A digital audio system satisfies bit transparency if audio data can pass through the system without being changed.

A system can fail to be bit-transparent if it performs any type of digital signal processing–such as changing the audio’s sample rate. Some audio operations–like converting audio samples from integer to float and back–can either be bit-transparent or not depending on the implementation.

An audio system can be tested for bit-transparency by giving a random sequence of bits as input and testing that the output is bit-for-bit identical to the input.