Digital audio sample
Encyclopedia
Digital audio samples are discrete
Discrete signal
A discrete signal or discrete-time signal is a time series consisting of a sequence of qualities...

 values (numbers) which represent the amplitude
Amplitude
Amplitude is the magnitude of change in the oscillating variable with each oscillation within an oscillating system. For example, sound waves in air are oscillations in atmospheric pressure and their amplitudes are proportional to the change in pressure during one oscillation...

 of an audio signal taken at different points in time.

A continuous signal
Continuous signal
A continuous signal or a continuous-time signal is a varying quantity whose domain, which is often time, is a continuum . That is, the function's domain is an uncountable set. The function itself need not be continuous...

 can be sampled
Sampling (signal processing)
In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous signal to a discrete signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of samples ....

 at some sampling rate
Sampling rate
The sampling rate, sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per unit of time taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, the unit for sampling rate is hertz , sometimes noted as Sa/s...

 and thus be converted into a digital representation using samples. A series of digital audio samples can be converted back (reconstructed) into an analog audio signal, which may or may not be identical to the original signal. The study and theory behind sampling and reconstruction is based on the sampling theory
Sampling theory
sampling theory may mean:* Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, digital signal processing * Statistical sampling* Fourier sampling...

.
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