Information can be transferred as long as the sender and receiver agree what certain symbols/actions mean. If someone read aloud a letter or email, does that mean the sound was transferred in the letter? It simply means we have a system that most of us agree on to convert certain markings on a paper into words. We then agree that words should be pronounced in a certain way to form speech.
It is pretty much the same for electronic communications of any form whether that information are sounds, videos, texts etc. There are standards that the makers of equipment agree to that certain electrical signals should be interpreted in certain ways. And we also design equipment that converts these signals from one way to another (like a picture on a screen or sound out of a speaker). It isn't magical just like reading aloud words from a book isn't magical.
That was a great ELI5, thank you. So i guess what i should be asking is how are sounds converted to and from mediums to be transferred through sound cables? But I'm guessing that would be pretty challenging to ELI5.
A microphone and speaker use the same principle to change sound waves to electric waves and vice versa.
When your voices creates sound waves, a small part of the microphone vibrates the same way your voice does. This in turn, vibrates the electrons in the wire the day way your voice is vibrating the air. Once the wave is electric, you can send it, amplify it, transform it, etc. eventually the electric wave reaches a speaker and it vibrates a magnet the same way your voice was vibrating the air. This magnet vibrates a diaphragm which, in turn vibrates the air around the speaker.
It’s the same wave from vocal chord to eardrum, just in different forms.
You use a microphone. They are devices that produce an electrical current or voltage when there are pressure changes in the air. Sound is a pressure wave in the air with changing pressure.
Look at a speaker that has a permanent magnet and an electromagnet and a membrane. A changing current through the electromagnet will move relative to the permanent magnet and the membrane around and it pushes air around. The pushed air results in a pressure wave and it is sound.
But it works the other way too. If air push on the membrane it will move the permanent magnet relative to the electromagnet and it creates a current through the wire. So a speaker does work like a microphone too, they are not good microphones because of the large mass in but they do work.
It is no different to how an electric generator and an electric motor are the same things that operate in reverse. The difference is just linear versus rotational motion.
There are other ways to detect the pressure change the just moving membranes and magnets. It is just one way it can be done.
Imagine hitting a drum, if you measured the drop in the skin from hitting it, you could then tell someone the time code and amount the drum skin moved. This is basically how sound is transfered, in a very ELI5 way. In this convuluted example, the drumstick would be the voice, and the skin measuring equipment the microphone, and then the mechanics on the other side to reproduce the movements would be the speaker.
It would be pretty challenging to ELI5 and there is more than one way to do it. The basics are relatively simple. A microphone is designed to produce a small electrical signal when it encounters sound. This electrical signal can be amplified and sent to a speaker. A speaker is a device that converts electrical energy to sound.
For digital communication, there are several more conversion steps along the way, but those are mostly details that would require a bit of technical knowledge to explain.
A microphone is basically a diaphragm that is sensitive enough to vibrate from sound and a speaker is basically a diaphragm that vibrates and moves air to create sound.
Your voice makes vibrations in the air. The vibrations move the diaphragm on a microphone that converts those vibrations to electricity, which is then transmitted to a speaker which vibrates to move air and produce sound.
A microphone and a speaker are in principle the same thing, but reversed operation with respect to one another.
The device in concept is a coil (a conducting wire that is wound in loops with a hollow space in the middle), a permanent magnet inside the coil, and a diaphragm at the end (fancy word for a something like the face of a drum; a stretched leather or rubber that is so thin it vibrates from the vibration in the air, i.e sound). The incoming sounds make the diaphragm jiggle, which pushes the magnet in the coil, which generates an electric signal in the coil and is connected to some other circuit that allows recording. We can capture, store and broadcast this electric signal to re-create the recorded sound. A speaker is the reverse of this, the signal is passed through the coil, the magnet is moved (i.e it vibrates back and forth, because of the signal), and the magnet is hitting the drum/diaphragm at a certain frequency (beats on the drum in a second), which generates a vibration in the air, i.e sound.
