National Association of Broadcasters Engineering Handbook, 10th Edition

CHAPTER 1.15 Digital Audio Standards and Practices

CHIP MORGAN

CMBE El Dorado Hills, California

RANDALL HOFFNER

ABC, Inc. New York, New York

Updated for the 10th Edition by

TIM CARROLL

Linear Acoustic Inc., Lancaster, Pennsylvania

INTRODUCTION

Digital audio technology has supplanted analog audio technology in U.S. television and radio production and broadcast facilities. Like digital video, digital audio offers many advantages in production, editing, distribution, and routing. Digital audio is remarkably robust and far less susceptible to degradation from hum, noise, level anomalies, and stereo phase errors than analog audio. Each analog audio recording generation and processing step adds its own measure of noise to the signal, but in the digital ...