#1January 26th, 2008 · 02:28 PM
160 threads / 33 songs
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short lesson for digital newbies
I thought I would post a short lesson in as layman terms as I can get , about how the digital recorder captures your sounds..    first off  sample rate... the best way I know how to explain this is to use the camera analogy.
what the computer is sorta of doing is taking pictures (not really it's called samples) if the incoming signal. now the rate is just how fast the pictures are taken.. Imagine some one running across your front yard and you have a old camera that you have to push the button every time to take a picture ...  your not going to capture much of the guy running across your yard.,so there will be gaps... You get a new camera that has auto shoot on it ,and it helps because it has a higher picture taking speed.  Now your get a camcorder and wow  it looks like there are no gaps and you can see everything as he runs across the yard...  (ok i know this analogy sucks but it is the best way I know how to explain it)  This is what your computer is doing to the input signal.. it is taking samples of the input signal.. So naturally the higher the sample rate, the more defined the sound will be, as it takes more samples (think like pictures analogy) in the same amount of time.

Sample rate would look like this "44.1khz" which is cd quality (but not really all that good compared to what is available) up to "192khz"   

Layman's terms for bit rate.. just think of it like this .. you can record a hotter signal.(gives you more headroom). There is more to it than that but really that covers mostly the effect of a different bit rate. 

Most bit rate is either 16 or 24 there is 32 bit floating but most people don't use it.

If you record at a high bit rate,but want to burn it to a cd you will need to convert it to CD settings(16bit, 44.1 khz). IMHO you should use what is called Dithering.  It helps with the truncation and helps keep as much of the original sounds as possible.

I am keeping this (I hope real simple) for the home recording/ layman/ beginning digital recording enthusiast .
 not sure it this will help anyone but maybe it will
Greg
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