Digital audio

Digital audio is technology that can be used to record, store, generate, manipulate, and reproduce sound using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of sound production, sound recording (tape systems were replaced with digital recording systems), sound engineering and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.

A microphone converts sound (a singer's voice or the sound of an instrument playing) to an analog electrical signal, then an analog-to-digital converter (ADC)—typically using pulse-code modulation—converts the analog signal into a digital signal. This digital signal can then be recorded, edited and modified using digital audio tools. When the sound engineer wishes to listen to the recording on headphones or loudspeakers (or when a consumer wishes to listen to a digital sound file of a song), a digital-to-analog converter performs the reverse process, converting a digital signal back into an analog signal, which analog circuits amplify and send to a loudspeaker.