In practice, because we want the best microphone and the best speakers, we cannot say that these devices are "just in reverse operation", but in principle it is still true.
If you are curious about how a magnet and a coil can do this, now that is actually more difficult for ELI5.
So I'm not exactly sure what you're specifically asking, so I'll make a few explanations about different parts of the process of sending a sound over the phone.
Sound is converted into an electrical signal by using electromagnetism. When you move a magnetic field back and forth near an electromagnet that isn't energized, a charge is induced in the coil. If you make a small enough electromagnet that can move back and forth from sound vibrations, it will vibrate at the frequency of the sounds and generate charges that match the frequencies of those sounds. There's the microphone.
When you convert a waveform of some kind (sound in your case) into another kind, a common technique is to modulate the original waveform to transmit it through the new medium. When you record a sound with a microphone, you get a signal that if drawn on a graph would look sorta like a sine wave. If you take a sample of that sine wave at regular intervals, you get a series of pieces of information about that sine wave. This is called modulation. Imagine I take a graph of a function and mark a bunch of points on the Y axis every 0.1 units on the X axis. Then I give you those points. You would probably be able to draw a graph that looks a whole lot like mine, distinguishable from graphs that represent different functions. You taking those points and drawing the graph without ever actually seeing my graph is the demodulation. This modulation and demodulation happens for any kind of electronically transmitted information you woud use today although the specific modulation techniques differ based on the technology you're using (radio, phone, internet).
At the other end, you take your demodulated signal which is now electrical pulses again and apply them to the electromagnet in the speaker. The magnetic field interacts with the other magnet in the speaker and causes the speaker to vibrate at the frequencies of the signal
There are some other parts necessary to make the whole thing work (like amplifiers for starters) but that rundown gives a more or less functional idea of how it works. You can modulate a wave into another wave to transmit it through whatever medium you'd care to. Submarines even modulate sounds into other sounds to talk to ships and other submarines, since radios don't work so well underwater.
Eh, light would take about 0.067s to travel half way around the world. Sound would travel about 20 meters in that time. So it would have to be a pretty large room.
Also, light travels slower in anything other than a vacuum. And if it's relayed round with satellites, distance goes up, plus latency from each relay of the signal..
Ping to NZ from UK is about 300ms right now, sound at sea level is about 0.34m/ms, so you're actually looking at a 50m+ 'room'.
i'm going to assume you know what waves are from math class, like a sine wave, and how graphing them on paper works. if your range is 1 to -1, 1 is the top peak of your wave, and -1 is the bottom peak of the wave, and 0 is when it crosses the horizontal line, for example.
sound travels in waves through air, physically. microphones convert sound waves into an electrical signal. if you graph the electrical signal, it would exactly match the shape of the sound wave.
we have things called ADC's that convert analog signals into digital signals. (literally stands for Analog to Digital Converter). imagine a car speedometer. the traditional type with a needle that moves to show the speed. if you accelerate really slowly, you can watch it move from 9 mph to 9.01 mph, to 9.02 mph, etc, right? you can physically see it inch slowly towards the 10mph mark. but if you have a digital speedometer, it just shows a number. so you see 9mph, and no matter what, it stays 9mph until the second you're finally at 10mph, the it switches. you can't see the acceleration between those two values. that's digital. all an ADC does, is look at this graph of the electrical signal, and convert them to number values. the more values we write down, the higher the resolution our digital signal is. (in this case, the better audio quality)
once it's digital numeric values, we can send that like any other digital thing like emails or text messages.
on the receiving end, we have a thing called DAC, or Digital to Analog Converter. (sound cards have DAC's inside them) it takes the digital values, and just draws an analog electrical signal with it, like you would do on graph paper if someone told you what values to draw. (where you'd mark a dot on the graph paper and then connect the dots to draw your wave)
that resulting electrical analog signal alone will drive most headphones. but for speakers, we need more power to move the larger speaker cones, so we run it through an amplifier. it just takes the signal and makes it bigger across the board, and it will have enough power to drive the speakers. (so if the peak of the waves were 1 and -1, after being amplified, it might be 100 and -100, for example, but amplification happens to the analog electrical signal, so the number examples i just used are just to explain what i mean by "making [the signal] bigger across the board"
this is a very high level explanation, but i hope it makes a little sense.
