What Audio DSP Is: From Sampling to Real-Time Processing
In one sentence: DSP (digital signal processing) turns sound into a stream of numbers and reshapes it with math, in real time.
How sound becomes numbers
The signal a microphone captures is a continuous analog wave. Before a computer can touch it, two things happen:
- Sampling — the sound is measured tens of thousands of times per second (e.g. 44,100 Hz).
- Quantization — each measurement is stored as a number (e.g. 24-bit).
A slice of audio is now a long list of numbers — exactly what DSP operates on.
What a plugin actually does
An audio plugin is a piece of DSP: it takes that stream of numbers in and puts a processed stream out, continuously.
To avoid audible latency, these calculations usually have to finish a whole buffer within a few milliseconds.
Different algorithms produce different sound — which is why Qingtan focuses on building its own DSP: the character comes from the algorithm itself.
What's next
Later posts break down the DSP behind common processing: EQ, dynamics (compression), and time-based effects (delay, reverb).