Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Originally, sound cards used 8-bit digital sampling, which provided for only 256 values
(2
8
)toconvertasound.Today'shighest-qualitysoundcardsfeature32-bitsampling(2
32
),
which translates into more than four trillion possible digital values that can be matched to
a given sound.
You can experiment with the effects of various sampling rates (and compression techno-
logies) by recording sound with the Windows Sound Recorder (in Windows XP or earlier
versions; neither Windows Vista nor Windows 7's Sound Recorder permits selection of
different sampling rates) or a third-party application such as Audacity (available from
ht-
tp://audacity.sourceforge
.
net for Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and other operating
systems) set to CD-quality sound. Save the sound and play it back at that highest-quality
setting. Then convert the file to a lower-quality setting and save the sound file again with
