What a completely useless statement. This ultimately happens when your music hits the speaker wire, if not before. Do you use one of those $3 RCA cables to connect your iPod/iPhone to your stereo? Analog!
To the OP: What matters, really, is that cheap FM transmitters sound like sh-t by design. FM is garbage, really, and cheap FM transmitters are absolute trash. If you care anything about music, I'd strongly recommend spending your money on a more direct connection.
That's a pretty strongly worded statement, and quite a bit more useless than the previous post. In fact your statement is worse because it's a misrepresentation of the issue, rather that a simple statement of fact (as was the previous post, to which you responded).
Listening to music is and always will be an analog process. Your red-herring statement points that out clearly. Our ears are analog. However the process of getting from digital (bits) to analog (sound) is completely different between the originally cited case (Frequency modulation, transmission, and demodulation) and the case you're citing (direct transmission to a speaker, or amplifier). You could use the same argument to say that FM transmission is the same as plugging into the headphone jack and listening to your headphones - "they're both analog!"
Frequency modulation (FM) involves taking the analog signal from your source, modulating it onto a higher frequency (in this case, something in the normal broadcast FM band) and into the frequency domain, amplifying the modulated signal, broadcasting it, receiving it, and demodulating back from the frequency to amplitude domain.
FM as defined for broadcast allows a 30hz - 15,000hz frequency range for the source signal. You're throwing away anything outside of that range. There are significant sources of distortion inherent in the modulation / demodulation process. The signal-to-noise ratio is typically very poor compared with directly sending the analog signal to speakers (phones) or another, reasonably high-quality amp.
The act of digital to analog conversion and then sending (over your hypothetical RCA cable) to an amplifier is quite simple. There is no modulation. There is no filtration of the signal to conform to limit the bandwidth. It's the original analog signal, sent directly to an amplifier, or better yet, speaker (headphones). Sure there are noise sources in the digital to analog conversion process, but they are tiny compared with the sources in the frequency modulation / transmission / demodulation case.
In the end, though, even though you put forward a
fallacious argument, you found your way to a reasonable conclusion. FM transmission isn't very good. It's way better to find a direct (analog, or better yet digital) transmission method.
I've use three different FM transmitters. At best, the music sounded crappy (as one might expect, given the issues enumerated above), and under normal circumstances it was noisy and carried some (or a lot of) static. Further, if you live in a big city (like the bay area), there are very few FM frequencies that are unoccupied - and even the "out of band" frequencies carry some interference from broadcast stations.
Final note, digital satellite radio is absolutely not the same as FM radio in terms of sound quality. Digital satellite radio is sending an analog modulated BIT STREAM (i.e. digital bit stream), just like digital cable / satellite TV. You either get a perfect CD-quality stream, nothing (loss of lock), or a some kind of stuttering signal (bit dropping). But you will not have static, and you should, under normal circumstances, get a signal that is equivalent to a one-step digital to analog conversion.
Thx mate!
