Square waves or 1's and 0's?

Almarg - with S/PDIF the transport level is still 1's and 0's, but the protocol of the interface requires encoding the data to limit the number of consecutive 1's or zeroes, allowing a clock to be recovered as well as the data.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

I guess we all interpreted your question a little different.

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

that was a true statement Lynne simply because digital cable carries simple shape signal compared to an analogue music.

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.