I’m pretty sure that that analog signals is just a continuous stream of input versus digital which provides signals at discrete time steps. Why have we shifted from analog to digital for so many things? Wouldn’t a steady stream of information be of better use?
In: Technology
In a digital system you’re transmitting the numerical representation of a signal. In an analog system you’re transmitting the signal directly.
Say you want to transmit one musical tone. A digital representation would look like this:
*Sing the musical note ‘A’ for 6 seconds.*
And you could then add extra information to make sure that whoever is receiving that information has understood you correctly:
*Sing the musical note ‘A’ for 6 seconds. That’s a frequency of 440 Hz for 6000 milliseconds.*
And then you could even add a checksum:
*Sing the musical note ‘A’ for 6 seconds. That’s a frequency of 440 Hz for 6000 milliseconds. The sum of all the digits in this instruction is 6+4+4+0+6+0+0+0 = 20.*
So even if the recipient has misheard you, the checksum probably isn’t going to match and he can ask you to repeat the instruction. So you now have pretty good protection against transmission errors.
That recipient can now go and forward this instruction to 100 other people, and even if he does so over a pretty bad phone line, the information isn’t going to change. Every single one of those people will sing the exact same note (as long as they can sing) for the exact same duration.
In an analog system you’d just sing the note A to someone for 6 seconds and ask them to repeat it. If that person then passes on the information to others (by singing the note to them), the information is always going to change a bit. And if those recipients pass on the information, it’s going to change even more.
Latest Answers