AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - sound in wav-format

wrote:

Andreas Håkansson writes:

im using the program Origin7 to read a wav-files. The result is given in a 3
coloumns worksheet, Time, Right and Left (stereo). The time is given in
seconds, so far everything is just fine. The question I have is in what unit
are the values for right and left. The values are approx. from -5000 to
5000.. but what!?

They represent the amplitude of the waveform. The units are irrelevant,
since what matters is the relative value (5000 is twice as loud as 2500).
^^^^
I thought loudness was logarithmic.

Once in an amplifier, you could make an association between the waveform
amplitude and the signal voltage, for example, but in the computer, it's
arbitrary. The values can range from -32768 to +32767, limited by the
16 bits used for each sample.