Once a student was teaching a class and asked me to give him the clearest possible explanation of what bitrate meant.
Today I am going to share with you that explanation that although it does not refer to sound but an image in the background, it is the same and is very easy to understand.
Imagine that you put me in front of a beautiful landscape full of rivers and trees, mountains and Valleys with some Villas with Fields full of flowers and animals.
There is a lot of information there if I had to make a detailed description.
Imagine that you ask me to give you a description in 4 words.
It would have to make a very general description that, being very brief, Nova contains details. Maybe I’ll say something like “a beautiful autumn landscape.”
if after that you tell me that now I will have 14 words to describe what I am seeing.
I’ll be able to give more information Although it will really continue to be very summary, but you could already give some details.
“a beautiful autumn landscape with fields and mountains that have houses, flowers and animals”
If they ask me for the following explanation and they already allow me to use 50 words, I will be able to give many more details.
Although of course I will still have to omit a lot of details.
How many words might I need to give a detailed, spoken portrait of what I am looking at?
Well, this example that I just gave of the four words at the beginning then 15 words later have maybe 500 words later is exactly what the bit rate is.
We are talking about what is the amount of information that our audio or video file can transmit per second and obviously The higher the information There will be more details and therefore a higher quality and on the contrary the lower the information the lower the details and therefore lower quality.
That’s why a bit rate of 320 thousand bits per second will have a much higher audio quality than one of 90,000 bits per second.
Because in music, images and video, the quality always depends on the amount of information.
And in the specific case of audio and video, the amount of information is measured by seconds.
This means how much information it can transmit per second, that is, how many bits it can transmit per second, which means How much information and therefore How much detail, which is synonymous with quality.
With this we will understand very easily that as well as the sampling frequency is also very important and we will explain it in another article.
The rate of bits that are transmitted per second is crucial in determining the quality that an audio or video will have.
Of course, it must be understood that the higher the bit rate per second, the larger the size of the audio file will be because the greater the amount of information stored will be, but this will result in higher quality and greater definition.
Because here the definition concept is crucial.
The higher the bit rate the higher the definition and therefore the higher the quality.
The definition would be the detail of our initial explanation, if they let me use 2000 words to describe a landscape, I will be able to give many details and define them with great clarity. And that will mention a lot of quality.
This As-is applies to audio or video files.
Surely with this explanation it has been much clearer what is the rate of bits per second and why it is important.
