What is the difference between analog and digital mixers?
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An analog mixer uses transistors as amplifiers throughout the entire signal pathway. The transistors will get various volts input according to the audio signals and then output the same voltage in its output. It is then possible to do simple analog operations using these transistors and resistors to add or multiply signals together.
Digital mixers however only drive the transistors at maximum or no voltage. The transistors work better in this mode as there is no ambiguity in what signal they represent but it does also limit what they can represent. For each input you would have an analog to digital converter which is a circuit that outputs digital numbers for the voltage level. These numbers are then sent through transistors that do numerical operations on them, such as additions and multiplications. The output is then sent through a digital to analog converter which converts the numbers back to an analog voltage signal which can be sent to a power amplifier.
> an·a·log
> a person or thing seen as comparable to another
In general, *analog* means a signal is directly encoded into an electrical current. So the electrical current is comparable to the original signal. In the case of sound, the vibrations in the air are translated into “vibrations” in the electrical current.
Digital means the signal is first translated into 0s and 1s, which is then carried by the electrical current as low or high voltage. Since the 0s and 1s carried by the electrical current is meaningless without a translation step, it’s not comparable to the original signal.
For analog mixers, since the electrical current is directly analogous to the sound, they can directly manipulate the current itself to manipulate the sound.
For digital mixers, the “sound” got translated into what’s essentially just numbers. They have to do math to manipulate the sound.
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