Sound
Sound is an important part of a computer gaming experience. It is also a large part in a computer
theater system. And it has a lot of smaller uses, like playing CD's or encoded music on a computer.
The average human ear can hear sounds between 16Hz and 25KHz, and can detect sound direction
and orientation. This makes a good speaker setup imperative for high end audiophiles and
audio enthusiasts.
Stereo and Mono
There is a distinct sound between monophonic (mono) sound and stereophonic
(stereo) sound. The difference between one and two channels of sound is as clear and day and
night. But stereo is only good for knowing if sounds are coming from the right, or from the left. It is
hard to tell if sounds are coming from in front or behind. Stereo encoding also has a limited sweet
spot where sounds are correct in stereo. Different audio samples might have different sweet
spot locations, making it extremely hard to be perfectly lined up.
3D Sound
For theater like sound while watching movies on DVD, or when playing very engaging games a
good sound setup is very important to "complete" the experience.
Analog to Digital Conversions
Analog audio is converted to digital audio by sampling. The number of samples taken each
second is known as the sampling rate. The quality of the samples are known as the bit
rate. The bit rate represents the number of differences in the audio that the conversion will be able
to detect. A bit rate of 8-bits will allow for 256 different tones to be detected. 16-bit bit rate will allow
for 65536 different tones, allowing for a much truer sound. All music on audio CD's is in 44.1KHz at
16-bit. Radio music is comparable to 22KHz at 8-bit.
Analog audio is converted to digital audio by a Analog-to-Digital Converter, known as a ADC,
which is part of most sound cards. When audio is in uncompressed digital form, it is know as
Digital Pulse Code. Digital audio is converted to analog by a Digital-to-Analog
Converter, which is known as a DAC. A DAC is located in every sound card, and in some newer
speakers. Some of the newer speakers allow digital audio to bypass the sound card to be output
through a S/PDIF or USB port directly to the speakers where it will be converted ny a
DAC. The advantage of this is that the digital signal suffers less distortion than the audio signal normally
would while being output to the speakers.
Analog To Digital | 3D Sound Formats | 3D Sound APIs | Speaker Set-Ups
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