What is the difference between digital and analog recording?
A1: For all practical purposes, analog recording is what we generally think of when using our vcr or audio cassette recorders. Analog recording consists of heads writing or reading signals directly onto a medium (like a tape) with a magnetic encoding. Digital, on the other hand – also reads/writes data but encodes the signals into a numeric string of digits. There are a couple different ways in which we generally use digital video/ audio recording: 1. Directly onto a computer’s magnetic hard drive through a variety of compression formats- such as in PC (Windows) based systems and embedded OS / Linux based systems such as our DVR-N4, or; 2. Onto a magnetic tape cassette, as used with mini decks (Sony’s GVD-200 and GVD-800) and new digital camcorders. The major tape formats found in new digital camcorders are Sony’s ‘Digital 8’ or the more common ‘Mini-DV’ . No analog equipment will record or playback digital media, but some digital units (GVD-200/ 800) do have the ability to playback an
