Glossary → Audio fundamentals
Audio fundamentals

Aliasing

Aliasing is the distortion produced when frequencies above the Nyquist limit are sampled anyway, folding back into the audible range as false tones.

Converters prevent it with anti-alias filtering before sampling; resamplers must filter equally carefully. Audible aliasing today usually signals a buggy sample-rate conversion somewhere in a pipeline.

Related terms

Nyquist theoremThe Nyquist–Shannon theorem states that a digital system can perfectly capture frequencies up to half its samp… ResamplingResampling converts audio from one sample rate to another — 48 kHz video audio to 16 kHz for a speech model, o…

Frequently asked

What is Aliasing?

Aliasing is the distortion produced when frequencies above the Nyquist limit are sampled anyway, folding back into the audible range as false tones.

Why does Aliasing matter?

Converters prevent it with anti-alias filtering before sampling; resamplers must filter equally carefully. Audible aliasing today usually signals a buggy sample-rate conversion somewhere in a pipeline.

What terms are related to Aliasing?

Closely related concepts: Nyquist theorem, Resampling — each has its own entry in this glossary.