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That's about five billion bits per hour, which is why you'll need at
least an 800 Megabyte hard disk to record an hour of compact
disk quality music.
To visualize the analog-to-digital conversion process, refer to Fig-
ure 1. At the top is one cycle of an analog input signal wave.
We've used a simple sine wave to make visualization easier. In
this example, the signal has a peak-to-peak amplitude of 20 units,
measured by the scale on the left. The sampling frequency is
many times higher than the signal being sampled and is shown
along the bottom of Figure 1. Once for each cycle of the sampling
frequency, the sample-and-hold circuit "slices" the input signal,
allowing the quantizing circuit to generate a (digital) number equal
to the closest (of the 65,536 possible discrete values) quantization
value of the input signal at the time the sample is taken. This re-
peats for each successive cycle of the sampling frequency and
Figure 1. Analog-to-Digital Conversion