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interesting. on the same topic, i been also curious of something and wonder if anyone have the answer to this. lets say i have a track playing just one note (to be specific, a frequency measured in hertz, lets say 528) for one minute and we want this to be as pure sounding as possible. what is the best approach to do this? in addition, if the audio file is in WAV and we convert them to mp3, do we still lose a lot of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t that likely end up as a sawtooth pattern at the speaker and thus introduce a number of harmonics?
Not if the sound driver is doing its job properly -- it's generally bad form to add harmonics above the Nyquist frequency[1] of the input file. If you do have to deal with a buggy sound driver, you can use any small multiple of the tone frequency as your sampling rate and still have efficient LZW compression. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Actual sawtooth on the left (done at higher bit rate), tone on right is 2khz tone at 8khz sample rate (audacity won't generate tone right at nyquist). Looks like a triangle wave in audacity, but the tone is fairly pure with just a whisper of harmonics, and those are probably from the speaker.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, an 1056 Hz 8-bit WAV file filled with alternating +127 and -127 samples will perfectly reproduce a 528 Hz tone. That's about 60kB in size, and a traditional LZW compression (I.e. Zip) will work quite well due to the repetition.
Wouldn’t that likely end up as a sawtooth pattern at the speaker and thus introduce a number of harmonics?
(tldw: the answer is no, like the other commenter said, if the D/A converter is working properly)