What does PCM mean? Used to have a Marantz PCM player, sold it for £70 on ebay, even though it was fuct.
Printable View
What does PCM mean? Used to have a Marantz PCM player, sold it for £70 on ebay, even though it was fuct.
Pulse Code Modulation. All CDs are encoded in PCM. DSD/SACD is different, it's been described as "PDM" although there is some argument around that.
It's basically the way the analogue waveform is reconstructed from the bits (pulses) in the datastream. Think the classic picture of a bar chart approximating a sine wave - the more bits the bigger the bar.
The analogue signal has just three properties - frequency, amplitude and phase - the sampling frequency determines the highest frequency that can be encoded, bit depth determines the maximum amplitude that can be encoded.
Thank you fellas.