Crosstalk change

I noticed with the 1.216 release that crosstalk is now displayed as negative dB. I preferred when it was displayed as just dB. Most of the vintage gear I look at, if it has a crosstalk spec (usually called separation or channel separation), gives the number in dB. I see that ASR crosstalk plots are in negative dB- maybe that prompted Matt to make the change. When I talk about crosstalk I refer to it in dB and not negative dB. A very small nit, I know, but I was curious about the change- luckily I read the release notes and realized that I had not made a mistake with the measurement…

I’ve always referred to channel separation in positive dB and crosstalk in negative dB.

Hi @Var, yes, crosstalk is usually expressed as a ratio

Vcoupled \over Vsource

And so, a log of a quantity less than 1 is of course negative. But, I think conversationally, when someone mentions “50 dB of crosstalk” the understanding is there isn’t gain involved…and so that’s understood to be -50 dB.

@restorer-john- I am curious as to what the difference between channel separation and crosstalk is- related to amps and not tuners. I have been using the terms interchangeably-hopefully not incorrectly. I defer to you as I consider you one of the most knowledgeable “audio guys” around. The only thing I found was separation may be used in multi channel amps (>2?) but describes the same thing as crosstalk. @matt- thanks for the reply and I get that it is going to be negative, it just made sense to have it displayed the “old way” IMHO- It was not causing me to wake up in the middle of the night, though :grin:

Crosstalk is a spurious signal, other spurious signals (noise, distortion) are given as a negative dB value, best to be consistent… But then again I’ve seen channel separation as a negative value too.

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