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Abstract – Real and virtual instruments for data acquisition and signal processing are widely used in industry, entertainment and education. In this paper I compared different hardware and software solutions in instrumentation, and I analyzed these technics in a particular case: generation and processing of audio signals using additive and FM synthesis. The comparative study reveals the advantages and the disadvantages of the real and virtual instrumentation especially in academic education.
Keywords: data acquisition; signal processing; FM synthesis; real and virtual Instrumentation.
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I. INTRODUCTION
Data acquisition and signal processing are of particular importance nowadays. We encounter data acquisition and signal processing in many fields of science and everyday life, such as telecommunications, entertainment electronics, military technology, video and audio signal processing, television, music and speech recognition. In this paper I would like to present the generation and processing of audio signals, because this research area is very important today, it is very actual, and an entire industry is based on today's multimedia technologies. It has a huge market, user base and large financial background. We encounter audio signal processing in the entertainment industry, music, synthesizers, studio technology, mobile phones, speech recognition and artificial intelligence [1, 2].
I'd like to study and compare the generation, acquisition and processing of audio signals with real (hardware) and virtual (software) devices. Each solution has advantages and disadvantages, and I compare the use of the two methods in university education and distance education [11, 13, 16]. Particularly, I want to investigate the production and processing of audio signals with different hardware devices (signal generators, synthesizers) and the possibility of producing these signals with software tools, such as virtual instruments, virtual synthesizers or LabView applications created by students [3].
After the initial analog electronic era, with the development of computer technology, new possibilities opened in the direction of signal and sound processing. With the advent of modern digital synthesizers, it became possible to replace traditional, classical instruments with electronic instruments and reproduce the sound of entire orchestras. These devices have become more advanced over the years, they can reproduce traditional instruments completely, and they have also managed to produce new, never-heard, synthetic sounds.
The first synthesizers used subtractive synthesis to produce modified sounds. The over...