As a rule, a signal should be sampled at least twice as fast as the highest frequency contained in the signal—this is known as
Nyquist’s Sampling Theorem. The lowest standard sampling rate used with today’s soundboards is 11kHz—this allows fair reproduction of normal speech and vocalization (up to about kHz. However, most low- end soundboards can digitize signals up to kHz. Unfortunately, the human range of hearing is about kHz. To capture sounds reasonably well throughout the entire range of hearing, you would need a sampling rate of 44kHz—often known as
CD-quality sampling because it is the same rate used to record audio on CDs. The disadvantage to high sampling rates is disk space (and sound file size. Each sample is apiece of data, so the more samples taken each second, the larger and faster a file grows. If 8
bits are used for each sample, 256 discrete levels can be supported. But the most popular configuration is bit conversion, which allows a sample to be represented by one of 65,536 levels. At that level of resolution, samples form a very close replica of the original signal. Many of today’s soundboards are bit.
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