Square waves or 1's and 0's?

Thanks, everybody. I've been reading on the net. Someone says the signal is 1's and 0's and the next person (critic) says square waves. You open the door so that I can understand the concepts. What started it is that I have an entry level (RCA)MIT digital coax and a signalcable digital coax. I knew that the MIT didn't cut it so I tried the signalcable and the sound opened up. Now I'm reading overwhelming positive reviews of Oyaide DR-510 and wondering if it would be a worthwhile upgrade from the signalcable at $140 or around there. Don't know if I will try it but I feel smarter already.

Al and Agisthos are right. I was not asking the content of the message (signal). I was asking for a physical description of the signal. I thought I was asking in effect for someone to dispel a myth. Now I'm not sure of that because there seems to be a gray area of confusion depending on what exactly is the question.

I also read that a digital coax cable between transport and DAC should be 5 ft long. This certainly qualifies as myth.

Lynne

Hi Al,

Thanks for articulating the original question. Steve's paper is very helpful.

I can do close to 8" but will have to measure to make sure. It will be interesting to experiment and very helpful to know that length is almost always a factor.

Best Regards,

Lynne

My question was oversimplified and came out of ignorance. Your anwsers will give me all the reading I want tonight because I have to re-read. You guys are over my head but it's fun trying to understand it. You are a great source, better than anything else I've found on the net.

I was tired of reading the argument that the quality of cable doesn't matter because the signal is simply ones and zeros. I have two digital coax cables and it clearly does matter.

Thank you.

Lynne

OK. An analogue wave form is continuous in terms of time and voltage and frequency. A digital wave form is a square wave, as it were, which means it is repetitively maybe not on-off but high-low, higher-not-so-high, low-lower in terms of time and voltage as it represents the encoded information. And the binary system is the only one that can work for this Pulse Code Modulation because the language is ones and zeros. The vehicle for this language is the square wave because it is not continuous but repetitive.

That's my homework.

Al & Steve,

Yes, Al, I read the Wiki piece before but was somewhat unclear until you have now further explained it. Visual aids--graphs, charts, schematics are difficult. I need to learn first the meaning before they make sense. I was unclear on the voltage being a constant value and on the transition period as it relates to the binary data.

I was struck with the beauty of the S/PDIF system where the clock and data are one signal until I read Steve's explanation of jitter and how the BMC signal is vulnerable to it.

I'm very happy to have learned this basic concept of the digital signal. Many thanks for hanging in.

Al, on an unrelated topic discussed in a former thread which I should discuss in a follow up to that thread but since the website made changes nothing works on my pc the way it did and I'm not sure you would find it on that thread, and in regard to your lack of enthusiasm for autoformers in SS, I did demo the autoformers with the hk990 integrated driving the AR9's. the 990 is rated at 150w/8ohms, 300w/4ohms, and the 9's are rated at 4ohms. So using the 4ohm tap gave the set-up 150w/8ohms versus 300w/4ohms without autoformers. There was no apparent difference except that sound quality was a little better without the autoformers apparently because of running the signal through another device with more connections. It was a horse a piece.

But with an amp that is limited into 4ohms, the autoformers did enhance sound quality when the amp was driving 4 ohm speakers turned into 8 ohm speakers. Presumably converting 8 ohm speakers into 16 ohm speakers would cause more loss than gain. If all this makes any sense.

Lynne

OK. It probably needs to be qualified. I got it from
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_signal. Please explain.