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Digital sound quality

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Digital sound quality.

Sound quality

Sound information. Sound is a wave that travels through air, water, or other medium with a continuously varying intensity and frequency.

Digital Sound Quality

A person receives sound waves (air vibrations) supported by hearing in the form of sound of varying volume and pitch. The greater the intensity of the sound wave, the louder the sound, the higher the frequency of the wave, the higher the pitch of the sound

Dependence of the volume and pitch of sound on the intensity and frequency of a sound wave

The human ear receives sound with a frequency of 20 vibrations per second (small sound) to 20,000 vibrations per second (loud sound).

A person can receive sound in a wide spectrum of intensities, in which the highest intensity is 1014 times greater than the lowest (100 thousand billion times). To measure the volume of sound, a special unit “decibel” (dbl) is used (Table 5.1). Decreasing or increasing the sound volume by 10 dB is suitable for decreasing or increasing the sound intensity by 10 times.

The sound volume
sound in decibels
lower limit of human ear sensitivity 0
leaf whisper 10
Conversation 60
Gudok Vehicle 90
Jet engine 120
Pain threshold 140
Sound time sampling. In order for a computer to process sound, a continuous audio signal must be converted to a discrete digital form with support for time sampling. A constant sound wave is divided into small separate time sections, for each section a certain value of sound intensity is set.

Therefore, the constant dependence of the loudness of the sound on time A (t) is replaced by a discrete sequence of loudness levels. On the graph, this appears to replace a smooth curve with a sequence of “steps”

Sampling frequency. To record analog sound and transform it into digital format, a microphone is used, connected to the sound card. The quality of the digital sound obtained depends on the number of measurements of the sound volume level per unit of time, that is, the sampling frequency. The more measurements that are made in 1 second (the higher the sampling frequency), the more accurately the “ladder” of the digital audio signal repeats the curve of the dialogue signal.

Audio sample rate is the number of audio volume measurements in one second.

The audio sample rate can range from 8000 to 48000 sound volume measurements per second.

Audio encoding depth. Each “step” is assigned a specific value for the sound volume level. Loudness levels of sound can be viewed as a set of probable states N, for which encoding a certain amount of information I is required, which is magnified by the encoding depth of the sound.

Audio encoding depth is the amount of information required to encode the discrete volume levels of digital audio.

If the encoding depth is known, then the number of digital sound volume levels can be calculated using the formula N = 2I. Let the sound encoding depth be 16 bit, then the number of sound volume levels is the same:

N = 2I = 216 = 65536.

During the encoding process, each sound volume level is assigned its own 16-bit binary code, the lowest sound level will correspond to the code 0000000000000000, and the highest – 1111111111111111.

The quality of digitized sound. The higher the sound sampling frequency and depth, the higher the quality of the digitized sound. The lowest quality of digitized sound, suitable for the quality of a telephone connection, is obtained at a sample rate of 8000 times per second, an 8-bit sample rate, and by recording an audio track (“mono” mode). The highest quality digitized sound, suitable for audio CD quality, is achieved at a sampling rate of 48,000 times per second, a 16-bit sampling rate, and by recording 2 audio tracks (“stereo” mode ).

It should be remembered that the higher the quality of the digital sound, the greater the volume of information in the audio file. You can estimate the volume of information in a digital stereo sound file with a duration of 1 second with an average sound quality (16 bits, 24,000 measurements per second). To do this, the encoding depth must be multiplied by the number of measurements in 1 second and multiplied by 2 (stereo sound):

16 bits 24,000 2 = 768,000 bits = 96,000 b = 93.75 KB.

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Important things about the quality of digital music and digital video audio

Important things about the quality of digital music and digital video audio

quality digital music

1. The file format does not play a decisive role

digital music quality

What the producer of a track does with it in the studio is a thousand times more important than in what format the result of this work will be encoded. You can’t make candy out of shit – a decent track with an artistic message, properly produced, mixed, and mastered in an acceptable dynamic range (where you didn’t go overboard with compression in the first place), even on unimportant speakers, will sound better than a dull, gray, poorly mastered track, even if you hear it in lossless format on a fancy stereo system. It is always. This should be obvious to everyone.

2. Compressing the file size by 80% does not proportionally reduce the audio quality

When you compress digital audio, you get rid of the main ballast without affecting the quality of the music audible to the human ear. This process is called lossless compression (very similar to RAR or ZIP files). If you want to reduce the size of the audio file even more radically, you will have to shred the source and its sound forever; this is already a case of the notorious “quality loss”. Yes, as a result, the track undergoes irreparable changes, but people too often create darkness, claiming that this happens indiscriminately.

It’s time to admit that most people can’t hear some of the details on the album. It’s just that our ears cannot be compared to the hearing of a dog and other animals. You can get rid of a lot of secondary information in the audio and no one will know the difference. This is psychoacoustics in action, this is how lossy audio compression works. There is a certain threshold below which the difference begins to be heard (MP3 with a bitrate of 96 kilobits per second cannot be compared with an analog of 320), but this does not mean that the myth about the relationship between the percentage of compression and the end result is true. It is a myth.

3. People make the most of life when music is far from being of the best quality.

Life story. In the 90s, the conditional hero of the article participated in an illegal rave, spent the whole night and decided that he would make DJing the profession of his life. A brave step and a fateful decision. But what happened to the sound at that party? Everything was wrong, remember. The needle flew, the EQ not tuned, and the amps periodically cut out. Has anyone fired on this? Barely.

Have you ever been to a nasty sounding party that changed your life? Danced all night by shitty announcers in a weird club and left in the morning with your future life partner? They turned on the shortwave radio in the car, and there an old hit sounded like a balm on the soul and saved him from a reckless act. Or the cork didn’t seem so boring anymore. Did you play your favorite song before the tape broke on your pocket cassette player and you decided to form a band? All bloody sweltering summer listening to the playlist on Vkontakte and remembering this time for the rest of your life? Did you play a deplorable sounding set, burning with embarrassment, and then a line of people lined up with you, saying it was the best party of your life?

Congratulations! You are 99% of real people in real life situations who have experienced something with music. And music of such quality that the remaining percentage of purists and snobs are ready to burn to ashes. These guys think you need to worry about the audio format and dynamic range of someone’s equipment. Better to live real life. After all, it is quite short.

4. The search for an ideal is harmful

Each of us wants the world and its components to be ideal; this is the axiom. Any DJ wants to have speakers in clubs connected and tuned, every track in the collection shines with quality mastering, and so on. But only the results of the work done are taken into account, each of us is forced to make commitments every day.

So interestingly, this also applies to the quality of the music. We already noted at the beginning that this is an important point, but not so much as to deny the space of options and the possibilities of making decisions, perfectionism is completely out of place here. For example, a distinctive underground producer puts out a new track at 128 KBPS, and it will definitely break the crowd. A dilemma arises: to play it or not?

Purists will answer negatively. But you have to be honest with yourself and judge by the emotions you want to convey through music. If the combined weight of the factors exceeds five minutes of not-so-high-quality sound on your computer, the question can be dismissed.