For starters, they might not support all file data rates. While it’s true that just about every piece of digital kit features a DAC, it’s just as true that not all DACs are created equal. The Award-winning Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt USB DAC (Image credit: Audioquest) Record a high-resolution track, on the other hand, and you’ll take a step up to 24 bits, with a sample taken as often as 192,000 times per second.ĭigital audio data can be stored in a variety of sample rates, bit depths, encoding and compression formats – but no matter how it’s done, it is the DAC’s job to make sense of it all, translating it as accurately as possible from its binary format to return it as close to the original analogue recording as it can. Each of these samples is measured to an accuracy of 16 bits, storing the results in a 16-digit binary format. When recording a standard CD, say, a sample is taken 44,100 times per second. The timing of the measurement intervals is called the sampling rate. The value of the amplitude is represented as a binary number (comprised of 1s and 0s) and the length of this number is often referred to as bit depth. Digital music files are usually found in the form of Pulse Code Modulation (PCM), and are created by measuring the amplitude of the analogue music signal at regular intervals. The five-star Cambridge Audio DacMagic 200M desktop DAC (Image credit: Cambridge Audio)ĭigital audio takes a very different approach to that of analogue.
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