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:

    “Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children’s and our own needs, works only for a time—because, as one father says, “It’s a new ball game just about every week.” So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.”
    —Joan Sheingold Ditzion, Dennie, and Palmer Wolf. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)

    “The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.”
    —George Orwell (1903–1950)

    “I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)