re x oversampling cd player in article hcbc un l dd netcom com hcb netcom com h c bowman writes hello i just bought a new portable cd player for the office and i notice that it proudly proclaims times oversampling on the box now while i think i understand what oversampling is the rate of discrete samples exceeds the highest frequency component of interest by some factor i don t understand this times business it seems to me that when i bought my first cd player was it really years ago the specs said times could someone please tell me whether i m getting senile if i m not then what good does it do for the player to take samples at a higher rate if i really wanted better fidelity wouldn t i have to have the same higher rate of sampling during the recording process furthermore am i wrong in interpreting the sampling rate from the player s point of view as being the same thing as the data rate for the bit stream coming off the optical medium does this mean that the data rate related to the rotational speed of the disk has changed since note i just tried to figure this stuff out about a month ago myself from various people on the net so i could be wrong the data is only ever read once barring mistracks and such of course and eventually gets turned into khz bit two channel data oversampling takes two discrete data points and interpolates n points between them for n times oversampling when i asked people said that the interpolation was not simply linear interpolation but significantly more complicated anyway then the purpose of oversampling is to move the effective sampling rate up to n times khz in order to use higher frequency antialiasing filters for the same quality filter higher oversampling lets you build cheaper filters whereas for the same price filter higher oversamplings lets you build better filters so assuming the quality of all other components in a cd player remained the same oversampling should allow a manufacturer to produce slightly better sound due to anti alias filtering joel kolstad
