I tried looking it up, and my brain just wasn’t making sense of it, but I haven’t had coffee yet so.
In: 0
Analog is a range of values, 0-100, 4-20mAh
Digital is an int, so a 1 or 0, true or false.
Digital means discrete values. Analogue is continuous.
So consider a chess board. Each piece can be on a specific square. You can’t move a pawn 90% of a square. You have to move it whole squares. That’s how digital things work.
In snooker, the balls can be anywhere. You can put a ball half way along the table, or move it to a position half way between the centre and the edge. Or half way between that point and the edge, or 72.5% of the distance from a pocket. That’s how analogue things work.
Now, a lot of digital things have a lot more possible positions. A CD is digital. Each second of audio on each channel is made up of 44,000 numbers from 0-65536, each representing a 44000th of a second. A record is analogue. The grooves aren’t tied to any discrete time or distance.
Digital is like an on/off switch you can use to turn a light on or off. Analog is like a knob you can turn make the light all the way dark, as bright as it can get, or any brightness in between
Analog is like the accelerator and brake pedals in your vehicle the further and harder you press the more you get. Digital is like your horn it is either on or off no in between.
Think of old-time rotating dimmer switches that people have (or used to have) in their dining rooms. They could go anywhere from fully-off to filly-on, and anywhere in-between. That’s analog. But, most switches are only on/off — that’s digital.
think of it like this…. if you look at a digital signal of 1’s and 0’s on an oscilloscope, it will look like a flat plateau mountain… for the period of time its 1 its at the top of the plateau, and when its at the bottom of the mountain, its at 0.
if we look at that same series of signals with a much faster rate, each plateau becomes less and less wide and becomes instead the point of a curve. the curve is now analog. because each point of the curve is actually a duration of the plateau, you can only estimate the number.
Analog systems use signals or records that are analogous to the thing they’re recording, whereas digital systems describe the thing they’re recording using numbers. Our word “analogy” has the same sense: an expression is an analogy uses things in one example that correspond to something you’re trying to understand or explain. **In an analog record, there are continuous changes in the recorded medium** that correspond to every single change in the thing that is being recorded. **In a digital system, there are discrete numerical descriptions** of the thing that is being recorded taken at a sampling rate with a desired resolution.
Let me give you an example: If you use a microscope or powerful magnifying glass and look at the grooves on a vinyl record, you will see wavy patterns on the vinyl. These wavy patterns exactly match the sounds they would reproduce; the pattern is an *analog* of the sound wave.
If you use a microscope to examine a CD, you will not find anything that matches the sound waves: you’ll find a bunch of dark and light spots. These dark and light spots get interpreted as 1s and 0s by a CD player, which then takes that string of 1s and 0s and uses them as numbers. Those numbers describe the amplitude of the wave that the CD track records (I’m over-simplifying a bit for the sake of clarity).
In summary:
* analog recordings use something to embody continuous information that matches the thing it is trying to record—like waves on vinyl that match the sound waves that it records.
* digital recordings use numbers to describe the information that it is trying to record—like a string of numbers describing the sound wave that it records.
One compromise that is needed to do digital recording is that describing sound as a string of numbers necessarily means you have to sample that sound at various points. Digital sound recording breaks the sound into discrete bits of info, whereas analog systems are essentially continuous.
Some of the confusion from the use of the term “analog” comes from companies using the term in place of “continuous” as opposed to “discrete”. For example, some video game controllers have “analog” triggers or joysticks. What an analog trigger or button means is that instead of clicking on and off like a typical button, these triggers have a long trigger pull where it registers how hard you are pulling, and not just that you pulled it. An “analog” joystick registers the position you’ve moved it to, and not just a discrete tap in that direction like the old Playstation and NES controllers. But the underlying signals for these “analog” triggers and joysticks is all digitized; the controller sends numerical/digital data to the console, which processes this data like a computer would.
Two of the best explanations for the concept of analog vs. digital are these videos by Veritasium. Even though these are not strictly about analog vs. digital recording, the concept of analog vs digital is clearly explained with visual aids:
# Veritasium | [The Most Powerful Computers You’ve Never Heard Of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgF3OX8nT0w)
# Veritasium | [Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg)
Think of a vinyl record. When sound gets recorded on to the vinyl record it is physical soundwaves that get etched in to the surface, which get replayed by the stylus by following those grooves. It’s almost like physical soundwaves in the vinyl surface.
Now let’s think of old school photography. Light is allowed to expose on to the film through the camera. It creates an actual representation of the light that was physically hitting the film that creates the image.
So now think of the modern *digital* alternatives of those things. Digital Photography is discreet pieces of information. The photo is actually just stored values for a whole bunch of pixels. The analog photo isn’t discreet pieces but just one smooth gradient of lightness/darkness.
Similarly, digital music is discreet values broken down into small moments in time… you could think of them like “pixels” that make up the recording. The vinyl record however is like a smooth physical wave, there are no “bits” it is just a smooth wave.
Hopefully that kind of paints the idea in an intuitive way.
Analog signal can have any value and digital, if binary, can have only two 1 or 0(true or false).
Why digital is better? Because the signal has less distortion and can have better error correction implementation.
How you ask? Imagine a bottle of water, full is 1 and empty is 0. Let’s say I have a full bottle of water(a 1), now I will add a distortion in it, so I’ll drink 1/4 of the water, in the end the bottle has 3/4 or more than half of it’s content, a computer will still interpret it as if it were a full bottle even though it’s not. Which is not true for analog signal, the analog will interpret the imperfection.
Digital defines a finite set of values something can be. Analogue on the other hand can be any of an infinite set of values, as for any two values you can always find one between them.
Example: your battery voltage is analogue – it can be 3.7, 3.71, 3.701, 3.70000 … 00001, point being you can keep adding zeroes to infinity and getting a new value. Your phone however displays it as a rounded percentage – a digital value with 101 possible states (0, 1, 2, … 99, 100).
What this means in the real world is that digital values can be stored/copied without further reducing the precision – if you want to write down that exact percentage you only need 3 digits, however if you want to write down the exact voltage you’d need infinite digits – not something feasible in the real world.
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