Film is rearranged metal particles on tape which are read by an electromagnet. CDs are discs with burned pits in them which are read by a laser. What makes one analog and one digital?
In: Technology
Digital just means there’s an extra step in the middle to translate everything into 0s and 1s.
Film uses the physical properties of the metal and clever manipulation of chemistry to store an image.
CDs uses a laser and the physical properties of light to store an image, but the image was first translated into 0s and 1s (which correspond to the lands and pits on the disc)
Edit: More examples after I saw you meant audio.
With a magnetic tape, the soundwaves that were recorded get directly transformed into magnetic fields of varying strength. The tape essentially store “magnetic waves” that are a 1 to 1 transformation of the original sound waves.
With a cd, those sound waves are first translated into 0s and 1s before being transformed into lands and pits. With out a computer that knows the code, those 0s and 1s are meaningless.
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