Digital silence

Overview

The term "digital silence" is used to describe a digital audio signal which contains all "zeroes;" and therefore represents complete silence.

Basics

Although analog audio circuits can be designed to be extremely "low-noise" and therefore have no perceivable sound present unless amplified to an usually high level; there is always some noise present at the lowest levels. In digital audio; it is possible to have "complete silence" as represented by every bit in the digital audio word being a "0". When reproduced by a DA converter; digital silence will cease to be absolute because of real-world limitations regarding noise in analog circuitry.