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The article gives the same reason of arbitrariness of the second to debunk the numerology, but then goes on to say that the BBC chose 440hz because 439 is a pri
by sriku 10y ago
The article gives the same reason of arbitrariness of the second to debunk the numerology, but then goes on to say that the BBC chose 440hz because 439 is a prime number and is harder to generate electronically ... Which is nonsense as well ... Though it may have been true relative to price of components at the time.
- vidarh 10y agoConsider that as late as in the 80's on home computers, frequencies for all kinds of stuff were often chosen to be convenient factors of a suitable starting point so that they could be generated by stepping down frequencies from a single crystal. Frequency choices even then were driven by cost/complexity to the extent that e.g. rather than trying to synchronise things in other ways or decoupling various clock rates, the CPU clock rate of many computer models were chosen based on how other things were clocked. The Commodore 64's and Amiga's at least were both clocked slightly differently in the US and Europe because the CPU clock affected bus timings, and bus timings affected the custom chips for graphics and sound, and it was most convenient to time it all to match the video refresh rate of NTSC and PAL respectively. Given that, I'm not at all surprised if the BBC decades earlier found it more complicated to handle 439Hz given whatever clock signals they had available to create it from and/or wanted to be able to match it against.