Another good analogy: If you look at black-and-white newspaper photos, most of the time you can take a magnifying glass and see that the image is actually comprised of different density “dots” of black ink to constitute shades of gray. Eventually the dots form shapes and if you “zoom” out, you start to make up detail and contour. But the image is essentially a bunch of dots that represent the original image.
Look at the same newspaper with a color image-same principle, except the image has other colored dots (usually Cyan, Magenta and Yellow added to the Black); the resolution is enhanced by the added color spectrum, but still in concept, it’s a dot-based representation of that image.
Digital audio utilizes the same principle, except those ink dots are a series of bits that approximate the basic shape of an audio waveform (analog sound is a vibration of fluctuating air pressure in a space). The sound wave is “heard” by a device that then etches that sound (analog-to-digital conversion) into a data file. The recorded sound can be manipulated, but the quality of that tweaked sound is heavily dependent on the technology that captured the sound initially.
The latest technologies for recording digital audio are approaching the “feel” of old analog recordings, because the software and hardware uses many, many more “dots” with which to capture or “paint” the sound with.
Many say analog audio recordings have a “warmth” or “depth” to them because they have somewhat “unlimited” resolution to them-they don’t use a principle of dots to record the sound (as in the continuous groove of an analog vinyl record). When digital audio gets to be of such a high resolution that the human ear can’t distinguish it from analog, your results in terms of tweaking the sound will also be the same.