Data representation - sound Flashcards
What is analogue data?
Data which varies in a continuous way
What is digital data?
Data which takes the form of discrete values
What is an analogue signal?
An electrical signal which varies in a continuous way
Describe how sound is dealt with in an analogue sound system
Sound is an air pressure wave. The wave is often captured by a TRANSDUCER to produce an electrical current or voltage which varies proportionally to the wave
The electrical signal can be transmitted and used to recreate sound by vibrating a mechanical surface such as a loudspeaker to reproduce the original pressure wave
What is a transducer?
A device which converts variations in a physical property (e.g. pressure in a sound wave) to an electrical signal or vice versa
If vibration in a sound wave increases, what happens to the pitch?
It gets higher
What is a pure tone?
A regular sine wave
A more complicated sound is superposition of sine waves and is wobblier looking
How does a vinyl LP work?
The sound wave is recorded and a similar shape to the real sound wave is created in the grooves of the record
The needle follows the groove and the changes in this create changes in electrical signal
The signal is amplified and fed to a loudspeaker
Give two examples of a transducer
microphone
loudspeaker
Describe how sound is dealt with in a digital sound system
The electrical signal from a transducer is converted to numerical values with a size proportional to the strength of the signal. These are stored then converted back to an analogue electrical signal and then to a sound wave
In a CD how many sampled voltage values are there per second?
44,100 samples in TWO stereo channels
How many bits per voltage sample in a CD?
16 bits
How many possible voltage values does 16 bits give?
65,536
How many bytes per minute and per hour does a CD use?
minute=10MB
hour=650MB
What is a digital signal?
An electrical signal with voltage changes that are in discrete steps
Ina two level binary digit signal, which voltages are used?
5 volts and 0 volts
What is a binary digital signal?
A digital signal which uses only two voltage levels
This stops there being more than one binary pattern for 0
What is ADC?
Analogue to digital converter (hardware)
What is DAC?
Digital to analogue converter (harware)