It's much more complex than I'm going to make it seem,Īnd it's beyond the scope of an introductory article like this, but I willīriefly describe what really happens at the very end. The measurement into a number, and stores it in binary format (as a To be exact), a piece of electronic equipment measures the sound, turns In a CD, music (or otherĪfter the music has been recorded, it is converted into numbers by a These are calledĪnalog technologies, because the sound is stored as aĬontinuously varying pattern (of bumps in the plastic of a record or fluctuations in LP records stored music as bumps on the surface of plastic, whileĬassettes stored it using patterns of magnetism. There's another bit of processing that goes on after sampling (technically, known as modulation-I'll Lasting several minutes into a string of millions of zeros and ones. Talk about it very briefly, further down this page).īut, in very simple terms, the sampled data is essentially the information stored on your CD. In other words, there is no (analog) music on a CD at all-just a huge long list of (digital) numbers. Original track of music by burning some areas (to represent zeros) and Thus, the laser can store all the information sampled from the The lack of a bump (which is aįlat, unburned area on the disc, called a land) represents the A bump represents the number zero, so every time the laser burns a bump With a laser beam that etches bumps (called pits) into its Illustration: An ordinary CD is a sandwich of plastic (in which bumps have been pressed by a master disc), reflective aluminum, and protective polycarbonate plastic.ĬDs are made from an original 'master' disc. See it, the disc holds this information in a tight, continuous spiral Leaving other areas unburned (to represent ones).

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