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Jargon/Glossary :
Jargon and lingo glossary - T & U.
Tape Speed
The speed at which a tape travels across the recording or playback head measured in centimetres per second. Most open reel recorders offer a choice of recording speeds so that the user can choose between recording quality and length, this is also possible with some cassette decks and other analogue recording formats, but by no means common.
In the English speaking world tape speeds are often expressed in the archaic IPS or inches per second, note that while ips is indeed an abbreviation and should be spelled all caps there is a long running tradition of using and spelling it as a word especially in England.
The most common speeds are : 2.38cm (15/16ips), 4.75cm (1.7/8ips), 9.5cm (3.3/4ips), 19.05cm (7.1/2ips), 38.1cm (15ips) and 76.2cm (30ips), those numbers are often rounded nota bene.
The origins of the tape speed standard are simple, the first tape recorder from Telefunken ran at 77 cm and later portable models from the company featured speeds that were divides of that number, and since stolen Telefunkens were heavily used by the US broadcasting industry after WWII the first US based manufacturers of recorders such as Ranger and Ampex needed to make their equipment compatible with pre-recorded tapes and averaged the speed to the nearest inch, this is also the reason the early Ampex units used DIN spools.
Terabyte
1024 Gigabytes of data or 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 bits (sigh) in the real world or 1012 if you are a hard disk manufacturer.
Ternary
The representation of number in powers of 3, this is occasionally used as the basis for a digital system mostly as a "last resource" when you need to build a system that has to be compatible with an older binary based standard but also to offer a higher resolution as with Supermidi, in such "upgrade" cases the system used is typically Balanced Ternary using the digits 0, 1 and -1 rather than the usual 0, 1 and 2 as is used in logical applications (i.e. a normal ternary system), the legacy systems ignore the negative and see the data as binary while the ternary based systems take advantage of it.
Torque
Rotating force, in most cases measured in kilograms. Primarily useful as a measurement in the audio world when talking about DJ or other professional record decks, but the more torque a turntable motor has means that it's platter will start up or respond faster after being held by force, but in general terms the more torque that a turntable motor has the easier it is to design a system that is stable speed wise.
TOSLink See --> S/PDIF
Terrestrial
A term used in the broadcasting industry to describe radio broadcast that originate in the earth's atmosphere as in traditional TV and radio broadcasting, opposed to signals beamed in from space or brought to you via cable.
Transceiver = Transmitter/Reciever
A device or an component that can both transmit and receive signals, traditionally this word was used for combined radio transmitters/receivers only but in the last few decades this word has become common in the computer and telephony industries for anything that can handle any sort of transmission and reception functions simultaneously.
Transducer
Any device that converts mechanical or acoustical energy into electrical energy or vice versa. Phonographic pickups, loudspeakers and microphones are all examples of a transducer. There term is also used for mechanisms that convert mechanical energy into acoustic energy and so on, but those have not been used in the audio industry since the days of wind up gramophones so the simplified explanation given here above is more pertinent.
Transient
Term literally means something of a short duration but it's usually meant to mean a sudden and sharp but temporary increase in energy or information volume (i.e. a "spike" in a waveform or plot). This can cause all sorts of problems in that either the device has not expected this amount of energy and thus reacts by ignoring everything beyond it's expectations causing distortion (in extreme cases can damage the equipment) or the equipment can react and adapt to the transient but by doing so creates abnormal conditions for the normal signal.
For instance in loudspeakers a transient can cause the woofer to travel to it's extremes, this can not only mask or distort the sounds immediately around the transient since the woofer cannot react to them but the counter force will cause sounds that come after the transient to be masked or lose their timing coherence (their attack and decay characteristics are partially lost resulting in a muddled sound).
Note that because of the integration tendencies of your ears that results in sounds of very short duration being ignored and not presented to the brain it can happen that a transient itself is not heard by you directly but only the side effects, in the previous case of a woofer you might hear a thump when the woofer is driven to its extremes and a muddy sound for a couple of seconds afterwards but not the spike that actually caused it, in some cases the spike can also go beond the reproduction capabilities of the equipment and a similar effect will happen, i.e. you will hear the side effects and see the smoke but not the spike itself or only a portion of it.
