DIGITAL SOUND

• DIGITAL SOUND VS ANALOG SOUND

Analog sound is the one that catches original sound and tranfer it to analog idiom (decimal system).

Digital one is the one that catches original sound and tranfer it to digital idiom (binary system).

Sound is naturally an analog signal. An analog signal is continuous, meaning that there are no breaks or interruptions. One moment flows into the next. If you were to hum a descending note, people hearing you would be able to detect the change in pitch, but not point to specific moments when the pitch jumped from one note to the next.

Digital signals are not continuous. They use specific values to represent information. In the case of sound, that means representing a sound wave as a series of values       (0 or 1) that represent pitch and volume over the length of the recording. In a primitive digital recording of that descending note you hummed, you'd hear a single long sound as a collection of shorter sounds.

Digital sample rate:

In developing an audio sound for computers or telecommunication, the sample rate is the number of samples of a sound that are taken per second to represent the event digitally.

The more samples taken per second, the more accurate the digital representation of the sound can be. For example, the current sample rate for CD-quality audio is 44,100 samples per second. This sample rate can accurately reproduce the audio frequencies up to 20,500 hertz, covering the full range of human hearing.

Bit depth is the number of bits of information in each sample, and it directly corresponds to the resolution of each sample.