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It's nice to see that we have some well educated people on this thread. With all the engineering talk, and holding a MSEE degree myself, I just can't resist throwing in my 2 cents. Buzz is an engineer himself and he's right. Analog in it's purest form is the cleanest signal, but you have to consider the signal to noise ratio, thermal noise, transmission line losses, cross coupling noise, solar and cosmic radiation etc... associated with transmitting the signal. The problem with an analog signal is that it's magnitude is small and that makes it very susceptible to the noise sources I mentioned above. The problem gets worse as you try to send a signal over a long cable. Buffer amplifiers are need to boost and distribute the signal along the way, which is another noise source. Amplifiers are daisy chainned, amplifying the noise of the previous amplifier. With digital, the signal is converted into a series of pulses, which are not susceptible to these noise sources. The sample rate, how often the analog signal is converted into a digital bit, determines how well the signal will be reproduced, but that also limits bandwidth. Needless to say, the transmitted digital signal to the human eye and ear is far superior. |
