Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog Conversions

[muzzammil236]

Hi,

I am new in this field. I have a question. Can we really recover an analog signal (like recording my voice in an analog media best available to date) in its true essence after been converted to digital signal? I mean digital would be a discrete sampling of that continuous analog signal (of almost infinite resolution). How that digital signal can be recovered back to a true original analog signal that was recorded in first place??

Regards,

Muzzammil.

 

[BDWoody]

Hi,

I am new in this field. I have a question. Can we really recover an analog signal (like recording my voice in an analog media best available to date) in its true essence after been converted to digital signal?

Yes. It's not intuitive, and involves more math than most will have had, but if there is magic in Hi-Fi, it is in Sampling Theory.

Monty does a very good job describing it, but look into Nyquist Shannon if you want more.

 

[DVDdoug]

I mean digital would be a discrete sampling of that continuous analog signal (of almost infinite resolution).

Analog doesn't have infinite resolution... The usable resolution is limited by noise. I don't know of any analog format that can match the resolution of a CD. Analog also has frequency response variations and distortion that doesn't exist in the digital domain.

The weak link in (modern digital) recording is the "analog side"... Room acoustics and room noise, microphone non-linearities, and preamplifier noise. The weak links in playback are also the analog speakers and room acoustics, and maybe the amplifier.

DVDs & Blu-Ray's are better than analog VHS and my digital caliper has a lot better resolution & accuracy than my analog tape measure...

 

[JeffS7444]

And if you find yourself getting impatient and saying "But he's only showing sine waves! What about more complex waveforms?", fear not: That starts at 17:20.

By the way, the nature of how non-sinusoidal waveforms are actually composites of a number of pure sinusoidal tones has implications in the analog world too! For instance, when you see square wave output of a power amplifier, and it looks a lot more rounded-off than the original signal, that doesn't mean that the amp is "slow", it means that it's bandwidth-limited.

 

[Blumlein 88]

You can listen to an 8th generation DAC to ADC copy in either of these two threads. They aren't perfect, but are much better than the 8th generation of any other medium I am aware of.

Listen and choose the 8th generation digital copy.

Each of these zip files will open into three wav files. One is labeled Reference, one is A and one is B. These are 30 second snippets of full songs. The originals were from CD so all 44.1 khz and 16 bit. Either A or B has been thru 8 generations of DA to AD copying. The other is identical...

www.audiosciencereview.com

8th generation ADC/DAC loop vs the original.....can you hear it?

Download this zip file. It will unzip into a folder with three 30 second snippets of a Fiona Apple song. Two are the original digital file. One is an 8th generation loop thru DAC/ADC. Pick the odd file out on the poll...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[muzzammil236]

Awakening ...