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All of the above mentioned are standards for measuring and calibrating loudness.  Loudness in an audio signal is different than volume – volume may be the actual scale of signal power, but loudness is how loud an audio signal is perceived, which is a combination of volume, dynamic range, and such measurements over time.  Because […]

Digital audio is by nature, a quantized format.  When a converter reconstructs old-fashioned sound from a digital signal, it basically is doing a lot of math to figure out what shape of a wave is defined by these digital numbers.  Sometimes, even if the numbers themselves don’t exceed a certain maximum, the mathematical curve the […]

When you convert from a high bit depth, like 24 bit, to a lower one, like CD-standard 16, there’s going to be a loss of quality and an addition of distortion.  It’s not a lot, but it can be some.  What dithering does is it adds a special noise of its own, usually at frequencies […]