Tuesday, March 08, 2022

Ruminating on Audio Sample Rate and Bit Depth

 Whenever we are dealing with AI-driven speech recognition, it is important to understand the fundamental concepts of sample rate and bit dept. The following article gives a good overview with simple illustrations. 

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/digital-audio-basics-sample-rate-and-bit-depth.html

To convert a sound wave into data, we have to measure the amplitude of the wave at different points of time. The number of samples per second is called as the sample rate. So a sample rate of 16kHz means 16,000 samples were taken in one second. 

The bit depth determines the number of possible amplitude values we can record for each sample - e.g. 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit. With a higher audio bit depth, more amplitude values are available for us to record. The following diagram form the above article will help illustrating this concept. 


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