even in smallish
towns.

People are still doing technical measurements of LP playback gear, Miller
Audio Research for one. Their tests don't show much improvement over how
things were 30 years ago.

But reading you say this - I realize I had been exposed to something
like propaganda for digital media since the mid '70s. And now the
propaganda seems like they* wish they could put the genie back in the
bottle.

????????????????

*it's rather a different "they" now.

Any number of alternative technologies were tried, including several
flavors
of FM coding, but none were adequate. Analog media and media
contact-based
playback had to go.

By the time the CD came out, its key technologies had already been proven
over several years in the form of the Laserdisc.

And they still got it wrong in cases...

IME, the first completely foolproof technology is still being developed...
;-)

[Scott Dorsey]

geoff wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be
really pretty hard.

Harder than dragging a bouncing rock through medium-hard plastic, all on
resonant mechanical equipment ?

Probably not, but remember that by the time the CD came out, there had been
a century's worth of development in getting that bouncing rock to work right.
That's a very hard thing to do also. Electromechanical transducers always
are.

All things considered, digital stuff has come a long way since the eighties.
A lot of work has gone into making it sound good, probably even more than went
into the century's worth of record development.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Scott Dorsey]

In article ,
Mxsmanic wrote:
Scott Dorsey writes:

Right. The problem is that conversion step. That turns out to be really
pretty hard.

Hard, perhaps, but not impossible. Since the accuracy of digital is finite,
there will be some possible analog system that can fully exploit whatever
accuracy it provides. Beyond that, no improvement in the conversion is
possible.

Right. But in the eighties we were having trouble just getting a 100 Hz
square wave through the system without massive overshoot. Things are better
now.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[Arkansan Raider]

Trevor wrote:
"Arkansan Raider" wrote in message
...
There were good all-digital recordings from the onset. Does anybody
remember
Telarc?
I do, although I can't remember specific titles now.
I've still got dozens of them. Their 1812 Overture was my first CD.
Enjoyed the Eric Kunzel "Pop Symphonic" stuff too.
Yeah, I forgot about the Eric Kunzel one. I have that one, too.

ONE? I have seven, and I'm sure there were probably more.

Trevor.



Oh, I'm sure. I said "one" because that was the only one of his in my
collection.

My bad.

---Jeff

[Frank Stearns]

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

All things considered, digital stuff has come a long way since the eighties.
A lot of work has gone into making it sound good, probably even more than went
into the century's worth of record development.

Very true.

And I'd include in that the human factor. It took a while for some of us (many of
us?) to really get a full sense of what we had with the new digital medium.

Gone were the HF abberations of the LP that established a pleasant sense of faux
dimension; gone was tape hiss that gave us stocastic resonances that could
contribute various things (and mask others); and suddenly we lost the often useful
LF roll-off of tape (and many other sometimes useful distortions).

Not that tape and vinyl automatically give you a good recording, but by limiting
choices they did give a certain starting point.

with modern, higher-quality digital, you can't rely on the medium to help hide the
inherent flaws in the system (microphones and speakers and their locations in space,
primarily).

Whether you want it or not, with digital everything is there (or at least a lot
more). It's up to us to find new ways -- often developed over time in our
engineering subsconcious -- to define and maintain the illusion that is recording.

Frank
Mobile Audio

--

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

Precisely. It's possible to transmit digital information "perfectly", but
that has nothing whatever to do with whether the conversion was itself
perfect.

What is important to retain is that, in the digital realm, one cannot tweak
things forever. Once a conversion is optimal, no improvement is possible, and
no further tweaking makes any difference.

This is in sharp contrast to the analog world, where one can tweak and tweak
and always approach perfection a little more closely.

The irony is that analog systems can be perfect in theory, but never in
practice, whereas digital systems can never be perfect, even in theory, but
they often make it possible to approach perfection more closely than analog
systems do because analog portions of a system are vulnerable to physical
constraints, whereas digital components are not.

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

But you claimed that digital conversion is or can be perfect.

Seen from the digital side, that's true. Seen from the analog side, it's never
true (not even in theory).

A given waveform has one optimal digital representation, which is "perfect,"
because it cannot be improved upon in the digital realm. That representation
will never be perfect from an analog standpoint, because you cannot represent
an infinite number of points on a curve with a finite series of numbers.

What this boils down to is that, once you've developed an ADC that produces
the optimal digital representation of a waveform, any further development of
the ADC is a waste of time, because the digital representation can never get
better.

