Re: superscope

[Pat Missin <pat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ken Hildebrand wrote:
>
>The PSD220 superscope can go as slow as 50%.

I don't think this is true. I can't find my notes right now, but one
of the things that bugged me about the Superscope was that there was
some confusion about the actual amount of speed reduction. For some
reason the speed is slowed down in fifty increments (having to push
the button over and over again was rather tiresome, as I recall) and
each increment was 1% slower than the previous setting. If I recall
correctly, this mean that the slowest setting was actually 66% of the
original speed rather than 50% - ie, it had been slowed down by only
33%. 

This was particularly strange as its speed increase was calculated
differently, with the fastest setting being 200% of the original
speed. Bizarre and very confusing, unless they have fixed it since the
review sample I got to try out. 

For most purposes, a 33% reduction in speed is quite useful, but even
at 66% of the original speed, I found that it was still hard to pick
out some of John Popper's playing. Ditto for some of the bluegrass
fiddle I put in it. Also, I found that the sound quality deteriorated
much more than it did using software such as Transcribe! and
Transcriber. Not only that, these software versions were able to
reduce the speed much further - Transcribe! will slow a file down to
25% of the original speed and Transcriber will take it all the way
down to 9%.

I recall that the original promotional material for the Superscope was
trying to sell it as a transcription tool, but they later decided it
was more of a general practice tool. I think it performs the latter
job much better than the former.

 -- Pat.