[Elecraft] Re: Zero beat hint and why 800 hz maximum?

[O. Johns]

David,

The well-tempered scale is logarithmic, in a sense.  Each semitone  
frequency is gotten from the just-lower one by multiplying by the  
twelfth root of 2.  That way 12 semitone steps automatically make a  
perfect octave (factor of 2 in frequency).  If you're gonna have  
twelve notes in a chromatic scale, and gonna have all the musical keys  
sound more or less the same (all equally bad according to the purists)  
then you pretty much are stuck with this irrational ratio.

Hey, I just RTFM.  On page 9 of the K3 Owners Manual C1 it says that  
the sidetone is adjustable from 300 to 1000 Hz.  Is that really so?  I  
can't find anything in the manual about increments.  I haven't ordered  
a K3 yet, so can't check.  Is the increment really 50 Hz, anyone?

I'd be happy if the K3 sidetone/offset just went up to 880 instead of  
stopping at 800.  Of course, 880 requires 10 Hz increments.  I wonder  
if the problem here is memory register space.  From 300 to 1000 with  
50 Hz increments  would be 15 different pitches, just shy of two bytes  
of memory space to record.  The same range with 10 Hz increments, it  
would be 71 different pitches, requiring nine bytes of memory space to  
record.

73,
Oliver Johns
W6ODJ


On 17 May 2008, at 4:36 AM, David Woolley (E.L) wrote:

> O. Johns wrote:
>
>> Also, 740.0 is within a fraction of a Hertz of a correctly tuned  
>> (well-tempered tuning) F#.  So there is good reason to have the  
>> increments of sidetone pitch be 10 Hz rather than 50 Hz.
>
> Might it not be better to use a logarithmic scale (e.g. equal  
> tempered semi-tones) or a near logarithmic scale, with rational  
> frequency ratios (natural (is this "well tempered"?) semitones).
>
> -- 
> David Woolley
> "The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related  
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