I think there's fundamental difference when comparing digital audio to movie frames or "snapshots". With discrete images brain creates illusion of motion. With audio hardware (dac) reconstructs the waveform and our ears receives this continuous waveform. Our brain doesn't interpolate the audio (like let's say with moving images), it happens in DAC, its already continuous before its reaches our ears.

 

it's a data to audio stream. the dac reconstructs the waveform from discrete samples at the rate of 44,000 per second, or 48,000 etc.
Each individual sample isn't the waveform. It is what is needed for accurate reconstruction. ala Nyquist.

 

The problem with the movie analogy is that people assume discreteness means missing information. In film, anything can happen between frames, in digital audio, the signal is band-limited before sampling. Given that constraint and a sampling rate above Nyquist, there is only one possible band-limited waveform that fits the samples

 

More than Monty Python here we need Monty Montgomery, see clip belo.

Right. see clip below.

No, it seems not.
I thought the same when I studied digital conversion, imagining squared steps for waveforms as all school textbooks print, but as you can see here (3:37), it's not (but see the entire clip).
I don't know how many times this clip was posted... Maybe it's the best tech video about A/D-D/A conversion.

 

Last edited: Feb 13, 2026 at 1:08 PM

A firsthand account from the 1990s, before the invention of the internet:

Endless technical discussions... Back then, after getting my paycheck, I'd simply go to a record store and treat myself to some records. Once home, I'd brew a pot of tea, settle into my favorite armchair, turn on the stereo, put on a record, adjust the volume, and then sit there with the LP cover in my hands, listening attentively and enjoying the new music while gazing out the window into the distance.

It's remarkable what people make of such a simple act today. Back then, nothing like that existed. You listened to the music and talked to your friends and acquaintances about the band's music and even swapped tapes, but these technical discussions simply didn't happen.

 

Last edited: Feb 13, 2026 at 10:25 AM