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Gerard Kaplan
Chapter 3 digital audio. By reading the title of the chapter, I instantly knew I'd be interested in what I was about to read. I really liked how it compared the way digital audio works similar to how film creates motion. I remember those old cartoon flip books where if you flipped the pages fast enough it would make the cartoons look like they were moving. This helped me in the beginning of the chapter to get a brief understanding of how digital audio works. The chapter begins explaining a simple sign wave entering a digital audio signal. It then showed how the signs waves amplitude at a sample rate of 48 kHz produces 48,000 samples per every second. I then read on to where it explained bit depth, something I was unfamiliar with. I learned that bit depth is used to define the amplitude of each individual sample which determines the resolution that allows us to measure the signal. I read on about DSD and SACD. I learned that DSD as wells as SACD are not supported by ProTools and many other DAWs. I learned about the Nyquist Theorem, expressing illustrations of samplings ability to capture frequencies out side of a specific range. I read about clipping, a term I was never familiar with before, and learned that clipping is when the incoming electric signal exceeds the maximum amplitude that can be expressed numerically. In section 2, the chapter took me through the history of digital recording. All the way from DAT to DAWs, such as ProTools, which revolutionized the entire recoding industry and still does to this day. I learned about samplers and sequencers, two things I am familiar with and have worked with myself. It explained how samplers have the ability of storing a recorded sound or sample in memory, allowing the individual sound to be played back as they are triggered. A digital synthesizer is used to generate sound. In the last part of the chapter, section 5, I read about different digital formats and the difference between compressed files and files that are lossy compressed formats. I probably could have guessed this on my own, but the mp3 is the most commonly used mp3 file to this day. What I did not know is that the mp3 is a lossy compressed file. However, mp3 is not the best sound file we can get. Although, as popular as lossy files are, they don’t sound quite as good as the originals. It explains how lossy can be remembered by ‘you lose something in translation’. The chapter then explained non compressed formats. It explains how wave form (WAV), produces the original recording with zero compression. But it comes along with a very large file size, meaning it takes up too much storage on you’re computer.
Of course reading a chapter and having someone with years of experience explaining to you what you just read makes a world of difference. Edwin Ramos made understanding everything I had trouble with a whole lot easier. After we wrapped up the chapter he began showing me another students mix and showed me which parts were wrong and how he was able to fix them. We didn’t get into much about it but he explained enough to me in five minutes where I was able to come home and tweak some of my own work.
