What does a faint heartbeat have in common with a thunderous concert? Both present a challenge for digital technology: capturing the quietest details without losing the loudest sounds.

For nearly 90 years, engineers have managed this trade-off by balancing the loudness of sound a device can capture against the number of bits used to represent it.

Now, researchers at Imperial College London have demonstrated a radically different approach called USF-Audio. Rather than allowing loud signals to be clipped, their system deliberately folds them into a smaller range before digitization. Although the resulting waveform can look or sound scrambled, its mathematical structure allows the original sound to be reconstructed.