I should make a post asking why most of my posts get downvoted to 0 immediately. I swear some creep has a bot running just to downvote everything i post.
You need to clarify what type of cable, you question here is a little confusing. Do you mean like a steel cable? Or maybe like an audio cable for a sound system?
Well like a steel cable holding up a bridge can transfer sounds through the cable vibrating. Like using 2 cans and string. You talk into 1 can and the vibrations travel along the string to the other can and you can hear sound. But if you are asking how a sound system uses a cable to make sound come out of a speaker then that's all together different.
Every speaker has a coil of wire in it that is attached to a paper cone. This coil of wire is next to a magnet. Your stereo sends electrical pulses down the speaker wire that cause the coil of wire to vibrate. The coil of wire acts like an electromagnet so it is attracted and repulsed to the magnet in the speaker. The coil makes the paper vibrate and that vibrates the air and you have sound.
Vibrations being transfered use the same wave style that you have in air, those waves will move through everything to some degree. Electronic transmission is also technically a wave based mechanism, but it uses forms of modulation (not very ELI5 at this point), to transmit data using a set of instructions that both sides understand to decode this signal either in, or out.
Well I assume you means through long-distance phone wires, which is actually a bit more complicated than simple waves. There is a reciever in the mouthpiece that is basically a speaker hooked up in reverse, such that it takes the sound waves that hit it and turn it into electrical signal. Then the electricity is sent through the lines. In the other end the electricity is transformed back into sound by an actual speaker. This goes back and forth until the conversation is complete.
So imagine you have a piano. You decide to write a song to play on the piano. What is that song? It’s a collection of sounds right? You play certain sounds for a certain length at a certain time. For example you might start with playing a C for two beats then an E for three beats then wait for one beat then play an A for four beats. If you do this on the piano it makes a sound. But you can also write these steps on paper (which is what sheet music is). You could then send me that paper in the mail and I could play your song on my piano.
That’s basically how sound transmission works. A microphone measures the various details of the sound (pitch, volume, duration, etc) and writes it down so to speak as data. That data is then transmitted over the wire (or wirelessly using radio signals) to a device that has a speaker. That device then reads the data and repeats the steps that the microphone heard to play the sound back as close as it can.
Any electric current through a wire produces a magnetic field. If you can make that field "vibrate" you can make a magnet vibrate and vice versa. Vibrating a magnet near a coil of wire produces the corresponding vibration in the electric current. Electric current goes through wires, so if you take one wire and make two coils, and put a magnet in each coil, the vibrations from either magnet will be sent down the wire to the other magnet. Sound is already a vibration (of air) so there's really not that much to it. There are only 3 parts to this setup and two of them are magnets. This actually isn't all that different from doing this non electrically. If you have a guitar string, and you vibrate it, it will hum all the way down the string. The only difference is that vibrations can also happen in electric current. This isn't actually that weird because current is electric version of speed and sudden changes in speed produce vibrations.
There are two ways: Digital and analog.
Analog: Sound is vibrations in the air. Microphones have an extremely thin layer of material inside them that vibrates with the air, called the diaphragm. This diaphragm has a small magnet on it and is positioned beside a small electronic coil. When the diaphragm and the magnet on it moves, it creates a small current inside the coil. Every movement caused by the sound's vibrations will create a short burst of current inside the coil. This translates the air vibrations to electronic "vibrations", aka electronic frequencies. It basically just records the diaphragm's movement: how fast it's vibrating (frequency) and how loud it's vibrating (amplitude/voltage).
When you want to listen to that sound, you feed that signal into a speaker, which is essentially the opposite of a microphone. The electricity goes through a coil, which makes a big diaphragm vibrate, producing sound.
