Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 2 May 2022 at 01:43:03 UTC, claptrap wrote:
> I said it likely wasn't "feasible" not that it was impossible. 
> Even the high end digital effects units in the mid 90s only 
> managed a handful of basic effects at the same time, and they 
> usually did that by using multiple chips, with different chips 
> handling different blocks in the chain. A phase vocoder would 
> have been pretty hard to pull off on that kind of hardware even 
> if it was possible to a level of quality that was useful.

Technically even the Motorola 56000 can do over 500 FFTs per 
second with a window size of 1024 according to Wikipedia. So the 
phase vocoder part was feasible, but it might not have been 
sonically feasible in the sense that you would not end up with a 
product believed to be marketable or that it wasn't believed to 
be feasible to reach a sonic quality that would satisfy the 
market. That could come down to pitch-tracking, phase-vocoder 
issues or the details of putting it all together.

Phase vocoders do introduce artifacts in the sound, it kinda 
follows from the uncertainty principle, you get to choose between 
high resolution in time or high resolution in frequency, but not 
both. So when you modify the sound of chunks of sound only in the 
frequency domain (with no concern for time) and then glue those 
chunks back together you will get something that has changed not 
only in pitch (in the general case). So it takes a fair amount of 
cleverness and time consuming fiddling to "suppress" those "time 
domain artifacts" in such a way that we don't find it disturbing. 
(But as I said, by the late 90s, such artifacts was becoming the 
norm in commercial music. House music pushed the sound of popular 
music in a that direction throughout the 90s.)

However, the concept of decomposing sound into spectral 
components in order to modify or improve on the resulting sound 
has been an active field ever since ordinary computers were able 
to run FFT in reasonable time. So there is no reason to claim 
that someone suddenly woke up with this obvious idea that nobody 
had thought about before. It comes down to executing and hitting 
a wave (being adopted).

In general truly original innovators rarely succeed in producing 
a marketable product, market success usually happens by someone 
else with the right knowledge taking ideas that exists, refining 
them, making them less costly to produce, using good marketing at 
the right time (+ a stroke of luck, like being picked up by 
someone that gives it traction).

"Somone woke up with an obvious idea that nobody had thought 
about before" makes for good journalistic entertainment, but is 
usually not true. Successful products tend to come in the wake of 
"not quite there efforts". You very rarely find examples of the 
opposite. (The exception might be in chemistry where people 
stumble upon a substance with interesting properties.)