"There's no such thing as digital"
Reply #3 – 2013-11-26 08:40:16
Yeah, I stopped reading after a short time too. First of all, they seem to think that digital and analog are opposites. They're not. Digital simply means representing something as a number and analog simply means representing something with a similar phenomenon. So, digital in audio means representing something as a stream of numbers while analog usually means representing a sound pressure with an electrical signal or the depth of a groove (vinyl), or the strength of a magnetic field (tape). Anyway, they are referring to a few things like slew rate (it takes time for the signal to change levels), absolute voltage (there is a "grey" zone between the "black" of the "0" and the "white" of the "1") and timing (If the bit changes to the correct state but at the wrong time, this is equivalent to changing to the wrong level at the correct time) but the thing is, those engineers that designed it aren't dumb. Most digital signals need some kind of clocking signal. When only one signal stream is available, like with CD and S/PDIF, there are tricks to embed the clocking signal and the data into one stream.AS: Since there's no such thing as 1s and 0s in digital transmission, what is being sent over our USB/Firewire/Ethernet cables when we play back music files? CH: An ANALOG signal! In fact they probably mean an electric signal, because the transmission is in no way 'analog' to any of the data. They confuse the term analog signal for 'physical' signals, like representation as a voltage, mechanical pressure, light intensity etc. The only way you can strictly represent a digital signal with an analog is by counting something, like logs as hlloyge proposed, or maybe by integration (measuring the amount of electrons and dividing that by some number) as digital is purely representing by numbers. They accuse 'engineers' of not knowing what they're doing, but they themselves are talking nonsense.