Wow and Flutter Measurement - Equipment Performance

Equipment Performance

• Professional tape machines can achieve a weighted flutter figure of 0.03%, which is considered inaudible, but for the fact that without weighting it would be an actual 0.3%.
• The best cassette decks struggle to manage around 0.08% weighted, which is still audible under some conditions. As an example, the Tascam 202MkIII Auto Reverse Cassette Deck reaches this 0.08% level.
• Average cassette decks and car players often have around 0.2% or more flutter.
• Digital music players such as CD, DAT or MP3 use electronic clocks to deliver samples, which suffer from an analogous effect called wander.
• The linear sound track on VCR video recorders has much higher wow and flutter than the VHS-HiFi high fidelity track which is contained within the video signal.
• Primitive phonographs which used idler wheels sometimes had very high wow and flutter, but high fidelity belt drive turntables were typically less than 0.2% by the 1970s, and the best direct drive turntables reached less than 0.05%.

The term ‘flutter echo’ is used in relation to a particular form of reverberation that flutters in amplitude. It has no direct connection with flutter as described here, though the mechanism of modulation through cancellation may have something in common with that described above.