On/Off Transient : Some equipment generates a huge signal transient when turned on or off, this manifests itself as an audible "thump" sound when you perform either operation, this is usually a minor design fault and is in most cases nothing to worry about, however if an amplifier is turned up loud such a transient can damage a speaker in extreme cases due to the sharpness of the pulse. The solution to this is simple, do not turn on your amplifier until you have turned on your source components and turn off your amp before you turn off your sources, this is a recommended practice anyway.
Treuhandanstalt
A trust company set up by the German government in 1991 after the unification of East and West Germany. All the property owned by the East German government was put in to the trust and either redistributed to their original owners in the cases were they had been confiscated or nationalised in the first place or in the case of those that were deemed to be truly to be original creations of the East German state they where liquidated or sold off, like in the case of companies that were state owned enterprises from the start and not built on the foundations of earlier companies and properties that already belonged to the state prior to the creation of EG in 1949. In the case of companies such as RFT that were both, e.g. they were built up of both original and appropriated companies, they were liquidated and either the original appropriated property was returned to it's original owners or they were compensated financially by the trust.
Uncle Technology
A derogatory term taken from the computer industry, either technical advice with not even a tenacious link to reality or a hardware/software modification by someone that has no idea what he is doing. This sort of technical expertise is usually dispersed by your 13 year old nephew, some unidentified uncle (hence term), or this website.
Unipivot = Universal Pivot
Also known by the alternative name unipoise = universal balance, an unipivot is a type of a bearing that allows the contact surface to move in any direction unlike a ball bearing that will only allow movement in one direction. Used in turntable arms and it is usually a steel pin with either a needle or cone point, this sort of design needs to be damped otherwise it has a tendency to jump and in cheap arms damped with rubber or other cheap materials and in hi-fi tonearms with oil or silicone baths. Some unipivot arms are actually hybrids, having both a pivot needle and balls revolving around it like in a ball bearing.
Unit Audio
Archaic English term for hi-fi separates occasionally used in the UK, note that the term meaning has changed a bit over the years, in the 50's and up to the late 70's any audio equipment that had the speakers separate from the rest of the system could be considered unit audio, traditional consoles having the speaker or speakers built into the base unit. In fact to qualify as unit audio, a console by definition only had to have one speaker adjunct from the base, this usage of the term stopped when consoles were replaced in the marketplace by Music Systems and if you see it used today it is as a to denote separates sold as a unit or a system.
Upsampling
Usually when a DAC has a higher bitrate and/or sampling frequency than the material it's converting what you gain is basically improved headroom since the data that the converter is getting is still confined to the lower bitrate (i.e. the same granularity of a signal), upsampling is a technique whereby the original digital information is first converted into the maximum bitrate and frequency that the converter is capable of prior to converting the information into an analogue signal, this means a although the amount of original information is the same the converter is getting more detailed information and thus puts out a more granular signal. The net result of this is highly dependent on the design of both the upsampling software and the DAC but can be quite an improvement. Despite claims by certain UK based manufacturers of an upsampling capable CD players, a 16bit signal converted into 24bit/192KHz (or whatever) will never be as good as material originally recorded in that resolution.
USB = Universal Serial Bus
A high speed digital serial bus standard for computers and consumer electronics, developed by Intel in the early 1990's with the intention of getting rid of legacy I/O devices from the PC standard (i.e. Keyboard, mouse, parallel interface Printer and RS232 serial connectors which take 3 to 5 interrupts while each USB interface takes only one and can handle multiple devices while the legacy interfaces only handled one each). Intel had problems getting manufacturers to use the standard even though it was included on every motherboard chipset shipped by the company and it was ironically enough popularised by Apple Computer Corp. when they introduced the original iMac with the PC world following suit soon thereafter. Please note : It is often stated in technical publications that USB v.2 has a better transfer rate than the competing 1394 (i.e. that it is faster), this is a common misunderstanding based on the better theoretical burst rate of the USB v2 specification, the throughput of the current 1394 versions both in theory and even more so in practice is considerably better than of USB.
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