Digital signal processing: technology and marketing for audio systems

Compact disc (CD) and digital audio tape (DAT) formats are now widely accepted as being a very reliable and high quality means of reproducing music. With these new systems has come considerable new terminology and technology. A visit to any high street store will confirm that the marketing and advertising strategies for these systems discusses the attributes of digital filters, 4X´s oversampling, analogue to digital conversion, bit-stream conversion, anti-aliasing filters and so on. Graphics equalisers can be purchased that allow very precise digital filter control over the frequency range 100 Hz to 20 KHz. Top of the range amplifiers include displays that perform real time spectrum analysis. The author looks at the way in which digital signal processing is being brought to the general public´s attention by digital audio systems and discusses the state of the art capabilities of DSP in audio systems