Consider the following characteristics of digital audio when…

Consider the following characteristics of digital audio when answering the following question: Digital representations of voice audio have some redundancy, and Listeners can often use context to guess what a speaker is saying even if some of the speaker’s message is not heard.   For example, upon hearing “H___, Alice, this is Bob,” Alice is likely to guess that the first word was “Hi” or “Hello.” Would lossy compression be an acceptable technique to use given these characteristics of digital audio?  If so, how would its performance compare to that of lossless compression?

Suppose you took a digital picture of a poster that used onl…

Suppose you took a digital picture of a poster that used only sixteen distinct colors, and you want to compress it.  If your digital camera stores pictures using a color depth of 64 thousand colors (that is, 16 bits per pixel) you could save a lot of file space by reducing the number of bits used for each pixel. What would be the optimal number of bits to use?  Show your calculations.