Welcome to the Digital Audio Wiki
A public resource for information on digital audio - including formats, codecs, quality and theory.
Getting Started
For general information on how sound works, is recorded, transmitted and played back, as well as how we perceive sound, take a look at these pages:
For more specific information on the particular ways digitial audio is created and stored, see Popular Digital Audio Formats.
The Mission
The stated objective of this Wiki is to communicate concepts from the ground up, in a way which allows any visitor to understand and apply their comprehension. Digitial audio is a complex topic, but one which affects almost all of us in our daily lives. To this end it is hoped that by concentrating the surrounding topics into one place we can condense the information down into a more easily accessible format for members of the public as well as engineers and audiophiles.
Project Background
This wiki is established by a BSc student of Audio & Recording Technology as part of a final year project. The project's research question is "does the current trend in digital audio compression formats point towards a lossless standard in the near future?" A blog of the project's progress and findings is kept here, and is also intended to be a public resource: http://audio-data-quality.blogspot.co.uk/
Alongside this Wiki, a series of listening tests have been performed as a small study into general perception of audio quality in various different storage formats. The results of that study can be found here: C. Brown Listening Tests, 2014.
The wiki author takes no credit for the creation of images and videos used throughout the wiki. Images are sourced variously from other information sites on the internet, and videos are all sourced from YouTube, attributed to their creators via original source URL and description using the inspection option.
'N. B.:' If you are using a smaller monitor, some images may overlap text in places. If this is the case, please try zooming out in your browser by holding the Ctrl key and pressing - (minus) or scrolling down with your mouse wheel. You can reverse this by pressing Ctrl +.
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