Hi, since I am new to the whole audio world pretty much, I was wondering if someone could explain to me the difference between digital and analogue?

The most general explanation is that a digital signal represents information using a number of discrete levels/voltages/"values" while an analog signal uses an infinitely variable set of levels/voltages/"values" to represent the information.

This has a number of ramifications.

Digital signals, for example, might be less susceptible to distortion in certain places: if you know that any voltage > 1.0 represents "value 1" and any voltage < 1.0 represents "value 0" (these are arbitrary numbers), then if your equipment distorts something, changing it from 1.6v (input) to 1.8v (output), you have not changed the represented value as far as the equipment on the other end is concerned. Of course if you distort from 0.9 to 1.1 volts in this case, then you just changed "0" to "1". So distortion is not impossible. And of course audible distortion can occur from many other causes besides the one I just gave

Analog signals, on the other hand, might be better at actually capturing and reproducing an original sound, since sound is inherently analog, and any digital representation must "sample" the waveform at some sampling rate and precision, thus losing information. In practice, you can deal with this (to a lesser or greater degree) by sampling at higher bit depths and sampling rates, which is why digital sound today is often sampled or produced at "24/96" or "24/192" or other rates (the first number is the number of bits of information per sample, the second the number of samples, in thousands, per second) rather than "16/44.1" (audio CD), which has less information.

There is much, much, much more here and I'm greatly simplifying, glossing over and flat out ignoring a LOT of stuff. What would you like to know more about, specifically?

Pkasting, thanks for the help. I'll be honest: I had no idea what I was getting into! Like I said, I'm new to the audio-world, and I've been seeing Digital and Analogue thrown around alot on this board and others. I was hoping to get a reasonable idea for what people were talking about, like digital to analogue converters, or somethat that plays in analogue, or visa versa. As you can see, I am in way over my head

I'll break it down for you:

analog = vinyl = good

digital = ceedee, mp3, etc. = not as good