What's the difference between digital and analog audio?

Not exactly. I know the difference, but it’s hard to explain.

Ok imagine that you have a glass of water. The more water you put in, the more water there is in the glass. It could be around 200ml, or 250ml, or 233.456ml or anything in between. You drink a sip and hey! there’s less water left in the glass. And if you were to chemically analyse the water, you’d actually find some salt or other minerals in it. Often harmful ones. But it still tastes great.

Now imagine a computer tries to recreate the same glass of water. It drops exactly 160ml of Hydrogen and 80ml of Oxygen in a sterilized glass, making it preceicely 240ml of pure water. You can tweak that, always adding 2 parts of hydrogen per 1 part of oxygen, and end up with 241.6 or even 241.612ml of water if you want. And it will taste perfect and have no salt or anything else in it. But some people may notice the difference (or so they say).

Digital audio has come a long way since the “hollow” mp3s of the 90s. There is such a wide range of frequencies in modern digital recordings that no human ear can honestly say it can hear the difference. I have been a musician all my life and I can’t. But some of us still want to be “traditional” and keep that “good old days” feeling. Yes, there is magic in analogue too.

Good answer! I have a friend who is a musician and he told me the same thing, that you can’t actually hear the difference, it’s just a feeling that some people have when hearing vinyl that they equate to a difference. I’ve also read that technically, digital audio can go greater lengths than analog can, especially in terms of frequency. In general, its more accessible.

Thanks for the input! I have been wondering about this for awhile.

@Jack79 – I know I can’t hear the difference.

I kinda like the album imperfections on some of my kids story albums for the memories they bring back. That is why I don’t clean them up.

Just a basic note;
Digital = 1234567890
Analog = 1010101010

@Fred931 – I always thought it was the other way around! Wow.

Digital is about a steam of bits loaded with additional redundant bits. So if a few bits change, say during a snow storm, it can be fixed and the music coming from your digital car radio sounds perfect.

Another good analogy: If you look at black-and-white newspaper photos, most of the time you can take a magnifying glass and see that the image is actually comprised of different density “dots” of black ink to constitute shades of gray. Eventually the dots form shapes and if you “zoom” out, you start to make up detail and contour. But the image is essentially a bunch of dots that represent the original image.

Look at the same newspaper with a color image-same principle, except the image has other colored dots (usually Cyan, Magenta and Yellow added to the Black); the resolution is enhanced by the added color spectrum, but still in concept, it’s a dot-based representation of that image.

Digital audio utilizes the same principle, except those ink dots are a series of bits that approximate the basic shape of an audio waveform (analog sound is a vibration of fluctuating air pressure in a space). The sound wave is “heard” by a device that then etches that sound (analog-to-digital conversion) into a data file. The recorded sound can be manipulated, but the quality of that tweaked sound is heavily dependent on the technology that captured the sound initially.

The latest technologies for recording digital audio are approaching the “feel” of old analog recordings, because the software and hardware uses many, many more “dots” with which to capture or “paint” the sound with.

Many say analog audio recordings have a “warmth” or “depth” to them because they have somewhat “unlimited” resolution to them-they don’t use a principle of dots to record the sound (as in the continuous groove of an analog vinyl record). When digital audio gets to be of such a high resolution that the human ear can’t distinguish it from analog, your results in terms of tweaking the sound will also be the same.

@sndfreQ Wow, that is an awesome! I am a graphic designer so the printing analogy made great sense to me. Thanks so much.