Question re copying cassette tapes

[Aidan Wilson]

While I disagree about the benefits or otherwise of higher resolutions and 
sample rates in digitisation, the point is, that an audio CD must be 
stereo, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit.

Anything else will not play on any regular CD player (that is, which isn't 
a computer that can interpret the wav header). The reason is that audio 
CD wav files don't contain headers; they're raw PCM data - 1s and 0s. CD 
players are designed to interpret those 1s and 0s as stereo, 16 bit 44.1 
kHz. Altering the properties, if it plays at all, will have effects on the 
audio such as playing too fast/slow (if the sample rate is incorrect) or 
just outputting digital noise.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at sydney.edu.au

On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, William J Poser wrote:

> I'm not so sure about the recommendation of stereo digitisation. If
> the originals are not stereo recordings, there's no point in creating a
> stereo digital recording, and indeed, even if there are two channels
> on the original tapes, if they do not reflect inputs from two different
> microphones, you don't have a true stereo recording and there isn't much
> point in preserving two channels.
>
> Also, 44.1 K samples/second is overkill for most linguistic material. If
> it contains music, such a rate may be desirable, but for most speech,
> 22.05 K samples per second includes all of the information likely
> to be of linguistic significance.
>
> 16 bit resolution is highly desirable, but there's nothing sacred about
> 44.1K samples/per second sampling rate and stereo. These are merely
> residues of decisions made by the music industry and have nothing to
> do with the quality of linguistic recordings.
>
> Bill
>
>