So if you have a $50 ADC that produces this optimal digital representation,
building a $5000 ADC accomplishes nothing.

Which in turn means that it's entirely possible that some modern ADCs are now
"perfect" from a digital standpoint, because they produce optimal digital
representations of their input waveforms. Which means that arguing further
about conversions serves no purpose--they are as good as they will ever be.

If you want to go further, you need a more detailed digital representation
(more samples with greater bit depth), and then you can build a fancier ADC to
create the necessary numbers.

I don't know if perfect ADCs for 16 bits and 44,100 Hz exist, but it's
certainly quite plausible to think that they do. In which case, there's
nothing more to be done for CD-quality sound.

[Mxsmanic]

Scott Dorsey writes:

Right. But in the eighties we were having trouble just getting a 100 Hz
square wave through the system without massive overshoot. Things are better
now.

So are they better, or perfect? Are there ADCs now that can produce an optimal
digitization of a majority of waveforms actually encountered in real-world
audio recording?

If not, then there's more work to be done on the analog side of the ADCs. If
so, then the only future improvement would be in increasing sample rates and
bit depths, and the current digital representations are as good as they will
ever get.

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

And your proof that such conversion is possible, is...?

I consider it self-evident. A digital data stream is an approximation of the
waveform it represents. There will always be one--and only one--optimal
digital representation of that waveform. Once this representation is obtained,
nothing more can be improved.

That is the nature of digital systems, and it's one of the characteristics
that I notice that people with analog backgrouns have trouble with. My
background is digital, so I know the digital limitations very well, whereas
I'm much weaker with the ramifications of analog representations.

[Scott Dorsey]

Mxsmanic wrote:
Scott Dorsey writes:

Right. But in the eighties we were having trouble just getting a 100 Hz
square wave through the system without massive overshoot. Things are better
now.

So are they better, or perfect? Are there ADCs now that can produce an optimal
digitization of a majority of waveforms actually encountered in real-world
audio recording?

This is the hard question to answer, indeed.

But... the Weiss converters sound a little different than the Prism converters
which definitely sound different than the Grimm. So... if one of them is
indeed perfect, the question is which one.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck writes:

And your proof that such conversion is possible, is...?

I consider it self-evident. A digital data stream is an approximation of
the
waveform it represents. There will always be one--and only one--optimal
digital representation of that waveform. Once this representation is
obtained,
nothing more can be improved.

You are looking at this from an extremely narrow point of view.

[William Sommerwerck]

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck writes:

You are looking at this from an extremely narrow point of view.

No, I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone who understands
and
has used digital systems all his life.

Most people in the audio and video worlds know analog, not digital, since
analog preceded digital and is still the most important part of any system
that interfaces with the physical world. But sometimes their
misunderstanding
of the digital domain can work against them.

All right... Explain the difference between digital and analog. I've asked
the members of this group to do this several times, and none has ever gotten
it correct.

[William Sommerwerck]

"Arkansan Raider" wrote in message
...
William Sommerwerck wrote:

All right... Explain the difference between digital and analog. I've
asked
the members of this group to do this several times, and none has ever
gotten it correct.

Rut roh, Raggy.
Yes. Yes, you have.
Mxsmanic, you need to pack a lunch--we could be here a while.
I'm filling the popcorn popper right now... ;^)

I am not going to get into a discussion. I simply want to see whether or not
he understands. Nothing more.

[Mxsmanic]

Scott Dorsey writes:

This is the hard question to answer, indeed.

Yes, but it's a fascinating question.

But... the Weiss converters sound a little different than the Prism converters
which definitely sound different than the Grimm. So... if one of them is
indeed perfect, the question is which one.

Yes. Or perhaps none of them is yet able to do a perfect conversion. I don't
know.

I suppose you could examine the results by hand and calculate whether or not
the numbers coming out are indeed the best representation of the signal going
in. But is that really worth it?

[Mxsmanic]

William Sommerwerck writes:

You are looking at this from an extremely narrow point of view.

No, I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone who understands and
has used digital systems all his life.

Most people in the audio and video worlds know analog, not digital, since
analog preceded digital and is still the most important part of any system
that interfaces with the physical world. But sometimes their misunderstanding
of the digital domain can work against them.

[Arkansan Raider]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

All right... Explain the difference between digital and analog. I've asked
the members of this group to do this several times, and none has ever gotten
it correct.



Rut roh, Raggy.

Yes. Yes, you have.

Mxsmanic, you need to pack a lunch--we could be here a while.

I'm filling the popcorn popper right now... ;^)


---Jeff