[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[Michael Wouters]

I designed the hardware and wrote the software for the now defunct
Australian speaking clock.
The prototype pieced together the audio from fragments and it did
indeed take quite a bit of effort to get this to sound clean.
Mismatches in sound levels at the boundaries caused 'pops', for
example. I spent about a week with my headphones on.

Cheers
Michael

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 12:08 PM Bob kb8tq <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Based on only dimly remembered conversations long long ago:
>
> Getting all the “message fragments” so they sound natural and not choppy is
> not quite as easy as it seems at first. It’s by not quite rocket science, but there
> is more fiddling involved than one might think.
>
> One “solution” is to use fewer fragments and record larger portions of the message.
> Back in the day, storage limited your ability to record every message “full up”.
>
> Assuming you record the “at the stroke the time will be” only once, the rest is
> under 3 seconds of audio. At maybe 16 bits / 32K sps. (yes that’s overkill). this comes
> up just under 200 K bytes. Recording the full time message for every minute of the
> day would be less than 270 megabytes.
>
> That’s a pretty small flash drive ….
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
> > On Sep 30, 2019, at 4:00 PM, Neville Michie <namichie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here in Australia we are suffering the loss
> > of one of the significant developments in accurate time keeping and dissemination.
> > The talking clock, built in England, with sound tracks on rotating glass disks,
> > has been on the Australian telephone system for more than half a century.
> > The system was timed by quartz oscillators, synchronised to the local observatory time.
> > Now in spite of the trivial cost of maintaining the system it has been removed by
> > the money-hungry telco which took over the government run telephone system.
> > Now it occurs to me that the sound tracks occupy a very small digital space, and
> > with modern flash drives and a little logic the talking clock could be driven by
> > any time nut's disciplined time source.
> > So is there a time nut who could design a voice output that we could all use?
> >
> > “At the third stroke the time will be…”
> >
> > cheers,
> > Neville Michie
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