Audio Terminology And Definitions Dictionary

 

W  Symbol for watt or wattage

 

Watt  The primary unit (at least in audio) used to measure electrical power. Watts are used most often as an expression of amplifier power or to note a loudspeaker's power handling ability. A measure of electrical power defined by Current multiplied by Volts (A X V).

 

WAV  A standard uncompressed audio format for computers using the Windows operating system. WAV files can contain CD-quality (44.1 KHz/16-bit) audio signals, but the penalty lies in the large amount of space WAV files occupy—roughly 10 MB per minute of music. WAV is a container format.

 

WG-4 (Working Group 4)  The DVD Forum committee that is responsible for developing the audio standards for DVD.

 

WMA (Windows Media Audio)    Developed by Microsoft, WMA is one of today's most pervasive Internet audio formats. Though not as popular as MP3, proponents of lossy WMA claim that it can outperform MP3 in the area of sound quality, particularly with files encoded at lower bitrates such as 64 or 96 Kbps. This performance advantage makes it handy for applications such as portable digital audio players, where total play time is limited by a finite amount of internal memory.

 

WMV (Windows Media Video) This is Microsoft's proprietary lossy compression format for motion video. WMV is used for both streaming and downloading content via the Internet. Microsoft's Windows Media Player is usually bundled with the most recent version of Windows, and it allows playback of many audio and video file types, including WMA and WMV.

 

Woofer    A driver specially designed to reproduce bass frequencies. (See also: driver, midrange driver, and tweeter.)

 

Wow and Flutter  Measures of speed instability, typically of turntables and cassette decks.