I thought some of you guys would like to see this video from Xiph.com on Digital audio signals.
Check it out.
Check it out.
The inacuracies are smoothed out with the capacitance of the phono lead and amplifier in most cases using 128bit.Very good.
I would take slight issue with his claim that the stair steps are not really there. They are there in the raw output from most DAC chips, but the reconstruction filter gets rid of them. That is what it is there for. Another way to understand this is that the stair steps are the time view of what are images in the frequency view. People who are worried by digital stair steps should never use a simple NOS DAC, as that has no reconstruction filter so the steps are sent straight to your amplifier and tweeters.
128bit?? The steps are not inaccuracies, they are images. They are not the result of quantisation, but sampling. 1024-bit digital (if it were possible) would still have the same steps. To get smaller steps you need faster sampling. Given that the source is probably 44.1kHz or 48kHz, the only way to reduce the steps is to use a reconstruction filter (either digital or analogue).Harleyjon said:The inacuracies are smoothed out with the capacitance of the phono lead and amplifier in most cases using 128bit.
I'm not sure I know what you mean. Do you mean smaller steps in time? Smaller steps in amplitude can be had with higher bit depth, no?To get smaller steps you need faster sampling.