Glossary of Digital Audio Terms, Bass, Bitrate

RioVolt SP65

Glossary of Digital Audio Terms

Contents

Index 12

Glossary of Digital Audio Terms

Bass

Bass is the low-range area of the sound spectrum where low musical notes and sounds are located. Increasing the bass value will make the low vocals and drums more prominent in your music. You can select the amount of bass in your music by selecting various equalizer options.

Bitrate

Bitrate denotes the number of bits per second used by a digital music file. The size and quality of a compressed digital audio file is determined by the bitrate used when encoding the file. The higher the bitrate used, the higher the sound quality, and the larger the file size. For example, with MP3, a bitrate of 128kbps (128,000 bits per second) is generally thought of as “CD quality”, and takes up about 1 megabyte (MB) per minute of music. At a 64kbps bitrate, the sound quality is similar to that of an FM radio signal, but you can get approximately two minutes of music in that same 1MB of storage space. CD audio has a bitrate of 1.4Mbits per second (1,400,000 bits/second).

Codec

Depending on the context and kind of technology involved, codec can be defined as a compressed digital audio file format (like MP3, Red Book, etc.), a “coding/decoding” chip used to translate between digital and analog transmissions (used in modems), or a compression/decompression algorithm. Codecs compress audio data into a file, often for efficient transmission over a network, and then decode it for playback. While all the codecs perform similar compression of digital audio, there are differences in the technology.

The RioVolt SP65 supports the following digital audio codecs:

•MP3

•CD Audio (Red Book)