What does the quality of the audio or video depend on?
What factors are crucial for a higher or lower quality in digital files?
Files like WAV are not compressed, but they take up a lot of space and contain a lot of inaudible and unnecessary information.
This forced them to look for ways to be able to compress this audio or video to save space and so that they were also lighter to watch or listen to live on sites like YouTube or Spotify, etc.
Let’s see what are the important parameters:
1.- Bit Rate
It is the bit transfer rate. Said in an easy to understand way, it is the amount of information that can be transmitted per second. It is obvious that the more information that can be transmitted, the greater the detail and therefore the greater the quality.
Sometimes the transfer rate is fixed (CBR) but it can also be variable. Where the bitrate chosen for each moment will depend on the amount of information needed.
An audio with a lot of silence and few sounds will need to transfer much less information per second than an audio full of sounds and nuances.
2.- Sampling rate
The amount of information per second that is sampled will mark the number of details that are captured and can be transmitted.
But obviously also the higher the sampling rate, the greater the information contained.
Therefore, we see as a very simplified summary that a higher quality requires greater detail and therefore better information stored and a higher speed of transmission of that information.
Therefore higher bitrate and higher samplerate will usually mean higher quality, and will also take up more space.
