xiph has produced a couple of great videos that explain how digital audio work.
Episode 1 : A Digital Media Primer for Geeks : http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
Episode 2, Digital show and tell : http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
Great stuff particularly in the 2nd video showing what digital noise (quantisation errors) actually sounds like and why sampling a sine wave at only a couple of points can produce reproduce a perfect sine wave (i.e., "no stair steps").
Apologies if this has already been posted here.
Enjoy.
Episode 1 : A Digital Media Primer for Geeks : http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
Episode 2, Digital show and tell : http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
Great stuff particularly in the 2nd video showing what digital noise (quantisation errors) actually sounds like and why sampling a sine wave at only a couple of points can produce reproduce a perfect sine wave (i.e., "no stair steps").
Apologies if this has already been posted here.
Enjoy.