Sound quality

Sound quality is typically an assessment of the accuracy, fidelity, or intelligibility of audio output from an electronic device.

When applied to processing steps such as mastering recordings, absolute accuracy may be secondary to artistic or aesthetic concerns.

In PCM, each audio sample describes the sound pressure at an instant in time with a limited precision.

The limited accuracy results in quantization error, a form of noise that is added to the recording.

To reduce quantization error, more precision can be used in each measurement at the expense of larger samples (see audio bit depth).

After the removal of these details, lossy compression can be applied to the remainder to greatly reduce the file size.