Describe how your PC digitally captures a sound wave and how sampling rates affect the quality of the file.

What will be an ideal response?

To digitally capture a sound wave, your PC periodically records a sample of the wave's amplitude as a binary number. A sequence of samples is stored as an audio file. The more samples your PC takes per second, the more accurately it can reproduce the wave.

Sampling rates are measured in kHz (kilohertz), where 1 kHz is 1,000 samples per second. An 11 kHz sampling rate produces fairly realistic digitized human speech. However, music requires  sampling rates of 22 kHz or 44 kHz for good fidelity.

At higher sampling rates, digital audio samples more closely follow the shape of the sound wave.