What is the difference between Analog and Digital? To explain let’s imagine an audio recording of a tone. An analog recording would look like the original wave – all the details intact, it’s a copy- an analog to the original. On the other hand (pun intended) a Digital recording, breaks the wave into chunks called samples and the measures the amplitude of the wave at each sample and stores these measurements in a stream of binary code – a square wave of 0s and 1s. A digital player would reconstruct the wave using these measurements.
So right off the bat, you may think that analog is the better of the two formats – and you aren’t alone. There are plenty of people who swear that analog audio recordings are the best. But digital comes with some great advantages and analog simply doesn’t have.
The first is resistance to noise – introduce noise into an analog signal and you’re going to destroy the signal. Digital signals, because they’re either 0 or 1 and nothing in between, can withstand some noise and not lose any quality at all.
Digital is also easier to copy, there is no generation loss as analog loses a bit of quality every time it’s copied – like a game of telephone. Digital signals can also be synced up and read by computers which analog can’t. And very importantly for video, patterns can be found in the sequence of 1s and 0s in digital signals, so digital can be compressed – and that is key for making video as ubiquitous as it is today.