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Shown below is a
video clip (QuickTime movie) of the closed lab.
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| The purpose of this exercise is to have students observe the benefits of µ-law encoding. Students first take an audio file (a piece of classical music) and reduce the bit-depth from 16 to 8 bits. They then take the same 16-bit audio file and reduce it to 8 bits, but this time using µ-law encoding. Through a logarithmic compression algorithm, µ-law encoding gives the dynamic range of 12 bits using only 8 bits per sample. The students can hear the better quality sound on the µ-law encoded file as compared to the plain 8-bit file. |