95
votes
Accepted
If humans can only hear up to 20 kHz frequency sound, why is music audio sampled at 44.1 kHz?
The sampling rate of a real signal needs to be greater than twice the signal bandwidth. Audio practically starts at 0 Hz, so the highest frequency present in audio recorded at 44.1 kHz is 22.05 kHz (...
73
votes
If humans can only hear up to 20 kHz frequency sound, why is music audio sampled at 44.1 kHz?
44,100 was chosen by Sony because it is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers. This makes it divisible by many other whole numbers, which is a useful property in digital sampling.
...
29
votes
Accepted
What sampling frequency should I use if Nyquist is not available?
HINT
When you sample at below the Nyquist rate, aliasing happens. That means frequencies higher than half the sampling rate get folded back down to below half the sampling rate.
Have a read about ...
28
votes
Accepted
Does the Nyquist frequency of the cochlear nerve impose the fundamental limit on human hearing?
Does the Nyquist frequency of the Cochlear nerve impose the fundamental limit on human hearing?
No.
A quick run-through the human auditory system:
The outer ear (pinnae, ear canal), spatially "...
21
votes
A question about sampling rate of cosine signal
It is actually not distorted, it is sampled at high enough rate. What fools you is the straight lines drawn between sample points, it gives you a false impression of the waveform. It shows you a ...
21
votes
What sampling frequency should I use if Nyquist is not available?
As correctly stated in Peter K.'s answer, this question is about aliasing. Since you can't sample at a rate that is sufficiently high to avoid aliasing - i.e., $f_s>50\textrm{ kHz}$ - you have to ...
16
votes
Difference between Nyquist rate and Nyquist frequency?
Harry Nyquist invented/discovered/proved a lot of things; it can be hard to keep track of them all. The three most important for signal processing and communications are probably these:
If you sample ...
15
votes
Accepted
Does the Shannon theorem not apply when the amplitude of a wave is changed faster than half the time period of the wave?
Once you start changing the amplitude you are increasing the bandwidth of the signal. That's called "amplitude modulation" and the highest frequency is now the sum of the original frequency ...
13
votes
If humans can only hear up to 20 kHz frequency sound, why is music audio sampled at 44.1 kHz?
The Nyquist rate is above twice the bandlimit of a baseband signal that you want to capture without ambiguity (e.g. aliasing).
Sample at a lower rate than twice 20kHz, and you won't be able to tell ...
10
votes
If humans can only hear up to 20 kHz frequency sound, why is music audio sampled at 44.1 kHz?
Basically, twice the bandwidth is a common requirement for signal sampling, thus $2\times 20 = 40$ kHz is a minimum. Then, a little more is useful to cope with imperfect filtering and quantization. ...
10
votes
Given a signal that is not bandlimited, how do you properly take the FFT?
In the real world, there is always some amount of aliasing, because no real signal is actually bandlimited.
In many cases, the signal spectrum tends to zero relatively quickly as the frequency ...
9
votes
A question about sampling rate of cosine signal
The actual requirement is to sample at GREATER then twice the bandwidth, not at a rate equal to it...
So only your 80Hz same set actually meets the requirement, because the 60Hz case is ambiguous in ...
9
votes
Accepted
Amplitude modulation vs sampling rate?
The OP's opening statement is incorrect:
$f_s > f_{max}/2$ prevents frequency aliasing for a bandlimited
signal, but not amplitude aliasing
$f_s > 2 f_{max}$ prevents aliasing. It's as simple ...
8
votes
Accepted
Downsampling and Gaussian Filtering in the Context of Scale Space Pyramids
You're correct, it has to do with the Cut Off frequency of the Gaussian Blur Filter in its Frequency Domain.
In order to see it, just apply a DFT (Using MATLAB it can be achieved by ...
8
votes
Difference between Nyquist rate and Nyquist frequency?
These terms are indeed named in a confusing manner, as frequency and rate are pretty much synonyms. Either way:
Nyquist frequency is the maximum frequency in a signal
that can be well recorded given ...
