Digital Recording - Process

Process

Recording

  1. The analog signal is transmitted from the input device to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
  2. The ADC converts this signal by repeatedly measuring the momentary level of the analog (audio) wave and then assigning a binary number with a given quantity of bits (word length) to each measuring point.
  3. The frequency at which the ADC measures the level of the analog wave is called the sample rate or sampling rate.
  4. A digital audio sample with a given word length represents the audio level at one moment.
  5. The longer the word length the more exact is the representation of the original audio wave levelwise.
  6. The higher the sampling rate the higher the upper cutoff frequency of the digitized audio signal.
  7. The ADC outputs a sequence of samples that make up a continuous stream of 0s and 1s.
  8. These numbers are stored onto recording media such as magnetic tape, hard drive, optical drive or solid state memory.

Playback

  1. The sequence of numbers is transmitted from storage into a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which converts the numbers back to an analog signal by sticking together the level information stored in each digital sample, thus rebuilding the original analog wave form.
  2. This signal is amplified and transmitted to the loudspeakers or video screen.

Read more about this topic:  Digital Recording

Famous quotes containing the word process:

    “We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”
    —Rita Dove (b. 1952)

    “The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.”
    —Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)

    “We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
    —Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)