Recording - March 2016 - 60

By Paul J. Stamler

Part 15: Digital Recording II-Converters
In our last installment, I talked about the advantages digital
recording offers. As you well know, digital lets you do a whole
lot more than just store the recording or copy it without added
noise or distortion, but we're not quite ready to go there yet.
Instead, I want to reiterate that, in general, the quality of a
digital recording is determined by how accurately the voltages
in the analog signal are converted into numbers at the beginning of the process, and how accurately the numbers get turned
back into analog voltages at the end. Those jobs are done by
analog-to-digital (A/D) converters and digital-to-analog (D/A)
converters respectively, and this article will be about them.
If you do all your signal processing (including mixing) in the digital realm, you probably won't be using D/A converters for anything but monitoring, because the final conversion will take place in

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RECORDING March 2016

the listener's equipment (boom box, fancy hi-fi, car stereo or portable
player), and you have no control over that. So monitoring is the
main purpose of your D/A converters, and while that's critically
important (see Articles 2 and 3 in this series), your D/A probably
won't directly affect the quality of the digital signal delivered to the
final listener. So this article will mostly be about A/D conversion.
We start here
Before I begin, I should mention that modern A/D converters
do their job in a somewhat roundabout manner; see the sidebar, "What An A/D Converter REALLY Does". It's not vital to
know that, since converters really do turn analog signals into
numbers after filtering out-of-bounds frequencies to prevent
aliasing... but it's still nice to get the facts straight.



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2016

Contents
Recording - March 2016 - Cover1
Recording - March 2016 - Cover2
Recording - March 2016 - 1
Recording - March 2016 - 2
Recording - March 2016 - 3
Recording - March 2016 - 4
Recording - March 2016 - 5
Recording - March 2016 - Contents
Recording - March 2016 - 7
Recording - March 2016 - 8
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Recording - March 2016 - Cover3
Recording - March 2016 - Cover4
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