EQ and compression are the two processors that do more to a recorded signal than anything else, and the math underneath both is simpler than the plugin GUIs suggest. We walk biquad filters, the parametric EQ math, attack and release in a compressor, the look-ahead trick, why the same algorithm in a $50 plugin and a $5000 hardware unit can sound surprisingly different, and where the money actually goes.
Dsp
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DSP for Audio -
How Noise-Cancelling Headphones Work Active noise cancellation is a real-time control loop fighting the wave equation. We walk through feedforward, feedback, and hybrid architectures, why ANC crushes low rumble but gives up on hiss, the latency budget that governs the whole design, and what transparency mode and adaptive ANC actually do to the signal.
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The Fourier Transform, Finally Intuitive Any signal is a sum of sinusoids — that one sentence unlocks audio codecs, Wi-Fi, 5G, oscilloscopes, and JPEG. This post builds the Fourier transform from first principles, explains why the naive DFT is impractical and the FFT fixes it, covers windowing and spectral leakage, and shows the whole thing in working Python.