The Art of Digital Audio

If you are interested in the secrets of digital audio, then this book is a must read. As a music producer and computer musician, I often find myself wondering about what lies beneath the surface of my digital hard- and software, partucularly since there seems to be an abundance of misinformation, heresay, and plain old rubbish floating around in the community. Understanding the principles of how audio gets digitized, and moreso what happens after this process can greatly improve the sonic results of ones work. However this topic is very complex and hard to grasp, so plowing through technical manuals and college-grade material puts a serious strain on the creative process. Correction - it kills creativity altogether. Rising to the occasion, John Watkinson has succeded in bringing these difficult to understand matters down to a graspable level, even though it is an impressively comprehensive piece of work. The book truly helps put an end to myths and misunderstandings, as it can be equally read as an encyclopedia for looking up specific topics, or back to back. At times it can even seem too thorough (most of us don't really need to know exactly how data is handled), but this depends on what you want to learn. You can rest assured it's all in there, whether you're looking to learn how to bulid digital circuits from scratch, or need to understand what dithering and A/D/A conversion is all about. In short - If you are serious about digital audio as an electronic musician in any form or as an audiophile in general, this book will not dissapoint.

The Art of Digital Audio is well written and informative technical overview of digital audio, except that being a mid 1990s book, it almost completely omits detailed coverage of some topics (like MPEG audio compression) that would nowadays have to be considered critical. It is nonetheless an essential component of the well informed digital audio engineer's library. There is a *lot* of stuff in this compendium that you would otherwise have to find scattered over a dozen other books. One hopes a revision for the twenty-first century is in the works.

The most comprehensive book to date on Digital Audio.