analog signal

An analog signal (American English) or analogue signal (British and Commonwealth English) is any signal, typically a continuous-time signal, representing some other quantity, i.e., analogous to another quantity. For example, in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous signal voltage varies in a manner analogous to the pressure of the sound waves.

In contrast, a digital signal represents the original time-varying quantity as a sampled sequence of quantized numeric values, typically but not necessarily in the form of a binary value. Digital sampling imposes some bandwidth and dynamic range constraints on the representation and adds quantization noise.