What is a sample?

A sample is a number sent to the D/A converter. A sample has a magnitude and a duration.

• The magnitude on a 16-bit converter is $\pm 32767$.
• The duration is the inverse of the converter's sampling rate (1/sr).

  1 sample = 1/44100 = 0.00002 second

  At a sampling rate of 44100 samples per second, each sample has a duration of 0.00002 second.

(One second is a long time for a computer. That's why we divide it into samples. A sampling rate of 10 samples per second would divide the second into tenths, with each sample lasting 0.1 second.)