8
votes
Accepted
What is Faster Than Nyquist signaling?
Harry Nyquist made so many contributions that it's easy to get confused.
Related to sampling, Nyquist proved that a signal $s(t)$ bandlimited to $B$ Hz can be reconstructed from samples taken at a ...
8
votes
Proving Nyquist Sampling Theorem for Strictly Band Limited Signals (Whittaker Shannon Interpolation Formula)
Approaching The Sampling Theorem as Inner Product Space
Preface
There are many ways to derive the Nyquist Shannon Sampling Theorem with the constraint on the sampling frequency being 2 times the ...
7
votes
Accepted
Given a continuous time signal, does the minimum Nyquist sampling rate depend on the choice of the set of basis functions?
In the most general case, if you want to sample a continuous-time signal without loss of information, the minimum sampling rate is independent of any choice basis functions. The faster the signal ...
7
votes
Accepted
Signal values we will 'miss' between sampling instances during sampling of band limited signals
I don't have a real answer but I have the feeling that this result will help you out: Bernstein's inequality says that, if the signal $x(t)$ is bandlimited to $|f|\leq B$, then $$\left| \frac{\textrm{...
6
votes
Accepted
Why remove energy at Nyquist before ifft?
you don't have to set $X\left(\frac{N}{2} \right)=0$ if you don't want to. it will correspond to this component:
$$ X(k)\frac{1}{N}e^{j 2 \pi \frac{nk}{N}}\bigg|_{k=\frac{N}{2}} = X\left(\frac{N}{2} ...
6
votes
Accepted
Nyquist plot interpretation when curve hits the origin
First to clear up the OP's misunderstanding: the Nyquist Stability Criteria involves clockwise encirclements of -1, not the origin, and this would be the polar plot for the open-loop gain specifically....
6
votes
Link between DFS, DFT, DTFT
Yes your understanding is basically correct.
The 1st paragraph (2 lines) expresses the fundamental relation between the DFS and the DFT of a finite-length sequence $x[n]$ while the 2nd paragraph tries ...
6
votes
Understanding the Conditions for Recovering a Discrete Time Signal Through Sampling
Lets have a higher level of the idea of signal reconstruction from samples.
When you try to reconstruct something from partial information it is important to know what you know about the result ...
6
votes
Accepted
Higher order harmonics during sampling
The sampling is indeed analogous to mixing as to my understanding. In the sampling process, we multiply the time domain signal with an impulse train - the impulses in time are represented as impulses ...
6
votes
Accepted
Conclusions of sampling around Nyquist Rate
Is the rate of 2B exclusive?
Yes. The sampling theorem states that the signal must be band limited to half the sample rate. That implies that the energy at the Nyquist frequency must be zero. In ...
6
votes
A question about sampling rate of cosine signal
There is no aliasing as 𝑓 = 30 Hz is less than or equal to the folding frequency, 30 Hz and 40 Hz, respectively.
Yes and no. There isn't significant aliasing when you're sampling at 80Hz, because ...
5
votes
Soft question: Why do we need to reconstruct a signal?
You may not need to explicitly reconstruct. But if you did reconstruct a waveform using the samples that you have, and end up with something different from the actual input, your controller is ...
5
votes
Accepted
Soft question: Why do we need to reconstruct a signal?
The concept of reconstruction has nothing to do with the application, rather it has to do with the question: did I get the same signal that is really there. If you cannot recreate the signal back, ...
5
votes
Why is a square wave aliased?
In addition to @hotpaw2 explanation, a graphic. There are two analog square waves (red and green), with different lengths. They are depicted with a fine sampling, denoted by crosses. Their actual ...
5
votes
Signal values we will 'miss' between sampling instances during sampling of band limited signals
Observations
I have used +1 and -1 in the sequence instead of your 1 and 0. With $\alpha=1$, the band-limited continuous function $f_m(T)$ in your first two figures (with the above mentioned ...
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