Hacker News Reader

I think you have got that backwards.

A digital signal is inherently lossy as it takes only finite number of values because digital is discrete (0 and 1), whereas analog is continuous and in theory it can encode an infinite number of values, subject to your codec apparatuses limits.

View on HN

I was referring to the fact that an "exact value" doesn't even exist. There is noise on every analog signal. If there is no exact value then lossless becomes a meaningless term.

Strictly, that doesn't matter. Depending on the signal being sent, digital is lossless, as well. Specifically, for a bandlimited signal, digital can be lossless.

Basically, the sampling theorem is a hella fun topic. There was a very good video that served as a fun primer on this from a few years ago, if you want me to look it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com