Analog vs Digital, which is better in terms of fidelity?
Sound is naturally an analog type of signal, therefore in an analog recording, sound is stored in its original form. So, for example, in an analog tape, the sound signal is laid on tape directly from the microphone. In digital technology, however, the analog signal is sampled at some interval, and then converted into numbers to be stored in the digital device. To hear the music, the numbers are turned into a voltage square wave which roughly resembles the original wave. We saw before that on a CD, the sampling rate is 44000 samples per second, which means that there are 44000 1's and 0's per second of sound.
The two big advantages of digital technology are:
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The recording does not degrade over time. As long as the numbers can be read, you will always get exactly the same wave.
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Groups of numbers can often be compressed by finding patterns in them. It is also easy to use special computers called digital signal processors (DSPs) to process and modify streams of numbers.
In the end, the digital way is more flexible, easier to use, less expensive, has greater availability and the difference between it and the analog solution is not really noticeable.