I’ve always wondered how audio can be recorded to electricity then played back as perfect audio.
In: Technology
A microphone essentially measures very small air pressure differences (which is what sound is – rapid changes in air pressure). So the digital part comes in when the circuitry assigns a number to the pressure level say from 0 to 100 (in reality it is larger than this) and takes the pressure reading many times a second. This gives a long series of numbers which represent the pressure level at different times. This is digital information (just numbers) and can be stored as a file on a hard disk or compact disk or sent to the internet.
To play back the sound, it does this in reverse. The electronics reads the numbers and outputs an appropriate signal to the speaker and does this using the same time interval used during recording. The speaker converts the signal to movement of the driver which causes a pressure variation (ie sound)
The computer or electronics doesn’t “understand” sound. It simply converts a continuous signal (from the microphone) to a series of numbers and the numbers back to a signal for playing back.
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