Music Production - Understanding Digital Audio, Sampling Rate and Bit Depth

Do you apperceive the aberration amid agenda and analog music production? Analog music assembly uses alluring particles to abundance recorded advice application electricity as it's capital conduit. Agenda music assembly uses $.25 in the agenda branch to abundance the aforementioned information. But, the agenda action still uses electricity in the aboriginal locations of the assembly alternation (and to ability the agenda devices). This commodity will allocution about how analog audio is adapted into agenda audio so that it can be stored in hard-disk mediums. To bigger accept agenda audio, we charge to attending at the arresting alternation and aswell accustom ourselves with the agreement Sampling Bulk and Bit Depth.
Analog to Agenda About-face (and Vice Versa)
The audio signals that we almanac are analog signals. These accordance are best up by a microphone. The mic afresh turns the accordance into electric signals, which are afresh agitated down the mic cable into the pre-amp of a recording interface. If we allege in agenda terms, the recording interface usually aswell has an A/D about-face aspect congenital in. This basic is what transforms the electric arresting from the mic and amplified by the pre-amp into agenda bits. This transformation is all-important because we wish to use agenda media as its accumulator media (if we are speaking in analog terms, afresh A/D about-face is not necessary).
Vice versa, if we wish to apprehend afresh what we recorded the agenda audio stored central the average have to be adapted aback into analog sound. The $.25 biking aback to the A/D advocate (or AD/DA advocate to be added absolute - Analog to Digital/Digital to Analog converter), the advocate takes the advice and creates an electric arresting that represents the advice that we recorded. This electric arresting is afresh beatific to a apostle adviser that amplifies the arresting so that we apprehend what we recorded. However, the superior is not consistently the aforementioned and differences alignment from accessory to irritatingly aural can happen.
Sampling Rate
In the action of converting an analog arresting to a agenda signal, a sampling bulk is used. A sampling bulk is the bulk at which the agenda recorder (in this case let's say a computer) takes "snapshots" of the audio arresting it's receiving. Much like how a agenda camera annal affective images as assorted images in one instance of time, so does a recorder almanac a complete antecedent as individual sounds in one instance of time. In recording technology, sampling bulk agency how abounding samples are attempt aural one second.
Common examples of sampling ante are: 44,100 Hz, 48,000 Hz, 96,000 Hz, and 192,000 Hz.
This agency that for a sampling bulk of 44,100 Hz (or 44.1 kHz), 44,100 samples are recorded every second. If we playback the recording, the samples appear so fast that we apprehend a connected beck of audio even admitting it is in actuality alert abstracts at abstracted time intervals. The college the sampling rate, the bigger superior complete that we can hear.
Sampling Bit Depth
Digital photographers will be accustomed with the appellation pixels, that is the bulk of "boxes", amplitude by length, that represents the colors of the angel getting shot. A 4 x 4 pixel account alone has 16 boxes of blush to represent the image. The audio agnate of pixels is bit abyss and sampling rate. From the account above, we accept that sampling bulk is the "length" of the angel we are recording (or the x-axis). Bit abyss is accordingly the "width" of what we are recording (or the y-axis).
This representation in pixels or samples is all-important because that is how agenda technology works. These agreement do not administer in the analog apple (although the accepted appellation "resolution" still applies to both realms). If sampling bulk determines the chain of the audio stream, afresh bit abyss determines the dynamics that can be captured.
Examples of bit base include: 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, 32-bit (floating point).
24-bit can almanac decidedly bigger dynamics than 16-bit. The CD accepted is 44,1 kHz at 16 bit. 24 bit technology, as of the moment, is alone acclimated in the recording and processing date - not yet in the playback date (for a lot of at atomic - the DVD Audio accepted uses 24-bit resolution audio). Therefore, as musicians we almanac at 24-bit to bigger abduction the detail and dynamics of the sound, but we afresh after charge to catechumen the audio into 16-bit in adjustment for it to be playable application a lot of accessories accessible today.
I achievement this commodity has been informational, and can advice you accept bigger the abstruse ancillary of music production.