View All Students
Ryan Lundberg
2/20/2013
5:30 p.m. to
7:30 p.m.
Lesson 2
This week we covered the digital basics of modern recording techniques. A couple things covered were sample rate, quantization, file compression and the process of recording to reproduction. Sample rate makes a lot of sense to me because it concerns the resolution of the sound waves. A higher sample rate can correspond to a higher megapixel picture compared to a lower. The better the rate, the better the quality of the sound.
The sample rate also goes hand in hand with the Nyquist Theorem. This sates that to accurately get a good picture of any recording, you must have the sample rate at least twice the highest frequencies you wish to record. This will allow a better 'picture' of the sound recorded and will limit alias frequencies. Alias frequencies are the higher frequencies that won't be captured within the sample rate if it's too low and fold over, or get mixed into, the next sample causing harmonic distortion.
One thing that I am a little bit unsure of is the Bit Depth or Bit Rate. From what I discussed with my mentor, the Bit Depth concerns the overall memory used to capture every bit of data during a recording. Karl mentioned that it's important to know what Bit Depth is being used for a recording for transfering purposes from one DAW to another as well as when you put the recordings onto disc. From what I also understand, is that bits are used to encode the initial amplitude, or voltage, of an analog signal to digital so it can be properly stored into data storage. The better the bit rate, the more accurate the didgital representaion.
I asked Karl for his preferences on both sample rate and bit rate/depth. He suggested using the 44.1k/sec rate and 24 bit rate. His reasoning for this is that the 44.1k is sufficient enough to cover almost all recorded frequencies and the bit rate can give you a higher quality recording and is still usable when transfering to other DAWs or disc without any compatibility issues.
