Sqito said:
Getting offtopic: I KNOW that at some point in the future samples won't get stored like we use to know them [point-by-point]
Once storage is not an issue, samples will be stored as mathematical spline curves between points. And once this happens digital soundcards will get along and be able to represent that stuff without any quality loss. that's the day analog recording really dies... but...how far are we? 2007?
oh what a nice off-topic
storing vector (points, splines) information is not an issue, it was even used in the first grafic format. and it does even exist for audio in some way: midi & the general midi standart
by the way, spline representation is an approximation with strong limitations. it is not exact.
of course, you mean the waveform representation - and that's possible as well, that's exactly what a fourier transformation does. a fourier transformated signal tells you EXACTLY what sines are needed (frequency, amplitude and phase) to represent the signal. the playback device for this is called an additive synthesiser.
so as you see, the storage is not an issue at all...
the problem lies in the A-D-A convertion. a DA converter simply cannot transform angle values to a certain current value, you'll still need a software that transforms the "vector" representation to a discrete, "point by point" signal. you'll end up with standart PCM. it's exactly the same thing with the AD convertion. a photo camera for example cannot detect lines and shapes, it can only record the data in the most accurate way possible and let a SOFTWARE do the job of vectorizing the image. you see what i mean? again, it's impossible to directly transform a continuous current value to a vector, simply because you need more than one "time-sample" to get one vector (you need to see the whole picture). that means your converters would need an infinite latency time. and electronic or software engineers are not happy to deal with infinity, without even mentioning the audio-engineers precious time
so it's not about the future, it's impossible.
the other point is processing. processing a vector data-type is not as straight forward as discrete processing ("point by point"). a simple level change of the "vectors" would involve heavy-weight calculations to provide the same result as a simple multiplication with PCM data.
but of course, some other calculations like EQing and some others would be easier to implement, but still not in a straight forward way.
beeing exact, your idea is complete nonsense, you will turn in circles again and again and end up with PCM -again and again-.
