W3 An abbreviation for World Wide Web.
walla The film industry term for background crowd noises in a movie.
Walla Walla A city of southeast Washington near the Oregon border south-southwest of Spokane. Founded in 1856 near the site of an army fort, it is a manufacturing center in an agricultural region famous for sweet yellow onions. In spite of its name, a quiet community.
wavelength Symbol (Greek lower-case lambda) The distance between one peak or crest of a sine wave and the next corresponding peak or crest. The wavelength of any frequency may be found by dividing the speed of sound by the frequency.
web ring A group of websites all sharing a common theme. For example, web rings exist for fans of certain bands, movies, TV shows, authors, race car drivers, etc. Soon we will have a web ring for web rings.
weighting filters Special filters used in measuring loudness levels, and consequently carried over into audio noise measurements of equipment. The filter design "weights" or gives more attention to certain frequency bands than others. The goal is to obtain measurements that correlate well with the subjective perception of noise. [Technically termed psophometric (pronounced "so-fo-metric") filters, after the psophometer, a device used to measure noise in telephone circuits, broadcast, and other audio communication equipment. A psophometer was a voltmeter with a set of weighting filters.] Weighting filters are a special type of band-limiting filters designed to compliment the way we hear. Since the ear's loudness vs. frequency response is not flat, it is argued, we should not try to correlate flat frequency vs. loudness measurements with what we hear. Fair enough. Four weighting filter designs dominate (See: References: Metzler):
Wheatstone bridge 1. An instrument used for measuring resistance.The circuit used is a 4-arm bridge, all arms of which are predominantly resistive. The bridge is a two-port network (i.e., it has two terminal pairs across opposite corners) capable of being operated in such a manner that when voltage is applied to one port, by suitable adjustment of the resistive elements in the network, zero output can be obtained at the signal output port (usually a meter). Under these circumstances the bridges is termed balanced. 2. An Omaha based music group. [Although the circuit used in a Wheatstone bridge was first described by Samuel Hunter Christie (1784-1865) -- the son of James Christie, founder of the well-known auction house -- in his paper "Experimental Determination of the Laws of Magneto-electric Induction" (1833), Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) received credit for its invention because of his adaptation of the circuit in 1843 for the measurement of resistance. Wheatstone also invented the concertina, the stereoscope and contributed significantly to the development of the telegraph.]
white noise Analogous to white light containing equal amounts of all visible frequencies, white noise contains equal amounts of all audible frequencies (technically the bandwidth of noise is infinite, but for audio purposes it is limited to just the audio frequencies). From an energy standpoint white noise has constant power per hertz (also referred to as unit bandwidth), i.e., at every frequency there is the same amount of power (while pink noise, for instance, has constant power per octave band of frequency). A plot of white noise power vs. frequency is flat if the measuring device uses the same width filter for all measurements. This is known as a fixed bandwidth filter. For instance, a fixed bandwidth of 5 Hz is common, i.e., the test equipment measures the amplitude at each frequency using a filter that is 5 Hz wide. It is 5 Hz wide when measuring 50 Hz or 2 kHz or 9.4 kHz, etc. A plot of white noise power vs. frequency change is not flat if the measuring device uses a variable width filter. This is known as a fixed percentage bandwidth filter. A common example of which is 1/3-octave wide, which equals a bandwidth of 23%. This means that for every frequency measured the bandwidth of the measuring filter changes to 23% of that new center frequency. For example the measuring bandwidth at 100 Hz is 23 Hz wide, then changes to 230 Hz wide when measuring 1 kHz, and so on. Therefore the plot of noise power vs. frequency is not flat, but shows a 3 dB rise in amplitude per octave of frequency change. Due to this rising frequency characteristic, white noise sounds very bright and lacking in low frequencies. [Here's the technical details: noise power is actually its power density spectrum - a measure of how the noise power contributed by individual frequency components is distributed over the frequency spectrum. It should be measured in watts/Hz; however it isn't. The accepted practice in noise theory is to use amplitude-squared as the unit of power (purists justify this by assuming a one-ohm resistor load). For electrical signals this gives units of volts-squared/Hz, or more commonly expressed as volts/root-Hertz. Note that the denominator gets bigger by the square root of the increase in frequency. Therefore, for an octave increase (doubling) of frequency, the denominator increases by the square root of two, which equals 1.414, or 3 dB. In order for the energy to remain constant (as it must if it is to remain white noise) there has to be an offsetting increase in amplitude (the numerator term) of 3 dB to exactly cancel the 3 dB increase in the denominator term. Thus the upward 3 dB/octave sloping characteristic of white noise amplitude when measured in constant percentage increments like 1/3-octave.]
wide-range curve Same as X curve
widget (perhaps alteration of gadget) 1. A small mechanical device or control; a gadget. 2. An unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article. 3. As developed by Guinness, a small disk with a pinprick-size hole that fits inside their beer cans. As the beer is packaged, a small amount of stout is forced into the widget and held there under pressure. Once the pressure is released by opening the can, the beer is freed from the widget and a stream of bubbles flows upward. Now when the stout is poured, it looks like a pub-poured draught with the characteristic Guinness head (thick collar of foam), without the widget it looks like any other beer. It also reproduces the creamy texture and low carbonation of a draught pint. Now also used by Murphy's and Beamish.
Wintel A contraction of the words "Windows" and "Intel." Used to describe personal computers made from Intel microprocessors and running Microsoft Windows software. It is reported that this "Wintel standard" accounts for 80% of all PCs.
WOM (write-only-memory) Term coined by Signetics in 1972 for their 25000 Series 9046XN Random Access Write-Only-Memory integrated circuits. Based on SEX (Signetics EXtra secret) processes, these devices employ both enhancement and depletion mode P-Channel, N-Channel, and NEU-Channel MOS transistors (devices which simultaneously, randomly, or not at all, enhance or deplete regardless of gate polarity). The world's supply of WOMs was quickly consumed by newly designed airline baggage-handling equipment, where they are still used today to store the exact real-time location of each bag. WOM production was suddenly discontinued when it was discovered that the only copy of the mask code had been accidentally filed into a WOM location.
word An ordered set of bits that is the normal unit in which information may be stored, transmitted, or operated upon within a given computer - commonly 16 or 32 bits.
word clock The synchronizing signal that indicates the sampling frequency or rate of sample words over a digital audio interface.
word length The number of bits in a word.
World Wide Web (WWW and/or W3) 1. A way to present resources and information over the Internet, or according to its inventor CERN , "The World Wide Web (W3) is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." 2. Satirically called the World Wide Wait.
WOROM (write-once read-only memory) Systems in which data may be written once, but not erased and rewritten. Usually refers to CD-ROM technology that can be recorded once only.
write To record data on a medium.
WWW (World Wide Web) See: World Wide Web.