Comparison of Digital and Analog

Section: Information
...Subsection: Digital and Analog Information Representation
... ...Subsubsection: Comparison of Digital and Analog

The obvious example is watches. Some of us wear digital watches, some wear analog. The digital watches have numbers displayed on them, the analog ones use hands.

Q. 1
So what about those watches with an LCD panel that shows little hands? Are they digital or analog? What about a sundial or an hourglass? What if you had a computer program that showed a sundial or hourglass on the screen?


Recording technology also provides us with some very straightforward examples. Thomas Edison Pioneered a form of analog sound recording in 1877. Remember that sounds are simply waves. To record a sound, a membrane in a microphone is used to copy that wave onto some surface. (Foil, in Edison's case) To replay the sound, a needle is forced through the groove created by the recording process. This needle is attached to another membrane in a speaker. When the speaker membrane vibrates, the original sound wave is recreated. The process is entirely analog. No numbers are involved, the process is completely mechanical, and there is infinite precision, but very limited accuracy and much room for error in the sound recording and reproduction process.

Compact disk technology uses digital means to record and play sounds. The sound waves are read by a computer which analyzes each instance of the sound, and assigns it a numerical value. Many of these numerical values are stored each second. When the music is played back, it goes through another computer, which retranslates the numbers into the sounds that the numbers represent. As anyone who listens to CDs can attest, digital recordings seem much more accurate than analog recordings. Since they are recorded at such frequent tiny intervals, the lack of precision is not a problem, and we find digitally recorded music more accurate.

Q. 2
Have you ever seen the little markings on CDs that look like this: AAD, ADD, DDD?

What do those marks represent? Which one would sound the best?


(Reference-- See http://www.tc.umn.edu/nlhome/g496/eric0139/Papers/paper.html for a very nice discussion of digital audio as it compares to analog sound reproduction.)