ABSTRACT
Previously, we described a digital audio signal as a discrete series of values, sampled uniformly in time. But the listener has two ears and hears the sound differently in each ear depending on the location of the source. Stereo audio files encode two signals, or channels, for listening over headphones or loudspeakers, so that sources can be localized. Furthermore, spatial audio reproduction systems will often use a large number of loudspeakers, recreating an entire sound scene, thus requiring more channels.
