how does sound get recorded digitally and played back perfectly?
In: Technology
It isn’t actually “recorded digitally”, it starts out as analog. The sound goes into a microphone (or guitar pickup or whatever) and creates a voltage waveform. That is sent to a special circuit/chip called an “Analog to Digital Converter” (ADC).
The ADC measures (“samples”) the incoming waveform very rapidly over and over, and converts the voltage at each sample point into a number. Each number is output as a binary digital value. Those binary numbers are output creating a stream of numbers that represents the original sound’s waveform.
That digital value series is stored and/or sent to another device, which reverses the process. It has a circuit/chip called a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) which takes the number and outputs a corresponding voltage. It does this over and over, very fast. That voltage is sent to an amplifier and speakers to re-create the sound.
Note that it isn’t a “perfect” process. There’s a limit to how precise the numbers are to represent the waveform samples (usually 16 or 24 bits). And since the original conversion to digital only took rapid samples at some rate, very high frequencies aren’t going to be perfectly captured. But this is usually done at a rate so fast that the human ear has a very difficult time telling the difference.
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