What is the difference between digital and analog audio?
In: Technology
Analog is wiggles. Digital is numbers that say how big and how fast to make the wiggles.
Speakers wiggle the air which wiggles your eardrums. So either way, the end result is wiggles.
Digital is nice because if you see a messed up “5” it can be easy to see it was supposed to be a “5” because you know what 5s are supposed to look like. (Real digital signals use binary, but the concept is the same.)
But if a wiggle gets messed up, it just looks like another wiggle. So you can’t fix errors as easily with analog. This means analog is more susceptible to noise.
Digital requires conversion back to analog to make the wiggles for the speakers. Having to convert back and forth is the downside with digital. The faster the wiggle changes, the more numbers per second the electronics have to convert. But modern tech has no problem doing this with wiggles that only change as fast as audio does.
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