analog signal

An analog or analogue signal is any time continuous signal where some time varying feature of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity. It differs from a digital signal in that small fluctuations in the signal are meaningful. Analog is usually thought of in an electrical context, however mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and other systems may also convey analog signals.

An analog signal uses some property of the medium to convey the signal's information. For example, an aneroid barometer uses rotary position as the signal to convey pressure information. Electrically, the property most commonly used is voltage followed closely by frequency, current, and charge.

Any information may be conveyed by an analog signal, often such a signal is a measured response to changes in physical phenomena, such as sound, light, temperature, position, or pressure, and is achieved using a transducer.

For example, in sound recording, fluctuations in air pressure (that is to say, sound) strike the diaphragm of a microphone which causes corresponding fluctuations in a voltage or the current in an electric circuit. The voltage or the current is said to be an "analog" of the sound.

Since an analogue signal has a theoretically infinite resolution, it will always have a higher resolution than any digital system where the resolution is in discrete steps. In practice, as analogue systems become more complex, effects such as non linearity and noise ultimately degrade analogue resolution such that digital systems surpass it. In analogue systems it is difficult to detect when such degradation occurs, but in digital systems, degradation can not only be detected, but corrected as well.

Disadvantage

The primary disadvantage of analog signaling is that any system has noise – i.e., random variation. As the signal is copied and re-copied, or transmitted over long distances, these random variations become dominant. Electrically, these losses can be diminished by shielding, good connections, and several cable types such as coaxial or twisted pair.

The effects of noise make signal loss and distortion impossible to recover, since amplifying the signal to recover attenuated parts of the signal amplifies the noise as well. Even if the resolution of an analog signal is higher than a comparable digital signal, in many cases, the difference is overshadowed by the noise in the signal.

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