From the course: Digital Audio Foundations
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Analog to digital conversion
- To bring sound from the analog domain into the digital domain, we use a process called Sampling. Sampling is done by an analog to digital converter or ADC for short and it means that we take regular snapshots, that is measurements of the voltage of the analog signal and record them as numbers. Here's a wave showing a few different sample points where the voltage of the analog signal was measured. The timing of how often those samples are taken is called the Sampling Rate or Sampling Frequency. Just like any frequency, this is measured in hertz, the number of times per second. The two most common sampling rates in digital audio are 44.1 kilohertz, that is 44,100 samples per second and 48 kilohertz or 48,000 samples per second. The sampling frequency determines how detailed a representation of the analog signal will be captured in the digital domain. Since higher frequency sounds create more detail in the shape of a sound wave than low frequencies, we need to use a higher sampling…
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