Valves Unlimited


Valves Unlimited Present 'Analogue Audio'

In this section I will be explaining why I think 2 channel analogue stereo recordings can (in my opion) sound better than any DVD audio setup.

Basically it all boils down to the why digital audio discs are made, and the process called sampling. An analogue sound wave has a nice smooth 'wavey' form from peak to peak, to make this in to a digital sound recording, this nice analogue wave, has to be converted in to 1's & 0's as this is how digital works.

I'll try to describe Analogue to Digital conversion very briefly and simply below.

So how do we get a digital signal, from an analogue signal, well this is where a bloke called H. Nyquist came up with his theory in about 1920. It states: The minimum theoretical sampling rate nessesary for recovering a transmission signal at a point distant from the transmitter (in this case your ears being the distant point, the speakers being the transmitter).

Using his theaory, for a voice transmission we arrived at 8Khz, which means 8000 samples of the analoge wave form is taken every second, seems a lot doesn't it, well that is the standard we use for telephone transmitions, fine for voice, but have you heard music on hold down you phone? well it's crap, and that's the reason.

Now we all know CD's are digital, but they sound better than a telephone. Why, well they are sampled at 44.1Khz, which is still not as good as a clean analogue signal. The reason they came to this sample rate was because that's the fastest they could sample when the CD was invnted in, I think the early 70's, and as it is a standard it cannot be changed, as new CD's would not be playable on older CD players.

 

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