Basic technical question about digital source signals


Forgive if this is a stupid question, but the current thread about digital vs analog made me curious: if you look at an analog music signal you see (I think) summations of sine waves i.e. a signal waveform which is "smooth". I realize that there are many contributions to digital sound, but starting with the most basic, if you look at the output from a digital source e.g. on an oscilloscope, would it appear "smooth" i.e. has all the stairstepping that occurs when you convert digital to analog been smoothed out or would the signal appear jagged to some extent?

Thanks for your time.
berner99

Showing 1 response by headphonedreams

You can actually see small steps in Stereophile's measurements of many dacs.

Playing 24/96 gives much, much smaller steps if the source has the info and the dac has the resolution. Most dacs can only differentiate up to around 20 or 21 bits. 20/96 still has step heights 16 times smaller than 16/44 (and a bit less than half the width).