BUILDING BLOCKS OF A COMPUTER AUDIO SYSTEM Introduction Different people have different considerations when buying a computer. What is interesting about this is, only a few pay attention to the computer audio system. It may not matter that much at first, but it would be good to know a thing or two about the computer stereo system so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Here we listed down some of the building blocks of a computer audio system.
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SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO The signal-to-noise ratio describes the correlation between an audio signal and the noise levels that a computer audio system generates. If the computer speaker system has a high signal-to-noise ratio, then that means it has high sound quality.
DIGITAL & ANALOG AUDIO Knowing the difference between digital audio and analog audio will help you determine the capacity of your computer’s sound processors. An analog audio utilizes more information, thus enabling it to produce original sound waves straight from the source. While it produces accurate recordings as an aftermath, these recordings tend to degrade thus eventually losing its quality.
Digital recordings uses new sound of music wave samples and records it by transforming it into a series of ones and zeros (bits) that best illustrate the wave pattern.
BIT DEPTH The bit depth is the number of bits present in a recording. It also determines the amplitude of a sample’s sound waves. Case in point, 65,536 levels are allowed in a 16-bit bitrate while a 24-bit bitrate allows 16.7 million. The sample rate indicates how many points are present in a sound wave that’s sampled over one second. The more samples there are, the closer the digital representation & analog sound wave will be.
CONCLUSION When Intel developed an audio standard (AC97), it served as a framework for anyone willing to dabble into creating a computer sound system. AC97 supported 16-bit 96 kHz audio, which was compatible with a DVD 5.1. From then on, developments in computer audio software have emerged. This is the reason why these days, our computer stereo system can play audio from highdefinition videos like Blu-ray. Intel also developed a new standard that enables Music Lovers computer sound system to support new audio formats. Source: www.musicloversaudio.com