Audio Basics
The fundamentals, explained properly. Not "compression makes things louder", but what a detector circuit actually measures, why LUFS replaced peak metering, how sample rate and bit depth really constrain a recording, and where the conventional wisdom passed around in forums turns out to be wrong.
49 articlesThe Iron Inside Your Signal Path: How Audio Transformers Color Sound
Transformers have no power supply and no active components, yet they change the ...
How a Shift Register Measures a Room: Maximum Length Sequences Explained
A binary sequence of 1s and -1s from a feedback shift register captures the comp...
AC Bias in Magnetic Recording: The Accidental Discovery That Unlocked Tape
Without AC bias, direct magnetic recording produces severe harmonic distortion a...
Acoustic Guitar Body Resonances: Plate Modes, Helmholtz Cavities, and the Physics of Tap Tuning
The body of an acoustic guitar is a system of coupled resonators tuned by the lu...
Three Laws of Physics in Your Headphones: Dynamic, Planar, and Electrostatic Drivers Explained
Every headphone preference debate comes down to three force equations. Understan...
Why a Bowed String Produces a Sawtooth Wave, Not a Sine
Most people picture a bowed string vibrating like a jump rope. The real motion i...
Transaural Audio: The Crosstalk Cancellation System That Makes Binaural Work Over Speakers
Binaural audio sounds immersive on headphones and completely flat on speakers. T...
Tape Print-Through: The Ghost Signal That Studios Deliberately Hid
Every reel of recorded tape silently bleeds signal onto adjacent layers during s...
Tape Wow, Flutter, and Scrape Flutter: Three Physical Mechanisms Behind the Analog Sound
Tape wow and flutter are usually described as pitch wobble from speed variations...
Cylindrical vs Conical Bore: Why Clarinets Miss Half Their Harmonics
A flute and a clarinet are the same length, yet the clarinet plays an octave low...
Plate Reverb Physics: Why a Steel Sheet Sounds Like Nothing in the Natural World
The EMT 140 is a 1 by 2 meter steel plate, 0.5 mm thick, suspended in a metal fr...
Guitar Pickups as Tuned Circuits: The Physics Behind Tonal Character
A guitar pickup is not just a microphone for metal strings. It is a tuned LC res...
Why Drums Don't Have a Pitch (And Why Timpani Almost Do)
Strings produce integer harmonics. Drums don't. The reason is the two-dimensiona...
The Pythagorean Comma: Why 12 Perfect Fifths Don't Fit in 7 Octaves
Every note in 12-tone equal temperament is mathematically wrong by a precise amo...
Spectral Leakage: Why Your FFT Analyzer Shows Frequencies That Aren't There
Feed a perfect sine wave into a spectrum analyzer and you may see energy at a do...
Shepard Tones: The Two-Dimensional Pitch Model Behind Film Music's Eternal Ascent
Pitch is not a single number. It has two independent dimensions, chroma and heig...
Linear Predictive Coding: How 10 Numbers Reconstruct a Human Voice
Every mobile phone call in the 2G era was reconstructed from roughly 10 coeffici...
Clock Jitter in Digital Audio: When Timing Errors Sound Like FM
Jitter in your sample clock doesn't just create random noise. It acts as phase m...
Equal Loudness Contours: Why Turning Down Your Monitors Changes Your Mix
Turn down your monitors by 20 dB and the bass seems to vanish. That is not your ...
Ambisonics: How Spherical Harmonics Capture the Complete Sound Field
Stereo captures two points in space. Ambisonics captures the complete sound fiel...
Dolby Noise Reduction: The Compander That Made Cassette Tape Viable
Cassette tape's noise floor sat roughly 50 dB below program level. Dolby's compa...
Acoustic Echo Cancellation: The 1960 Algorithm Running in Every Video Call
Every time someone sounds clear on a video call, a 66-year-old equation is doing...
Piano Inharmonicity: Why Tuners Deliberately Break Equal Temperament
Every concert grand you have ever heard is tuned out of equal temperament on pur...
