ABSTRACT
Digital audio technology has supplanted analog audio technology in U.S. television and radio production and broadcast facilities. Like digital video, digital audio offers many advantages in production, editing, distribution, and routing. Digital audio is remarkably robust and far less susceptible to degradation from hum, noise, level anomalies, and stereo phase errors than analog audio. Each analog audio recording generation and processing step adds its own measure of noise to the signal, but in the digital domain audio is not subject to such noise buildup. However, perceptual coding artifacts can be a problem; see Chapter 3.7, “Digital Audio Data Compression,” for additional information.
