recently, I was messing around in the control panel to try to check my speakers. I managed to find the audio sample rate, which shows options from 44100 hz to 192000hz. there were also audio bit depth, but I don’t know either of those. what is audio sample rate? and maybe also what is audio bit depth?
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So, an analog sound wave is [continuous, like this](https://media.monolithicpower.com/wysiwyg/1_33.png). Analog waves, including sound waves, are converted to digital in two steps:
1) “sample” the wave every X milliseconds or microseconds. Let’s say X=1ms, it means: take the value of the analog wave at t=0, t=1 ms, t=2ms, t=3ms and so on. This is the concept of sampling frequency, that is measured in Hz. 44100 Hz it means you take 44100 values per second, i.e. every 22-23 microseconds.
2) represent this value (which could be something like 0.3423483234892) in a digital way, using N bits -> this number of bits is the audio bit depth.
The sampling frequency relates to which frequencies are faithfully represented by the digital version. The higher the sampling frequency, the wider is the range of sound frequencies that are correctly translated into digital.
The bit depth relates to how accurate the amplitude (“volume”, more or less) is.
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