Digital recording

In a properly matched analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analog converter (DAC) pair, the analog signal is accurately reconstructed, within the constraints of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, which dictates the sampling rate and quantization error dependent on the audio or video bit depth.

Because the signal is stored digitally, assuming proper error detection and correction, the recording is not degraded by copying, storage or interference.

The number of bits used to represent an audio signal directly affects the resulting noise or distortion in a recording.

In addition, it is possible to release a high-resolution recording as either an uncompressed WAV or lossless compressed FLAC file[55] (usually at 24 bits) without down-converting it.

There remains controversy about whether higher sampling rates provide any verifiable benefit to the consumer product.