ZWS

Due to the increasingly mature environment of smart phones and Internet services, most people's music listening devices have been transferred to smart phones, so have you ever thought about how the "sound quality" that eventually reaches your ears is determined? KK BOX, Spotify, AppleMusic... Which music service has better sound quality? Do you need to buy advanced headphones? The following will tell you in an easy-to-understand way, "sound quality" is made up of what factors!

The above four parts are generally needed to convey the digital electronic sound to your ears. Of course, some elements can be subdivided and added between these four parts, but in the simplest sense, there must be at least these four. Between these four parts, you can imagine the concept of "multiplication", which means that as long as one part is "0", the final result will be "0". Good signal, good source, good transmission, but with poor speakers, the final sound quality will be poor, these are the basic concepts of sound quality.

First of all, if you usually only use your mobile phone to listen to music, and the music file is .mp3 or online streaming files, it is not recommended to buy good headphones! Because for advanced headphones, the above signals and sources may not only fail to give full play to their real strength, but also sound worse than ordinary headphones!

Sampling rate imagine drawing a curve on paper, then placing several dots on the curve, and then connecting these dots in a straight line. You will find that if there are more dots, the segments of these lines will be closer and closer to the curve drawn in the first place. The original curve represents the "original sound", that is, the actual sound made by the instrument or singer at the time of recording, while these dots represent the frequency of sampling, dividing a sound into several dots and digitizing it. the more dots, the more accurate it is to simulate the "original sound".

Cymbal.
Bit depth is similar to sampling rate, sampling rate is responsible for "horizontal", bit depth is responsible for "vertical". The common ones are 16bit and 24 bit. From the picture above, we can see that the range of 24 bit is wider, which means that the movement of music will be more lively and vivid, and the sense of space will be better, so it won't sound "boring"!

The sound channel is much simpler than the above two, that is, mono, two-channel, stereo and surround sound. The mono has become extinct, so we won't talk much about it. At present, the most common is stereo (Stereo), which uses two channels to play different sounds to simulate the relative stereo auditory perception. On the other hand, if both channels play the same sound, it is not stereo!

Surround sound is a more evolved version based on the concept of stereo. If you can't eat enough for one bento, why not eat two? Since adding an extra loudspeaker (channel) can make the sound more three-dimensional, why not add more speakers? As a result, the surround sound type of 5.1 channel or 7.1 channel is produced. Through the allocation of more speakers and positions, the listeners will have a more experiential experience. At present, most cinemas have 5.1 channels, using the front three loudspeakers and one speaker each. There are even 9.1 and 11.1 channels with loudspeakers in the ceiling and enhanced vertical sound field. It can only be said that there is no limit to the pursuit of sound quality.

Format is the familiar .mp3 or .wma and other sub-file types, each format of coding and characteristics are not quite the same, can be divided into lossy compression, lossless compression and no compression three types. The classic .mp3 format belongs to lossy compression, which features that you can delete the audio that is less important to the human ear and compress the audio file to only the original size of 1x10 or so, but the performance after replay will not deteriorate too much (similar to the concept of picture file. Jpeg).

Transmission refers to the way in which the signal is parsed by the source and transmitted to the loudspeaker (loudspeaker or headset). It is divided into wired and wireless types. The wired transmission mode can transmit more and more stable information, which is the first choice for the pursuit of high sound quality. According to the transmission lines composed of different metals, they also have different characteristics and tonality; fastidious enthusiasts even match different tonal wires according to the type of music. The scene of Andy Lau and Tony Leung enjoying Cai Qin's "forgotten time" in Infernal Affairs fully shows this part of music appreciation.