What signed 16 bits little endian mean in pcm audio buffer?

1. What is 16-bit PCM format?
2. What does pcm_s16le mean?
3. Is PCM little endian?
4. Is 16-bit audio signed or unsigned?

What is 16-bit PCM format?

The number of possible values that can be represented by an integer bit depth can be calculated by using 2ⁿ, where n is the bit depth. Thus, a 16-bit system has a resolution of 65,536 (2¹⁶) possible values. Integer PCM audio data is typically stored as signed numbers in two's complement format.

What does pcm_s16le mean?

pcm_s16le : Pulse Coded Modulation, where each sample is a signed 16-bit little-endian integer.

Is PCM little endian?

Inside WAV files, PCM samples are stored as little-endian. MP3 files are a compressed audio format, so it doesn't really make sense to say what endianness it uses, but when NAudio converts to PCM, it will again be little-endian.

Is 16-bit audio signed or unsigned?

16-bit audio is, by convention, usually signed. Think about what PCM audio is: each measure is how far along its axis the speaker should physically rest at that moment in time. Therefore perfect silence is absolutely any repeating value — that represents the speaker not moving.