Pro Sound Web: Digital audio at it’s most fundamental level is a mathematical representation of a continuous sound.
The digital world can get complicated very quickly, so it’s no surprise that a great deal of confusion exists.
The point of this article is to clarify how digital audio works without delving fully into the mathematics, but without skirting any information.
2 comments:
I'm glad this article was able to clarify to me exactly why sample rates above 44.1kHz may not necessarily always provide a better listening experience. I have heard this before, but the concepts of what actually happens with the digital recording of audio at different sample rates is much clearer. The repeated reminder that "digital audio captures math, not sound" was well-used in the article to keep my head straight during the explanation of the concept. The beginning paragraphs, although basic, were a nice refresher leading into the article.
This is a fairly good article in that it achieves what it sets out to do. I have previously read about how digital audio can capture frequencies up to half of its sample rate, but I never quite understood why. At one point the author states that, “It doesn’t matter if you have three points or 300 along the sine curve – it’ll still come out sounding exactly the same.” I don’t quite understand how this statement could be true. At frequencies approaching 22 kHz the sine waves would be much closer together so very few samples would be taken per wave. I would think that this would create a pretty inaccurate, blocky representation of the wave that would certainly not be equivalent to the number of samples taken per wave at lower frequencies.
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