ABSTRACT
It is important to have a basic understanding of how the audio is converted into digital information so that errors are not made in setting up the equipment. The audio signal is sampled at a constant rate like a series of pulses. For each of these pulses, the level of the sound is checked and this value is given a number. This number is transferred into binary code and this code is recorded as the digital information. The actual recording is therefore a string of codes, each representing the level of the audio at a particular moment in time. In order to achieve a good frequency response, the sampling is carried out at a very high frequency; 48,000 samples per second (48 kHz) is used for most professional systems. The level of the sound to be converted into binary numbers must also have sufficient steps to ensure accuracy, which is called quantizing. With the 16-bit system employed by most camera/recorders, 65,536 finite levels can be represented. Put simply, this means that in order to encode and decode the signals, all the systems must operate at the same sampling rate and the signal level must never exceed the maximum quantization step or no value will be recorded.
