Misr University for Science and Technology

Information Technology College

Sheet Two

Question One. Digital audio is better than analogue audio, why?

- Digital recording doesn’t degrade with recording which each copy is an exact representation of the
original.
- Digital audio bit streams retrieved from a CD or a hard disk will sound the same every time there
played back because the bit streams are exact copies this is not the case with analogue recordings.
- Digital audio is easy to process because the signal processing can be performed by mathematical
algorithms.

Question Two. What are the disadvantages of Digital audio?

- It requires two conversion stages: one to convert the analogue signals into digital format and a second
to convert the digital signals to analogue.
- These conversions processes can introduce their own types of distortion and defects.
- The digital data requires a far higher density storage than its analogue equivalent.

Question Three. What is the basic principle behind the analogue to digital conversions?
- The analogue signal is sampled at a regular interval and each sample is divided or quantized
by a given value to determine the number of given values that approximate to the analogue
value. (look at the figure at page 9 in the book)

Question Four. What is the quantization error?

- Quantization error is resulting from converting an analogue signal into a digital signal due to
the fact that a digital signalman only has discrete values while an analogue signal may take on
any value within dynamic range of the signal.
- It depends on the number of bits used to represent the analogue value.

Question Five. What is meant by sample rate?

- The sample rate is the number of samples that are taken in a time period usually one second,
and usually measured in hertz (like frequencies are measured).

Question Six. The sampling rate determines several aspects of the conversion process, what are
these aspects?
- It determines the speed of the conversion device itself.
- It determines the maximum frequency that can be converted.
- Sampling must be performed on a regular basis with exactly the same time period between
samples and this is important to remove conversion errors due to irregular sampling.

Question Seven. Give examples of the irregular sampling errors?

- if the sample is taken early, the value converted will be less than it should be.
- if the sample is taken late, the value will be higher than expected.
- if there is a random timing error {which called jitter} then the resulting curve is badly
distorted.

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Misr University for Science and Technology
Information Technology College