Dither and Noise Shaping: Why Adding Noise Improves Your Masters
When you reduce a 24-bit mix to 16-bit, you introduce quantization distortion th...
Harmonic Exciters: Synthesizing Presence With Nonlinear Distortion
An exciter does not boost high frequencies. It synthesizes new ones using nonlin...
The Missing Fundamental: Why Your Brain Hears Bass That Isn't There
Small laptop speakers reproduce almost no bass. Yet you often hear bass from the...
How Beat Detection Actually Works: Onset Functions, Autocorrelation, and Dynamic Programming
Your DAW's beat detection has no idea where the kick drum is. It builds a map of...
Masking Thresholds and Pre-Echo: What MP3 and AAC Actually Do to Your Audio
Every MP3 encoder runs a psychoacoustic simulation before it compresses. Underst...
Cepstral Analysis - Formant Detection and Pitch Correction
How cepstral analysis separates pitch from formants using the quefrency domain, ...
How Channel Strip Modeling Works - From Circuit Analysis to Digital Emulation
Wave Digital Filters, component tolerance modeling, and Newton-Raphson iteration...
Inside Pitch Shifting Algorithms - Phase Vocoder vs PSOLA vs Real-Time Methods
Why does Auto-Tune sound different from Elastique? The math behind pitch shiftin...
Audio Over IP Networks: How AES67 and PTP Achieve Sub-Microsecond Synchronization
Professional audio networks now achieve sub-microsecond timing precision across ...
Does Recording at 96kHz Actually Sound Better?
Recording at 96kHz instead of 44.1 feels like a free quality upgrade. In the aud...
Why Vinyl Sounds Warmer: The Actual Science
Vinyl warmth is a stack of measurable physical effects (RIAA curve, bandwidth li...
Lookahead Limiting and Peak Anticipation - The Math Behind the Magic
Why the best mastering limiters predict the future, and how 4x oversampling reve...
Comb Filtering and the 3-to-1 Rule Explained
Why placing microphones 3 times farther apart prevents that hollow, metallic sou...
Magnetic Tape Modeling - From Jiles-Atherton to Neural Networks
How modern DSP algorithms capture the complex physics of magnetic tape saturatio...
Convolution Reverb Algorithms - The Math Behind the Magic
How convolution reverb transforms O(n²) brute force into O(n log n) elegance usi...
Spectral Gating - The Noise Reduction Algorithm Behind Modern Audio Restoration
How spectral gating algorithms separate signal from noise by analyzing frequency...
Tartini's Third Tone: Combination Tones, Cochlear Distortion, and the IMD You Cannot Escape
When two tones play simultaneously through any nonlinear system, new frequencies...
The Phantom Peak: Why Samples Below 0 dBFS Still Cause Distortion
Your samples never exceed 0 dBFS, your meters read clean, and yet the audio dist...
Linear Phase EQ: What It Costs and When to Pay It
Linear-phase EQ preserves phase coherence at the cost of pre-transient ringing, ...
Why Pitch Detection Is Hard, and How YIN Solved It
Most pitch detectors fail in the same way: they get confused by harmonics and re...
Polyphase Sample Rate Conversion: The Algorithm Behind Every Rate Change in Your DAW
Every time you load a 44.1 kHz sample into a 48 kHz session, or enable oversampl...
Inside Four Classic Compression Circuits: VCA, FET, Optical, and Vari-mu
Every compressor reduces gain when a signal crosses a threshold. But whether tha...
Aliasing in Nonlinear Audio: What Oversampling Actually Fixes
When a saturation or distortion plugin sounds unexpectedly harsh, aliasing is of...
How 16-Bit Audio Achieves 120 dB Performance Through Noise Shaping
Raw 16-bit audio delivers 96 dB of dynamic range. Noise shaping pushes that to 1...
Why UI/UX Matters in Audio Software
Great audio processing means nothing if users can't find the controls. Here's wh...
Understanding Audio Buffer Sizes
The eternal trade-off between latency and stability. How to choose the right buf...