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by John Siau March 14, 2017
Monty Montgomery takes us into the lab and uses a series of simple demonstrations to bust some very common myths about digital audio. Test your knowledge of digital audio. This video is fun to watch and easy to understand! Monty takes some difficult concepts and demonstrates them in a clear and simple manner.
Have doubts about Nyquist? Have a fear of stairsteps? Are you worried about ringing? Ever wonder what digital audio does to the timing of transients? This video is for you!
Myth - "Digital audio has stairsteps."
Myth - "Increased bit depths reduce the stairsteps."
Myth - "Analog tape has more resolution than digital audio."
Myth - "Dither masks quantization noise."
Myth - "Signals lower than one LSB cannot be reproduced."
Myth - "Digital filters make square waves and impulses ring."
Myth - "Digital systems cannot resolve timing between samples."
by John Siau March 19, 2015
Digital recordings are now available in a variety of sample rates. The CD uses a 44.1 kHz sample rate, but high-resolution audio recordings are now available in sample rates of 96 kHz and 192 kHz. What are the advantages of higher sample rates? How high a sample rate do we really need?
Digital audio systems take instantaneous snapshots or "samples" of an analog audio signal and then store each of these samples as numeric values. The digital samples can be stored and transmitted without any loss of quality, but these samples must be used to reconstruct an analog signal before we can listen to the audio. The sample rate places very specific limitations ...
- John Siau
by John Siau August 27, 2014
The music industry is struggling to define High-Resolution Audio or "HRA". In doing so, most have focused on the delivery formats - analog vs. digital, 24-bits vs. 16-bits, 1X vs. 2X and 4X sample rates, PCM vs. DSD, uncompressed vs. compressed.
But, High-Resolution Audio is much more than the delivery format ...
"High-Resolution Audio Requires High-Resolution Performance at all Stages of the Recording and Playback Chain"
- John Siau
by John Siau August 14, 2014
"Analog audio has infinite amplitude resolution."
"Digital audio is limited to a finite number of steps."
"24-bit audio has more resolution than 16-bit audio."
While it is true that digital systems quantize the amplitude of the audio signal to the nearest step in the digital encoding system, this does not necessarily mean that digital systems cannot have infinite resolution. Contrary to popular belief, digital systems can provide infinite amplitude resolution if they are properly dithered.
- John Siau