discrétisation

11:29 Sep 17, 2020 

You are right - you could also put digitised sound on magnetic tape, although magnetic tapes are nowadays an endangered species, fast on their way to becoming an extinct species - as are floppy disks, compact discs etc.

I had in mind ONLY the initial use for magnetic tapes - for analogue recording of sounds.

@ writeaway
the fact that you can easily find a translation in a specialised glossary doesn't make a term "non-pro", especially if ONLY people familiar with the subject know what it means exactly.

When you don't know the meaning of a term, you could easily construct a sentence that is grammatically perfectly correct, using the right term found in a good specialised glossary, but that makes no real-life sense whatsoever. Have seen few translations like that.

11:03 Sep 6, 2020 

but finding it is simple. That can trigger a non-pro vote decision.

07:34 Sep 6, 2020 

"digital ... better than any tape" is misleading: digital signals can of course be recorded on tape.
The human ear doesn't hear any "jumps" because there are no jumps to be heard: the output device (CD player or media file player) processes the digital signal to retrieve the complete continuous audio signal.

20:39 Sep 5, 2020 

continuous variable into a "discreet" one.

Nothing to do with discretion, it's a variable that is defined only at certain points in times.

"discretisation" is like replacing a nice continuous line with a series of dots.

One example: real life sound is continuous - the variations in frequency and amplitude can be represented by a continuous line - registering sounds by old "analogue" methods like gramophone disc or tape recorders was a method of "continuous" recording.

if you "discretise" the sound you take a measurement only at fixed time intervals - if you want to record sound to a computer file you have no choice but to do that - computers don't do "analogue".

The reason why a good digital recording can sound far better that any tape is that the "sampling" is done so often that human ear can't perceive the "jumps" in sound level from one sample to the next, and each measurement is taken with a limited number of possible values, but the difference between two neighbouring values is too small for the human ear to hear any "jumps".

Standard CD format = 44.1k sampling rate (every 0.000023 sec) combined with a 16 bit rate (2exp16=65536 possible values for each sample).