4.2 The problems with distortion

Let's say you go out to Radio Shack and buy a few cheap cables that let you plug in your slammin' new guitar into yoursoundcard, just so you can play around with different distortions. You want try playing with MATLAB, using the TaylorSeries method's familiar discrete power series:

The first problem you notice in playing back your wav file is the noise; after all, those were some really cheap cables! However, from an introductory electricalengineering class and another signals class, you've learned how to filter out noise, so that should be easy to deal with later.

You notice the next problem when trying to execute the Taylor Series approximation of the signals. You may set someharmonics' constants to zero, but as you increase different coefficients of higher and higher powers, the only difference isthat the music has a lower volume, and the volume of the noise is higher! Why isn't this working?