Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1Introduction

The first affordable digital audio devices began appearing in the mid-1980s. Digital signal processing (DSP) mathematics had been around since the 1960s. Commercial digital recordings first appeared in the early 1970s, but the technology did not become available for widespread distribution until about 15 years later when the advent of the compact disc ushered in the age of digital audio. Digital sampling refers to the acquisition of data points from a continuous analog signal. The data points are sampled on a regular interval known as the “sample period” or “sample interval.” The inverse of the sample period is the sampling frequency, which we denote as f_s. A compact disc uses a sampling frequency of 44,100 Hz, producing ...