Category Archives: Digital Audio

Analog digital continuous discrete

Digital and analog. We often think of them, mistakenly, as equivalent things in different domains. But that’s a misunderstanding, and we often use the terms incorrectly. For instance, run a mic through a preamp and get a signal, we know … Continue reading

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Inter-sample peaks

We’ve seen that samples can represent a signal with greater peak amplitude than the peak sample values. If those sample values were higher, the output would exceed “1.0”, or 0 dB full-scale—I’ll refer to these as “overs”. This brings two … Continue reading

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Special case: perfect sine waves

Let’s say we want to test the output of a DAC while it passes a pure sine wave. The “pure sine wave” requirement is a bit more difficult than it might seem. In the general case, it’s not possible to … Continue reading

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How many bits can you hear? video

A listening test in video form. On the plus side, it’s helpful to see the spectrum as it’s playing, and a peak meter to see how the sweeps compare to each other, and to the announcing voice. On the minus … Continue reading

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A listening test

Click to play in your browser, or right-click-download to play as you wish (24-bit .wav file): multi-level sweeps.wav I call this a listening test, because it involves your ears, equipment, and even environment. Any of these can influence your limits … Continue reading

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Biquad calculator v3

The latest version of the biquad calculator. It also takes on the functionality of the frequency response grapher:

Posted in Biquads, Digital Audio, Filters, Widgets | Tagged | 56 Comments

Time resolution in digital audio

I’ve been involved in several discussions on timing resolution in digital audio, recently—honestly, I never knew it was a concern before. For example, in a video on MQA, the host explained that standard audio sample rates (44.1 and 48 kHz) … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio | 5 Comments

Amplitude Modulation Principles and Interactive Widget video

This video demonstrates important uses of AM—and serves as a demonstration of using the AM widget.

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Further thoughts on wave table oscillators

I see regular questions about wave table oscillators in various forums. While the process is straight forward, I sympathize that it’s not so simple to figure out what’s important if you really want to understand how it works. For instance, … Continue reading

Posted in Digital Audio, Oscillators, Wavetable Oscillators | 12 Comments

WaveUtils updated

WaveUtils needed only a minor change for compatibility with the WaveTableOsc update—addWaveTable changes to AddWaveTable. But I added something new while I was at it. The original wave table articles advocated minimizing the number of tables necessary—one per octave—by allowing … Continue reading

Posted in Source Code, Wavetable Oscillators | 17 Comments