High Tech Talk: Analog vs Digital – Making the Conversion Primary through the use of computers has the world been forced to digitize. We were an analog people for centuries before the advent of computers. Clocks were analog, radio frequencies were analog, and we spoke through the telephone in analog. Then came the advent of computers and we needed this new digital entity to coexist in an analog environment.
Two main areas had to be converted from their analog state to digital. The area of sight and the area of sound. Sounds like the “Twilight Zone” but in reality we needed to convert pictures, both black and white and color, and sound – voice, music, and telephone communications into a form capable of being stored on a computer. The conversion of color to digital form requires the sampling of tiny areas on a picture (pixels) and coming up with a 32 bit binary number that represents one of 4 billion shades of color and then storing these binary numbers in sequential order to allow us translate them back into a recognizable image. This is performed by an analog-to-digital converter ADC (storing process) and then a digital-to-analog converter DAC (recovery process).
Sound takes a similar path where the binary number of the sampled analog sound represents not color but frequency.
The Essay on Kirk Patrick, Kirk Samuda, Analog & Digital Signals
Understanding the nature of digital signals, binary, and other multi-level signal types do require an explanation of the two most prominent telecommunications types that exist, and examples of how they are applicable to specific devices, the binary is association and its function. (Please note that the majority of the information below are extracts from various websites, used to validate and ...
Additional electronic circuitry in conjunction with the ADC and the DAC must be used to produce the final image or sound or both in the case of video or movies. The transmission of data over long distances must also go through a conversion process through the use of a modem (modulator – demodulator).
Digital signals are converted to voice frequencies (binary 0 – 1200 Hz, binary 1 – 2400 Hz) and then back to digital by way of the modem.
