Sorry if this isn't posted in the correct place, if not hopefully a moderator will be kind enough to move this post.

I feel very stupid whenever I come to this forum, because I really don't understand much of the technicalities behind audio.

I know a little about what the basic terms mean, and I can get fairly good (IMHO) results from ripping/encoding audio, but I really don't get any of the deeper topics.

I'd really like to get into this all a little bit more, so can anyone recommend a good place to start from?

Thanks for any help.

jazznaz

Sure. Here.

Read a lot and, just for politeness, use search before asking. This forum is divided sections, being each one dedicated to one topics, and at begining of each of those section you can find some pinned posts that are usually the most important and asked questions.

The Hydrogenaudio Wiki is also a nice place to start.

And do not worry if you don't understand everything. Nobody knows everything at first. Undertanding needs time. Read.

There exists a great deal of introductory material on the web and there are a number of good books. With such a vague request, who knows what you really need? I typed
"digital audio basics"
into Google and got a list of more than 1500 hits.

Some of these are strongly oriented towards some particular aspect of digital audio, such as starting out with someone's commericial product to do a particular thing -- i.e. not a very general discussion -- but others are quite general introductions. You just have to spend a little time to discover what is helpful to you. If you read about the same topic from various viewpoints, more and more of it often starts making sense. You just have to allow for the initial frustration of not understanding everything.

There was one site listed on the first page of the Google search that has a number of streaming or downloadable (your choice) video tutorials on various aspects of digital audio, so you don't even need to read, if that is your orientation.

I just want a better grasp of the basic principles of audio technology, enough so that I could participate in conversations on this forum.

To be specific, I'd be more interested about lossy codecs, and the scientific/computing theory behind them.

I gathered that here is a good place to start, but I could only find various details about LAME pinned in the General MP3 section, and that wasn't really a whole lot of use, as its more of a guide, and less of an explanation of how it actually works.

It's my fault for not being clear enough in the first place though.

Thanks for the replies so far.

Take a look at our Wiki.