Journal Article
Open Access
Modern Sampling: A Tutorial
Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · Volume 67 · Issue 5 · pp. 300–309 · May 2019
Abstract
High-resolution audio has started to use modern sampling principles to further enhance the quality of digital audio reproduction. This tutorial seeks to explain how these new methods are an improvement over traditional Shannon sampling. Although perfect in theory, a Shannon-sampled signal will always have some aliasing errors when reconstructed because the infinite-duration filters required cannot be realized in practice. The tutorial first reviews the relevant parts of traditional sampling, and then goes on to introduce the modern method based on splines, which are one of many possible approaches. As an alternative, splines offers the possibility of a lower level of error for a given filter length as well as reconstruction filters that are very compact in time. The challenge for the future will be to develop circuits that allow these benefits to be achieved in practice.
