Mondo Knows Facts
CD audio samples 44,100 times a second
The rate came from fitting film and television equipment rather than hearing The sampling theorem requires at least twice the highest frequency you want to store, so 44.1 kilohertz covers the top of human hearing. The exact number was a practical compromise for the digital recorders and video gear already in use. Sixteen bit samples give about 96 decibels of range. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
The Fairlight CMI was the first digital samplerThe Australian workstation arrived in 1979 and cost as much as a houseEach extra bit adds about six decibels of rangeSixteen bit gives roughly 96 decibels between the quietest and loudest soundSampling had to be licensed after a 1991 rulingA court held that taking a recorded phrase without permission infringed the recordingThe E-mu Emulator brought sampling into reachThe 1981 machine stored its sampled sounds on ordinary floppy disksThe Akai MPC60 combined pads, sampler and sequencerRoger Linn designed the 1988 machine around his velocity-sensitive padsThe Amen break became the most sampled loopA six-second drum solo recorded in 1969 underpins thousands of tracks
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Tags: digital, sampling, standards
CD audio samples 44,100 times a second: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The rate came from fitting film and television equipment rather than hearing. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.