Quote:
Originally Posted by foxAsteria
Ah yes...of course I have no idea what any of that means....  Man I remember when I used to think I was smart, haha. |
Eh, it's probably my fault for not explaining it well. It's too easy to fall back on jargon
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Basically, it's just a function that smoothly maps values from the range -infinity to infinity to the range -1 to 1. It's both smooth and monotonic, which are two properties of curves that tend to lend themselves well to a soft pleasant sounding wave-shaper.
By smooth I mean that it is continuous, or that the derivatives (slopes) exist no matter where you compute them on the curve. For example, a square-wave is not smooth/continuous, since it's derivative is not defined on the place where it very suddenly transitions.
By monotonic I mean that the derivative never changes sign. So if you compute the slopes going from left to right, you never change whether you are going up or down (you always go up). A sine is for example smooth but not monotonic.
For reasons that get a little math-y, it just so happens that the input => output relation of many amplifiers can be described quite nicely by this function. People often like hearing what they are used to (I mean, music itself is at least partially "trained"), and all the years of exposure to audio amplified by such curves probably made us grow to like this type of soft distortion.
@Sju; Good idea. I will add such a mode.