J. Anthony Allen explains how bitrate (bit depth) determines audio fidelity. Each additional bit adds more possible amplitude levels, so a recording can capture the waveform more precisely. Low-bit audio sounds coarse and retro, while 16-bit recordings capture sound accurately.
Okay, the second number that we have to deal with here is the bit rate. Now you can think of the bit rate as kind of the fidelity of the sample. Okay? So if we look at our samples here, imagine that there's a grid on top of these and we can only plot a sample on that grid. In fact, here's a grid. Okay? In this case, we are working in a four bit sample. Okay, this is only four bits because. Let me just hide this one for a second. From 0 to 1, there are only four steps, okay? 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5. Sorry, we're working in six bit. So there are six steps possible in between here. So if I want this sample to move to here, it can't be anywhere in between these two. It has to be on one of these lines. Okay? So that is actually going to impact the quality of our sample a whole lot. So let's say this is a low sound, so it's moving slower. So our sample rate gets it. Say here. Whoops. Here, Here, here, here. I'm just kind of plotting this out. Should go there. Okay, so what you see here, like you see these four in a row here, because my sample, what I actually want to record is in between the two lines. But I can only grab a line here because I only have five bits to work with. Now that's not normally how these things work. We normally work with a lot more bits than that. So I have six lines. But let's give ourselves more fidelity here. Okay, now I have a lot more places I can plot those lines and the more places I can plot them, the more accurate it is. Right. Duplicate it again just to make it more fidelity. Okay, Now I have this many bits, however many lines that is, and the more spots I can plot it on the grid, the more accurate of a sound it is. So more so than the sampling rate, the bit rate makes it sound more accurate. So we normally record things at 16 bit, but you can increase it and you can decrease it. And in fact, if you want to make it sound like that old school video game sound, the way you do it is you decrease the bit rate, you lower the bit rate and it's going to sound like an old school video game because those were recorded with sound or actually generated with sound at a much lower bit rate. So that's what the bit rate does. You can think of it as this kind of vertical or, sorry, horizontal grid that we can plot samples on. Cool. If you want something to sound low phi, low fidelity, don't decrease the sample rate, decrease the bit rate.
