Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Digital Audio

Computers, of course, use digital signals, as do many modern stereo components such as Compact Disc players and Digital Audio Tape systems. Once a sound signal has been translated from analog into digital form, it becomes just another form of data that your computer can store or compute upon. Digital technology adds new terms to the audio vocabulary and raises new concerns.

Digital recording of sound turns music into numbers. That is, a sampling circuit examines audio waveforms thousands of times every second and assigns a numerical value to the strength of the sound every time it looks; it then records the numbers. To reproduce the music or noise, a computer's sound system works backward. It takes the recorded numbers and regenerates ...