Click here to purchase the entire book in PDF format. Why do I need to know statistics? There will be lots of cases where you'll need to know some basic statistical concepts as a recording engineer. For example, you may have already seen a meter on a mixing console that tells you the correlation of your left and right channels. To know what this means, you'll need a little background in statistics. Read a paper on multichannel microphone technique and you'll see coherence mentioned. More stats. Even an RMS voltage measurement is another name for a statistical idea called the standard deviation (sort of...). If you're doing DSP or working on digital hardware, you'll need to have a thorough understanding of dither, which, in turn means that you'll have to have a firm grasp of the concept of a probability distribution function. Of course, if you're more interested in things like listening tests, or if you read papers that talk about such things, you'll definitely need to know a thing or two about concepts like a mean, standard deviation and a confidence interval.