IDM Mailing Archive

quoted 5 lines Wheee... Digital will always be virtual. Analog is physical, it is real.

> >>Wheee... Digital will always be virtual. Analog is physical, it is real. > > Actually, in the limit, physical things tend to be quantised. >

In fact the physical world is quantised but obviously the scale at which it is quantised is generally not noticed by us (unless we use high energy accelorators). However, this physics stuff is irrelevant to the arguement of analogue vs digital. Shannon's sampling theory shows that you can theoretically reconstruct the exact wave as long as you have sufficient sampling, which CD does, without aliasing any of the signal. I am an analogue advocate because the digital to analogue converter of an average (less than ~500 quid) CD player isn't up to the job. The transformer of the power input circuit isn't far enough away from the D/A converter to be isolated and this is where most of the imperfection comes from (also low spec components, badly designed circuits etc). It is for this reason alone that digital suffers. All the sampling arguement is a red herring. I'm at the stage where I buy 12"s and CD albums. - Clive