D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org)

@xiphmont also made an amazing video response to the many responses he received to this article. Using analog equipment he busts a bunch of myths and demonstrates what really happens with digital audio. link or on YT if you can't play it ▶ this video

This is the most lucid explanation of aliasing I think I've ever read. I mostly deal with this stuff in the realm of audio where the matter of analog vs digital rages regularly. The reason one hears "Nyquist says" so often from people defending digital audio is that the pro-analog people are imagining stair-stepped signals in which the information that is "lost" results in a noticeable degradation in sound quality. This (11-year-old) video is the gold standard for addressing this concern: ▶ this video Curiously, no one ever seems to mention the actual problems (like aliasing).

> Audiophiles might point out that analog audio sources can theoretically hold details you can't hear in digital. This is true because values in analog media are continuous. Over imperceptibly short periods of time, the numbers that represent different values on a sound wave in a digital recording jump instantaneously from one discrete value to another with no gentle slope between. Analog signals instead form smooth curves, so at some level they can contain tiny variations in slope that are too subtle for the digitization of that signal to represent. > The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video. ▶ this video

link The talk ▶ this video <-- Youtube backup in case it doesn't work (YMMV) I wish I could force any audiophiles to watch it before they waste their money on snake oil. I think a similar point can be made about analogue synthesis, e.g. You pay Moog £1500 for what is ultimately a fancy box for a relatively simple analogue circuit.

Monty Montgomery's explanation of digital audio might be the best explanatory video I have ever witnessed, ▶ this video

Changing the sample rate of audio only affects the frequency range. All audio signal is _perfectly_ represented in a digital form. I am ashamed to admit this took me a long time to properly understand. For further reading I'd recommend: link ▶ this video

In sound, nothing beats personal experience, experimentation and hours of deliberate listening. Spend a couple of hours with a basic compressor built-in your DAW and try to get the feel and understanding of how each parameter affects different sounds (from sine wave and noise to voice to drums, etc.). If you feel it's not fruitful, read, watch videos, listen, work on your stuff and come back to it after a while. Regarding books, there's lots to choose from. For some quick applied wisdom, Bobby Owsinski's Mixing, Recording and Mastering Handbooks (separate) are recommended. Zen & The Art Of Mixing by Mixerman is very good, as well as his classic The Daily Adventures. The Bruce Swedien Recording Method is very good if you're into recording. For Youtube videos, some random things I can vouch for: I'd suggest watching Monty's Digital Show and Tell [1] as a primer for digital audio as a form. Steve Albini has been putting out some very solid and entertaining videos on recording lately [2]. There's also of course a few hyped (but deservedly so) channels such as @DanWorrall, @Producelikeapro or @ProductionAdvice. Nothing I can suggest for courses as I haven't been interested in them for a while. [1] ▶ this video [2] link

There is no system high-end enough to allow your ears to magically hear 96kHz, or even 48kHz. Unless you’re very young with golden ears it’s extremely doubtful that you can hear a 24kHz tone. It is absolutely snake oil. link is an overview by the creator of Ogg and Vorbis explaining exactly, scientifically, why these inflated sampling rates are snake oil. ▶ this video is a longer video by the same person that debunks a lot of digital audio myths.

Nyquist-Shannon simply says that you need 2x the sample rate of the highest frequency to perfectly recreate something. So, to recreate a 20 kHz wave that was sampled at 16 bits, you'd need 40 kHz sample rate. Bump that up to 22.05 kHz (for anti-aliasing) and you get CD audio. The bit depth, OTOH, is your signal-noise ratio (noise floor) when sampling/quantizing said audio. It's unrelated to Nyquist-Shannon. More bits gives you less noise when reproducing it. For CD audio, 16 bits was chosen to give an acceptable SNR of 96 dB. Monty Montgomery (of xipf.org) has a nice YouTube video related to this: ▶ this video

Let Monty Montgomery of xiph.org provide an illuminating tear down of “digital can’t really produce...”: ▶ this video Edit: fix auto-incorrected xiph.org domain

A great video which touches on this idea, but mostly in the context of audio: ▶ this video (relevant part around 8 minutes)

Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: ▶ this video Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.