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How to Digitize Audio for playback through a computer.
Dispelling the Myths about Digital Audio
There's a mystique about digital audio that makes people think that you need
a fully equipped studio, skilled technicians or engineers and a vast
investment in hardware/software to create it. That's patently untrue. If you can play
a sound through your computer, you can digitize it and if you can hear it, you can play it through your computer.
Another digital audio mystique is that it produces better sound. Not true
either.
Like the great pyramids of Egypt, digital sound is made up of thousands if
individual blocks yet, from a
distance this great pyramid looks like a smooth triangle.
As illustrated in the left panel, digital sounds are clipped as square waves
but to the human ear, digital sounds are a smooth transition from one tone to
another. For example, digital audio for CD's uses a process called over-sampling
to smooth the transition from byte to byte.
To date, the best sound media is still a record played on a quality
turntable.
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