Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions
Drop Refurbished
Like-new products you can trustDrop Rewards
Get $5 for every 500 points you earn! Learn more
Drop Keyboard Club
Become a member and expand your keycap collectionCollaborate With Us
For Brands & DesignersFollow Drop
Sampling frequency indicates how many samples you're taking per second of a signal, while bit depth indicates how many bits are in each sample (and this is really only relevant for the first recording of material anyway; lossy formats don't use bit depth). k/mbps is how many thousand/million bits are in each second. The last part doesn't change for lossy formats, but the former does. For lossy formats things are converted to the frequency domain (which are subdivided into frequency ranges) and parts that are "essentially inaudible" are taken out, thus saving on space.
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-ZeDn0i24lHS/learn/learningcenter/home/mp3.html http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/mp3.htm (Skip down to the encoding section on that second one).
While I'm not sure that they're using MP3 as their codec of choice, but I think for most formats it should be the same. FFT/some other variant frequency domain transformation -> taking out "irrelevant bits" (quite literally).
"Pandora on the Web plays 64k AAC+ for free listeners and 192kbps for Pandora One subscribers. All in-home devices play 128kbps audio, and mobile devices receive a variety of different rates depending on the capability of the device and the network they are on, but never more than 64k AAC+."
http://help.pandora.com/customer/portal/articles/90985-audio-quality
.... Sampling at 192kHz on a lossy codec? This doesn't even make sense. Sample rate refers to the sampling frequency of the original recording. And the original recording isn't ever done (or it generally should not be done) on any lossy format. Lossy formats don't have a proper bit depth anyway. What 44.1kHz/16 bit refers to is what the original recording was sampled on, and is a common CD sampling rate and bit depth. Due to human hearing capping out somewhere around 20kHz and the Nyquist frequency of that being >40kHz, it's in a decent spot. There are plenty of debates about bit depth out there.
But all of that is irrelevant because what you're getting here is a compressed stream anyway. It's been modified in the frequency domain to save space. Furthermore, 192kbps IS 192kHz streaming rate because you're sending 192k bits per second. It's not how it's usually used, but the misconception would be accurate. Just misguided.