FACTORS AFFECTING SOUND QUALITY
When a sound wave travels through a medium such as air and encounters another medium such as water, colder air, or a solid object, part of the sound is reflected back from the object in a manner similar to a beam of light. The balance of the sound passes into and is transmitted by the second medium.
Reflection
If the sound wave strikes a hard surface at an angle, a large part will bounce off and be reflected at an angle which is exactly equal to the angle of incidence. Reflected sound increases the intensity, causing a type distortion by adding an echo (a reflected sound) or reverberation (a multiple reflection of sound). Large areas with hard surfaces, such as auditoriums, produce a lot of reverberation and echo. The shape and size of the area also determines the reflection of sound for example theaters are designed specifically to carry the sound of an opera singer across the entire room. This deals with the impact that an environment has on the quality of sound however there are many technical aspects to equipment that also affect the quality of sound this includes processor speeds, random access memory (RAM) and hard disc storage. Other technical issues that affect the quality of sound are issues like sample rates and file formats file size and whether the output is mono stereo or surround sound these latter issues have already been covered on this blog on page "Playback sound quality".
Storage of Sound- With todays technological advances we are able to store music on a computer, hard drive or other memory device, or in some cases stream it from an online service, then you are introduced to formats, codecs, bit rates and filename extensions. Sound can be stored in a wide range of formats examples of these formats are WMA, .cda APPLE Lossless etc. Lossy compression is one of the two most common ways to record sound and it works by throwing away some of the data used to record the music, the lower the bitrate, the more gets thrown away. An example would be for a CD, lets say it runs at 1.4bps (mega bites per second) if we want a high-res MP3 file roughly at 320kbps we would need to lose almost half of this, so you would end up only using a small fraction of the data on the original disc. The other way to record sound is lossless which is different to lossy compression as it doesnt lose any of the data from the piece of music it originated from, after this it is packed into less space for storage. Lossless files compared to lossy are considerably larger and when uncompressed (playing the music) it should be exactly the same in data and in their sound.
PLAY BACK MEDIUM
Audio recording puts special demands on the computer which compared to the demands of surfing the web or checking your e-mail are very different. The more power, the better when working with audio files. The processor, properly called the central processing unit (CPU), is what most refers to as the brain of the computer. The speed of your computer is measured by the frequency at which the processor is able to perform an instruction, called instructions per second (IPS). This number used to be stated in megahertz (MHz), which implied a million instructions per second or MIPS. Now that chips are faster than 999 MHz, the term gigahertz (GHz) is used for any chip that exceeds 1,000 MHz (1 GHz equals 1,024 MHz). The higher the number, the more tasks the computer can do at once and the faster it can do them. Random access memory, or RAM, is another vital system component of your computer and another number that should be high. RAM is a specialized area where data is stored temporarily while the computer is on. It is called volatile memory because it is gone when you turn off the computer. RAM is superfast and data can be written into it and read from it at much higher speeds than from the hard drive.
RAM holds important information that needs to be accessed quickly. Having a lot of RAM will speed up a computer, no matter what
speed the processor is. RAM is measured by how much data it can store at one time.
The speed of these two processes will have a direct effect on the complexity of your sound quality and play back.
AUDIO PROCESSING
Audio processing is the intentional adjustment of auditory signals, or sound, frequently through an audio effect or effects element. As audio signals may be electronically represented in either digital or analog format, signal processing may occur in any of the domains.
SOUND SCAPE
Within the game environment sound scapes can be introduced within the software development kit. This allows the developer to add sounds to the game as the player moves through the layout. This gives the gamer the feeling he is in other environments other than just an empty room. These sound scapes could be wind, rain running water or muffled speech and are triggered by the developer
using reference points with the game scene and as the gamer hits the reference point a sound scape relevant to the back ground or processes within the game will be triggered.
File Formats/file size- Many pople when asked what they use the interenet for most of them say to search for music, there are many sites that will contain full or only a short piece of that music. Downloading such files can be awry if you dont know the format of the file this can cause your computer to freeze. Now adays there are many types of file formats but the one that is mainly used for sound is an mp3. File formats are a specific way to encode data that is to be saved as a file. The actual coding is done by CODECs which are a program/algorithm that encodes/decodes data to convert a file between different formats. The popular media codecs are generally for shrinking file size. Sample rate is determined by the number of samples per second which is taken from an audio signal that produces a digital audio file, it is measured in kHz (kiloHertz). If the quality of sound is good it is likely to have a high sampling rate.