[Flac] Standard encoding rates?

Ralph Giles giles at xiph.org
Tue Apr 5 08:26:45 PDT 2005


On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 02:26:03AM -0500, Hal Vaughan wrote:

> Is there a list somewhere of "standard" encoding rates?  I know, for example, 
> CDs are encoded at 44100, as is a lot of digital sound, but I've seen 
> programs that specify different levels of quality (like radio, phone, tape, 
> CD) and I'd like to know if there are some encoding rates that are accepted 
> as standardized for recording at different levels of quality.

Well, where analog formats are concerned these are estimates, and in 
there is no *standard*. "CD quality" is 44100 Hz stereo with 16 bits per 
channel. FM radio is limited to 17 kHz iirc, so in theory you could 
sample at 32 kHz, but in practice people usually use 44.1 or 48 kHz and 
just lowpass filter. AM radio is lower quality (mono) but I don't know 
what the digital equivalent would be. Telephone is nominally 8 kHz mono
(i.e. really bad) though I think the use of digital voice codecs in the 
last 20 years may have improved on this a bit.

Maybe someone else can comment on tape fidelity. I think the issue there 
has more to do with recording artefacts than bandwidth.

FWIW,
 -r


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