Understanding Digital Audio
Digital Audio is the representation of sound waves digitally.
Contents
Basic Principles
The most basic way to think of digital audio is like animation or video. By playing a number of individual "frames" quickly enough, it gives the appearance of motion. In the case of audio, the frames are called samples. Unlike video, however, digital audio is not an illusion - the digital representation of the sound is capable of storing all the information contained in and can be converted back into identical sound waves.
A device called an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) turns analog waves, either sound or electrical, into digital signals.