Analog vs digital signals?
Answers:
I can explain the basic, someone else or wikipedia.com can add technical details.
An analog signal is a smooth, curved signal. The pattern can look like the surface of the waves on the ocean. As you move across the waves, you gradually move up and down; the waves can "steepen" but they are still curved.
A digital signal is a squared version of analog. When you move across these waves, you fall pretty much straight down and then jump straight up. Picture boxes in front of you that have spaces in between, as you walk across them, you are either on top of them, or you are on the floor.
A stereo system that has tubes can generate analog sound, one with chips generates digital sound. Computers have chips and therefore generate digital sound.
Tubes create sound that smoothly transitions on a curve; Chips turn the sound on or off. Because sounds can be turned on so quickly by a computer, they blend together; just like our eyes blend motion pictures together; VHS tapes generate 32 frames per second, but they blend together when we see them in motion. The quicker the chips turn sounds on/off, the better the quality, the more the sound is like analog.
For digital to make a sound like analog (a curve), it creates several sounds, like dots along the curve, a sampling of the true curve...the more dots, the smoother the curve, the better the sound, the better the digital signal represents the analog curve that it is working to be like.
Hope this helps.
Analog is just combination of sine waves with curved slopes. With digital it we take those sine waves and sample the intensity of the electricity at several points in the analog wave and assign a number value to them. When a computer stores a sound it isn't storing the original sound, it is storing a sampling of possibly thousands of points all assigned a numeric value along the wave. It's really hard to explain without you having any background. Major in computer science and you'll learn all about it.
here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/analog_sign...
..and here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/digital...
I am getting away from electronics terms to TRY to explain what I know about digital and analog
digital means 2 states. more like ON-OFF nothing else. analog is like a rubber band, it has variations and can be stretched but just like a rubber band, it becomes weaker the more your expand them.
In case of digital, as i said 2 states, on and off. it could be a little on and little off or a huge ON and huge OFF still they are just 2 states.
Anything more will not be simple which is what you want it to be :)
Good luck
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