[sdiy] "Digital vs analog waveforms" [was: Ways for innovation]

[Lanterman, Aaron]

On Jan 22, 2016, at 10:27 AM, spivkurl at wearerecords.com wrote:

> they express their unfounded claims about how a digital waveform is that same or "higher resolution" (uh I hate that) than an analog waveform… 

I must once again remind cite the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem

When you’re listening to a “digital waveform,” by that point it’s been converted back to analog. Analog and digital transmission and storage formats have different strengths and weaknesses. Analog formats tend to degrade gracefully; digital formats have a sharp degradation curve, in which they’re perfect until they’re garbage (as I’ve learned going through archiving some old DAT tapes). Digital waveforms are converted to “analog” for transmission — the cable your internet service uses doesn’t know anything about “bits,” but the circuits encoding and decoding those bits do. 

I’ll take a “digital waveform” off of high-rate AAC file or a CD over an analog waveform off my old consumer cassette tapes.

- Aaron