1 Describe the difference between analogue and digital signals?

superscaper

severn786 wrote: »

i would just like to know the main differences in the two siginals and what stands them apart from each other, and where they are both used eg i know digtail signials are used within computers as they transmit in binary code, as with analouge they are used down phone lines and used for commicating sounds as well and speech any more help would be greatly helpful

I guess one generalisation would be all natural signals are analogue (eg sound, temperature, light etc) and to measure them, usually nowadays (especially if processing with pc) the signals are measure and then converted to digital, the analogue signal is broken down into finite steps. Another difference between the two is that you can get problems with noise inherent in analogue. So every time you copied an analogue signal it would deteriorate. Whereas a digital signal is just essentially specific numbers and theoretically you can make exact copies again and again without deterioration. Of course digital (when applied to real world signals) is always an approximation and analogue is the ideal representation of a real world signal. But depending on how accurate the digital is (ie sampling rate/how small the steps are) the difference may not be important or even perceptible.

Robinhood

superscaper wrote: »

Digital can be any number of steps, binary is a very specific form of digital processing. A digital clock doesn't mean 1's and 0's for example.

If you think of a digital number it is made up of 7 segments. This are either on or off to give you the digit you require. Hence the control lines would be made up of 1's and 0's.

superscaper

Robinhood wrote: »

If you think of a digital number it is made up of 7 segments. This are either on or off to give you the digit you require. Hence the control lines would be made up of 1's and 0's.

A digital clock doesn't have to have led display. My point was the display of numbers themselves. Another example, a transducer could have 200 discrete levels. That's digital and certainly isn't binary.