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What is the sample rate? What is bit depth?

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What is the sample rate? What is bit depth?

Bit Depth

Audio sample rate and bit depth – simple and understandable language

bit depth

Even if you are not dealing directly with digital sound recording, you will be interested!

Are you new to the world of digital music? Not sure what all these designations and complex numbers mean?

Hmm, no wonder! After all, every day there is more and more information. And knowing everything is almost impossible.

Yes, this is not necessary! You need to know the essentials.

Sample rate and bit depth are sound engineering concepts that you should know if you decide to make music in a computer environment.

Even if you haven’t had to record music in a virtual environment yet, but have dealt with audio (be it on a portable digital player, a player on a computer, or elsewhere), you may have seen some numbers in the properties of audio: “16 bit, 24 bit, 44100 Hz, 48000 Hz …”

The material is presented briefly and is accessible even to the uninitiated. Just the essentials.

So what are sample rate and bit depth? What is it for?

To begin with, that in different sources you can find: Sample rate and Sample rate. The abbreviations are equivalent. Call it what you like the most.

And bit and bit depth. It’s the same, the same, it just sounds different.

So.

Sampling frequency …

All inanimate music (music produced by a computer, music center, etc., that is, not live) has this parameter. This is the number of samples per second. Without going into details, I will say that 44100 Hz is optimal for humans. Since at a higher value, the sounds to be sampled will be practically inaccessible to our ears, we simply won’t hear them, because they will be out of earshot.

Discrete means discontinuous. That is, the sampling process is the processing of each bit of information one by one (that is, discretely and not all at once). In our case, this happens 44100 times per second. By Nyquist’s theorem, the required sampling rate for normal perception should be twice the hearing threshold. Since an average person listens up to 16 KHz (KiloHz or 16000 Hz), and something (normal for a healthy young person) up to 20 KHz, the sampling frequency was determined at 44.1 KHz (44100 Hz), that is, twice the threshold. audibility of the human ear. Why not 40 kHz (40,000 Hz)? Taken with margin (nobody canceled errors and noise on the route and after the CD release).

Bit depth is a kind of resolution of these same samples. Why am I calling this permission? Just so you prefer to understand by analogy what is what.

Grab your monitor – the higher the resolution, the better the picture, right? At low resolution you will see individual pixels and the eye will no longer be happy as before. I smile

Bitness is dynamic range – that is, the oscillation of your audio up and down (in terms of volume, power, so to speak), the nuances of performance.

The higher the audio bit rate, the more space the audio will occupy on your hard drive (on your computer); keep in mind.

For projects that are important to you, I advise you to use 24 bits and a sample rate of 48000 Hz. THIS IS A STANDARD. Then, for CD output, it will be possible to downgrade the data to 16 bits and 44.1 kHz.

But some people prefer to work in 24/96 (24 Bits – bit depth, 96 KHz – sample rate) or 24 / 88.2. The taste and the color …

For most projects, 16 / 44.1 is adequate (16 bit – bit depth, 44100 Hz is equivalent to 44.1 KHz – sample rate).

Sample rate and bit depth go directly next to each other and never go together. That is their destiny. They are friends in life, I smile

For the most boring and for those who find it quite difficult, I will explain again. Let me give you an analogy with a camera and images:

The sample rate is the number of photos you can take per second …

Audio sample rate and bit depth – simple and understandable language

And Bitness is the quality they will have …

Audio sample rate and bit depth – simple and understandable language

It is quite simple. At first, all of these sound engineering terms and expressions are misleading. I remember it and I know it.

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Sample rate and bit depth

Sample rate and bit depth

Bit Depth

When a signal reaches the ADC from a preamplifier, compressor, console output, synthesizer, it represents electromagnetic oscillations. That is, a certain wave with variable voltage (very small values) reaches the input of the ADC. To save a signal to a file, it must be “digitized,” that is, encoded by ones and zeros. The result is a graph of the wave on the computer screen.

Bit Depth

Even the best converter has an error, because there are no intermediate values between zero and one, and the wave graph will consist of only vertical and horizontal segments, with no oblique lines. The graphical representation of the wave will be influenced by the pitch (oscillation frequency), its timbre (waveform) and the volume (amplitude). A high-quality ADC must correctly transmit all these parameters to the recording system.

So the sound enters the system discreetly, that is, divided into small segments. The precision of encoding an analog signal in a digital environment depends on the size of these segments. The smaller the horizontal and vertical discrete units, the more accurate the scan will be.

Sampling rate

Splitting the wave horizontally gives us an idea of the sample rate or sample rate. The more often the ADC detects changes in waveform values, the higher the sample rate. In reality, a sample is a discrete unit segment, the smallest unit of sound. The shorter it is, the higher the sample rate.

For example, a sample rate of 44.1 kHz indicates that there are 44,100 samples per second of recording. We can edit the wave, taking a segment with a duration of 1/44100 seconds as the minimum editing element. As the sample rate increases to 48 kHz, this section drops to 1/48000 of a second, allowing for more accurate impact.

Sample rate match

Each sample is the same length as the previous one. For proper sound reproduction, the file and system sample rates must be identical. When an audio track with a different sample rate than the host (program) sample is added to the project, it must be converted.

If you play a higher frequency file on a lower system, it will sound slower than it should and vice versa. Converting a signal from one frequency to another always produces distortion. To “reshape” the sound for a new sample rate, the system must divide the samples into smaller pieces and reassemble them into a single wave. Such a process can lead, at best, to simply blurring the sound, at worst, to the appearance of clicks.

Of course, in the built-in speakers of a home laptop, the difference will not be noticeable. But when it comes to working with sound at a professional level, sample rate coordination is necessary.

It is not recommended to change the sample rate within the same project. A justification for higher sampling could be, for example, the need to process the file with algorithms or plugins that work better at high frequencies. Since a higher sample rate means dividing into smaller samples, the processing precision will be higher and the result will be of better quality. But it is also impossible to guarantee the effectiveness of this method: in each case the result will be individual. It is necessary to evaluate each time what is more important: the effect of processing at a higher resolution or the negative effect of conversion.

If for some reason, after completing the job at 48 kHz, you need to convert the signal to 44.1 kHz, save the original file in case you need to re-manipulate the material (for example, for alternative mastering). Processing at a higher sample rate will provide a better effect than processing at a lower sample rate.

Sound capacity

If the horizontal division of a wave gives us an idea of the sampling frequency, then the vertical sampling is the bit depth, which is responsible for the reliable transmission of the dynamic elements of the register. The more “steps” the converter can correct, the higher the bit depth of the recorded sound file.

For example, a wave over a period of time may move one step from 0 to 16, or perhaps four – 4 units per step. A more accurate representation would be 16 steps by one. The number of steps the wave is divided into vertically is the bit depth.

The higher the bit depth of the converter, the more reliably it will transmit signals of different volume levels.