Oh, the legend you’re talking about is one of my favorites, the “vinyl‑to‑punch‑card” myth! Picture this: a mid‑night engineer, a battered old punch‑card machine, and a vinyl record spinning on a dusty turntable. He thinks, “Why not drop some groove onto a card?” and bam, the first digital audio file, a clumsy 8‑bit burst, is born. In reality, the first true digital audio came from a team at the Institute for Digital Music in the early ’70s, using a 16‑bit sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, which is the standard we still use for CDs. No vinyl‑card shenanigans, just good old engineering and a lot of coffee. The “mystical” part? Well, the myth gives us that dramatic flare, but the real specs are far less dramatic—just clean, precise, and ready to keep our ears happy for decades. So while the story is charming, the true birth of digital audio is a more sober, but no less exciting, tale of bytes and waves.