Last year I wrote about why booking too far in advance can be dangerous for your business, and this concept of margin so eloquently captures what I had recognized had been my problem: I was so booked up with clientsDigital audio technologies in the 2010s are used in the recording, manipulation, mass-production, and distribution of sound, including recordings of songs, instrumental pieces, podcasts, sound effects, and other sounds. Modern online music distribution depends on digital recording and data compression. The availability of music as data files, rather than as physical objects, has significantly reduced the costs of distribution.[1] Before digital audio, the music industry distributed and sold music by selling physical copies in the form of records and cassette tapes. With digital audio and online distribution systems such as iTunes, companies sell digital sound files to consumers, which the consumer receives over the Internet. This digital audio/Internet distribution model is much less expensive than producing physical copies of recordings, packaging them and shipping them to stores.
An analog audio system captures sounds, and converts their physical waveforms into electrical representations of those waveforms by use of a transducer, such as a microphone. The sounds are then stored, as on tape, or transmitted. The process is reversed for playback: the audio signal is amplified and then converted back into physical waveforms via a loudspeaker. Analog audio retains its fundamental wave-like characteristics throughout its storage, transformation, duplication, and amplification.
Analog audio signals are susceptible to noise and distortion, due to the innate characteristics of electronic circuits and associated devices. Disturbances in a digital system do not result in error unless the disturbance is so large as to result in a symbol being misinterpreted as another symbol or disturb the sequence of symbols. It is therefore generally possible to have an entirely error-free digital audio system in which no noise or distortion is introduced between conversion to digital format, and conversion back to analog.
A digital audio signal may be encoded for correction of any errors that might occur in the storage or transmission of the signal, but this is not strictly part of the digital audio process. This technique, known as “channel coding”, is essential for broadcast or recorded digital systems to maintain bit accuracy. The discrete time and level of the binary signal allow a decoder to recreate the analog signal upon replay. Eight to Fourteen Bit Modulation is a channel code used in the audio Compact Disc (CD).
