Ask Lemmy

Maybe it helps to know that it can’t perfectly capture your voice. It can get close enough no human can tell the difference, but it’s still not perfect. First of all it has a sampling rate. To make this more understandable let’s think of a sample rate of 1 sample per second. Think of two speakers playing at the same time. One is playing your favorite song, the other is playing the exact note of that some for one second each and only changing notes every second. It’s going to somewhat mimic your song, but it’s going to be terrible. Now imagine that second speaker makes 4 samples every second, now it’s playing your song a quarter of a second at a time. Sounds a lot more like your song, but in the same way stop motion looks a lot like movement but isn’t right. Note up that sample rate to 100s or thousands of samples a second, now you’re getting to the point you can’t tell the difference, but it still can’t be perfect, because it’s still based on a sample rate.

If you can grok pictures from pixels, you can picture the same thing. If you averaged a picture out to one giant pixel, it’s unrecognizable, 4,8,16 pixels, maybe a simple icon starts to approximate into something recognizable. That little icon in your browser tab is usually 32 x 32 pixels. 1024 pixels total, and we barely consider that an image. It’s all about pixel count (sample rate). When you zoom in, you find that it’s not perfect, you always get to the point of individual pixels, unlike optical zoom where you can zoom almost indefinitely as long as you can collect enough light.