I’ve scrolled past this meme countless times, but somehow I didn’t think of this before now: What does an composite video signal sound like?Anyone have the hardware to test it out and record the sound for me?
I’ve opened serial terminals to serial mice, and I’ve abused /dev/dsp with random binaries I’ve fancied at the moment, but it never dawned on me to plug the red or white RCA jack into the yellow port in the mame of science, and now I only have audio RCA…
In the worse quality TV, putting the composite video into an audio line would make the speakers do a short distorted buzz, then cutoff. The higher quality TVs won’t even flinch. Their internal processing was fast enough to detect the wrong thing was connected, that the signal modulation never even made it to the amplifier. But to our ears it was probably just a bunch of electronic farts.
I do t m ow what it sounds da like but i know what it looks like. It’s basically modulating for every line of your TV high is bright and low is black with a marker for each line.
S-video was a mini DIN connector which wouldn’t have fit into one of these RCA jacks.
If you’d put composite video (the yellow RCA cable in this setup) into one of the audio jacks, pretty much all TVs would not do anything with it as an incompatible signal. If they actually tried to turn it into something, it wouldn’t be audible. Composite video generates a signal at something like 5-10Mhz, human hearing tops out around 20Khz (250-500x lower)
You can always drag out the signal to frequency shift it or something similar. It’s done all the time in astronomy as an example to create visualizations.
I guess it depends how much of a frequency shift you do, but I imagine with the blanking intervals it will mostly just sound like a nasty sawtooth wave?
I worked at Best Buy and you’ll be amazed at how many people couldn’t figure that out. I was also a genius for showing my in-laws how to select input to display their dvd player.
Back when radio shack was there to help you figure out how to connect the thing to the other thing. The usual problem was you had the one multi-colored thing, and the thing it was supposed to connect to did not have matching colors or matching anything at all.
You have to do it without looking tho. That said, I actually found them easier than hdmi. With hdmi, even if I have it the right way I sometimes think it’s the wrong way because it isn’t aligned properly.
wasnt about getting the colors right (which was a challenged trying to get cables connected in tight confines…) it was about how fucking tight those sockets were, and the closer the plugs were, the tighter they were by some bizarre happenstance, so ones super tight up against eachother like that would be near impossible to shove in, especially in cramped confines that you typically had to work in.
I had two pieces of equipment to connect and when I matched the colors it wouldn’t work. I had to swap two of the colors. I think they misprinted the colors on the unit.
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