Gear / Technical Help > Battery Boxes, Preamps, Mixers, ADCs, and Processors

Impact of marginal batteries?

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DSatz:
Whenever anything affects the positive-going part of a waveform differently from the negative-going part, that's non-linear distortion (in addition to the change in overall gain / signal levels). So even if you process this recording to even out the levels, the character of the sound may become somewhat different in the part where the gain is fading.

But maybe it won't be much of a difference, since any given amount of distortion on changing musical waveforms is generally much harder to discern than distortion on pure sine waves, depending on a whole host of factors. It's an audiophile myth that musical signals are a more sensitive test for distortion; experimentally it can be shown that that belief is way, way wrong. And personally I only hear distortion on pure sine waves when the THD is greater than one or two per cent. (A power amplifier with a burnt-out output transistor can be a useful learning tool sometimes.)

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