Art of Digital Audio, Third Edition

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Summary: copyright 1894^H^H^H994.
Review: If you're afraid this book may be too much for you, get Ken Pohlman's 'Principles of Digital Audio' first. Then if you didn't learn what you wanted to know there, Watkinson is the next step.

Rating:
Summary: It might as well be the Bible, cos it's all covered here.
Review: If you're afraid this book may be too much for you, get Ken Pohlman's 'Principles of Digital Audio' first. Then if you didn't learn what you wanted to know there, Watkinson is the next step.

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Summary: Well written technical overview, short of the computer age
Review: The Art of Digital Audio is well written and informative technical overview of digital audio, except that being a mid 1990s book, it almost completely omits detailed coverage of some topics (like MPEG audio compression) that would nowadays have to be considered critical. It is nonetheless an essential component of the well informed digital audio engineer's library. There is a *lot* of stuff in this compendium that you would otherwise have to find scattered over a dozen other books. One hopes a revision for the twenty-first century is in the works.

Rating:
Summary: The Bible of Digital Audio
Review: The most comprehensive book to date on Digital Audio.

Rating:
Summary: copyright 1894^H^H^H994.
Review: This book has all the details of doing digital audio, starting with banging two rocks together to start a fire, and quickly progressing to the development of western civilization. ... ok, it's not *quite* that bad. But there is precious little relevant information to any modern project. When your car's mp3 player is running Linux, who cares that Gray codes are the way to go for digital tape positioning? Who needs to be told that you might want to think about doing a calculation in RAM instead of with discrete digital components? There's a good chapter on "advanced digital audio processing". And it explains basic things about dithering, mixing, gain control, etc. But on the whole this book is very geared toward antiquated hardware, rather than presenting theories or algorithms that are relevant to all digital systems. I guess that's why it's the "art" and not the principles of digital audio. In the index you will find "cylinder transducer", but not "pitch" or "tempo".