Digital sound gains only storage efficiency, since perception needs analog output

Evidence

What then is digital recording and playback? Digital means that, at some point, the analog signal has been turned into hard numbers, usually encoded in binary form (0’s and l’s). We shall expand on this momentarily. There is, however, no advantage to digital technology at the very beginning and the very end of the process of recording and playback, because sound begins as an analog signal and we require the re-creation of an analog signal (again, air pressure variations with time) to correctly perceive the playback. The advantage of digital technology is storage efficiency and robustness. The digital data can be stored on a variety of media, including audio tape, at which point it becomes digital audio tape, or DAT. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 481

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines digital recording as analog-to-number conversion and identifies its actual advantage.