Chapter 5 Digitalization: 5.2 (To be Continued..)

5.2 Applications

5.2.1 Choosing and Appropriate Sampling Rate

5.2.1 explains why we choose sampling rates that are higher than the upper limit of human hearing, and talks about the tradeoff between sampling rates and file sizes. Overall this part is brief and informative.

Just out of curiosity, why do we pick 44100Hz as default sampling rate from the very beginning? I looked it up online later, but maybe we can briefly mention it somewhere.

5.2.2 Input Levels, Output Levels, and Dynamic Range

My first impression is that the last a couple of paragraphs are a little bit dry and hard to read.

Also, I don’t quite understand Figure 5.19. How can I tell no sample value is less than -90.3 dBFS from the picture? And in the Aside, the number 32768 might be random to most readers. It would be good to write it as 2^(16-1) since this is a 16-bit system.

5.2.3 Latency of Digital Audio Systems

With the help of Flash Tutorial: Reducing Latency, 5.2.3 does a pretty good job explaining what latency is and how to reduce it. However, without the flash tutorial, the part on buffer size is quite hard to understand, and it doesn’t explain the relationship between buffer size, sampling rate and latency well enough.

5.2.4 Word Clock

This part well explains the concept of word clock, which is pretty unfamiliar to most readers. The master vs. slave analog is very good. The Flash Tutorial: Word Clock is another success. I feel most learning supplements in this chapter are more helpful than the text itself.