Audio Sampling - bit depth (e.g. 16bit)

Hi,

Take a look at the following site. It has a tutorial on how the sound is reproduced given the sampling rate and bit depth.

There's heaps of information on this site for you in other areas too.

http://www.musiq.com/recording/digaudio/(remove spaces from the above URL)

Cheers,
Tim.

Most of the music and "natural" sounds that you hear are made up of sine waves.
(Think of rolling hills)
Digitized sound is a series of pulses that are smoothed (filtered) into near sinusoidual waveforms.
(Think of stair steps)

If you dig through this site;
http://www.chipcenter.com/analog/techarch.htm
You will find a lot of technical details on all aspects of digitized signals.

Chas

The higher the bit depth, the smoother the steps, and the more "natural" the playback sounds.

As an added benefit to both higher sampling frequencies, and higher bit depth, the less work that the filtering circuit needs to do.
With less work comes less phase shifts and other errors that will be added to the sound by the filter circuits.