[jamsmith]

"I suppose it's possible you can't fully appreciate it without looking at the math. Digital audio is not a graphics file, a picture of the wave. It is a numerical representation of it. It is a set of numbers that describes the waveform so that you can recreate it later. 2+2=4. 1+1+1+1 isn't any more of a 4 just because you used more data to represent it."

Uh, actually once you are in the digital domain, I don't have any problems there. (I have been a software engineer for 12 years.) But the alegory here doesn't work. Four individual samples are not "4". They individual 4 samples and not added. The math works that way counting the number of bits in each sample where 1+1+1+1 = 0100. And while digital audio is not a "graphics file" it can be represented graphically. When you see a waveform in your editor, you are seen a graphic representation of a sequence of samples. In a sense, a graphic file is not to different as a graphic file is collection of bytes or words that describe individual pixels much as samples describe points on a wave.

As to the sine components and Nyquist, that is what I always knew to be true. It just appeared from the way I read things here (sometime you guys can be brief to the extreme) that something else was believed. I will not elaborate on that, I will accept it as my misinterpretation. I just wanted to clarify it for myself.