PCM: A Real HD Encoding Scheme

Pulse Code Modulation or PCM is the most widely used, the most popular and the best audio encoding scheme currently in use. It is the preferred method used by audio recording studios, mastering houses, digital music distributors and is the uncompressed encoding scheme used on every compact disc, DVD and Blu-ray title. It is a digital representation of an analog signal comprised of a large number of discrete binary samples. The amplitude values are also quantized based on a range of available amplitude values. A signal encoded using PCM is a sequence digital amplitude values called words at each sampled time. The sample rate is usually measured in kilohertz and the word lengths in bits.

While there are aspects of PCM encoding that play a role in the fidelity of the reproduced result, the primary factors in the quality of this encoding scheme are the sample rate and the word length.