Sounds are generated in the form of analog waves, which are continuous waves, which you'll see shortly in the upcoming figure. We can record surround sound through a recording device. For multichannel sound recording, you need to have certain methods to record music that can use a simple recording setup known as Deca Tree. Here, microphones are placed in a particular fashion to capture sounds from the left, right, front, and back of the source. There are also many processing techniques that can filter and convert sounds that are recorded to mimic the various components needed for each of the channels.

We take samples of the analog sound waves that are produced by a piano at close intervals (the rate at which the samples are taken between intervals is known as sampling frequency). The process of taking samples from analog waves to store them digitally is known as Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). These samples can be stored in uncompressed PCM-like formats or be compressed into a smaller and more manageable file size using audio compression techniques. Wav, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD are some of the formats that audio is commonly saved as. Ideally, we want to save audio into a lossless compressed format so that we get a small manageable file that contains amazing sounds.

When the digital format of the sound is played back, the analog sound wave is reconstructed using the stored information. Close resemblance to the original analog sound waves is one way to ensure sounds of good quality. By increasing the number of channels to create a 3D sound effect using the basic 5.1 surround, which requires five speakers, one for front left, one front right, one center, one back left (as surround), one back right (as surround) and a subwoofer, also greatly improves the listening experience.