[LAD] Denormals / subnormals (again)

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Tue Jan 3 01:56:49 UTC 2012


On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons at linuxaudio.org> wrote:

> I haven't seen a single case where it wasn't easy to avoid denormals.
> All it takes is some small offsets at strategic places in your code.
> Usually that amounts to very few, and they are easy to spot if you
> understand the code.

hosts don't have the luxury of assuming that the author of a plugin
smart enough to do Foo is also knowledgeable enough to take care of
denormals. Lets face it - they are an artifact of the Intel
architecture (powerpc and alphas never had this issue), and its
reasonable to a host to assume that a plugin doesn't do the right
thing. this would be true even if all but 1 plugin did, because you
can pretty much guarantee that people will try to use the plugin and
when it screws up the host, they will blame the host ...

but sure. i mean even in a program as large as ardour, if DC bias is
used to handle denormals, there's only one place where we add it.

--p



More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list