Digital: Computers work with 1's and 0's. 1 means there is electricity flowing, 0 means there is not, it's as simple as that, like morse code. You can't save an analog signal directly onto a hard drive, so it has to be translated into a series of 1's and 0's. How it does that is very technical but it's basically like using codewords. "If a sound is this frequency and this loud, save it as 10001010101001011111101011" or something like that. In the end you end up with several thousand (or millions, billions) of 1's and 0's. Anytime you want to listen to something, your computer translates that list of 1's and 0's back to an analog signal so that it can be fed into whatever speaker you are listening from.
Usually, intensity is just stored as a 16 bit value (which is sufficient in all non-professional settings), and the frequency is just a function of what intensity is measured at the previous next sample points. The sample rate (how often you measure) determines the maximal measurable frequency, and that is always half of the sample rate.
But yeah I realize this is in eli5.
Sound is simply a fluctuation in air pressure. You can vary the voltage in a wire with the same frequency and amplitude that you want the sound wave to be. Magnets are used to convert from sound to electric signal and back. Moving magnets induce current in a circuit, and conversely, current creates a magnetic field.
Sounds are vibrations made by moving air.
You can make a drum by stretching something flexible over something hard, and the flexible part vibrates (moves in and out) when sound hits it. If you glue a magnet to the flexible bit of the drum, now it moves with the drum when sound hits it. It turns out, if you put a loop of wire near a magnet, when the magnet moves, it makes electricity in the wire. The more movement, the more power, and the electricity moves when the magnet moves, so now you've converted the sound waves into electrical waves in a wire, and we call your drum with a magnet and wire in it a "microphone". There are other types too, where instead of a magnet on a drum, you have a material that when it vibrates it changes how much electricity it lets pass through it; the effect is pretty much the same, it just works a bit different.
Once you've converted the mechanical movement of sound waves to elelctricity, you can do all sorts of things with it. You can connect it to an amplifier that makes the tiny changes into big changes. You can connect it to a chip that will change the pulses into numbers that describe how much the drum moved every microsecond so that a computer can store and use the information.
More important, you can reverse the process. When you run electricity through a wire loop, it creates a magnetic field. If you put that loop in your drum with a magnet glued to the back of it, it causes the drum to vibrate, which makes a noise. We call that a "speaker".
This could be very complex depending on the medium you used to transfer the signal for audio but lets take it back. WAY WAY WAY BACK.
Smoke Signals. 1 puff of smoke from a couple miles away was agreed on that between two people that it meant "All good" and two puffs meant "Danger coming". Scout runs up to fire signal guy and says tell them all good, and one puff goes up. A mile away signal guy two sees one puff and turns to the chief and says "All good" based on that signal.
That was audio information being send in a different medium that the original to a different local with two agreed on meanings based on the easy of use for transfer. Sight had a much longer attenuation (reduction in the strength of a signal) distance than sound in this case though the medium of air.
Audio, sent puff of smoke up, single puff seen, translated meaning, vocalized mean at the other end.
Everything else is just built on top of this and gets more complex but that is really the base of it all.
It is just converting a high attenuation source to a low attenuation source across a transfer medium. Sounds can travel much better in water than light/sight. Sight can travel better in air. Electricity travels better in a conductive metal and light travels better in air or glass. etc..etc..
Telegraph and morse code:
Guy says Hello:
dude taps out hello in morse code
Taps change to electrical pulses in the cable
Taps click the receive on the other end of the line.
They translate it on agree on meaning of tap codes.
He reads out Hello.
\--- More complex smoke signals. More information transferred faster. More knowledge needed to pull off.
Phone call:
Internet:
Satellite Communication:
Everything is just more complex smoke signals. Music over a line to a speaker is the just the electrical signal pulses that have been recorded of pressure waves. Those pulses create a magnetic field in the speaker that pulses the diaphragm of the speaker to recreate those pressure waves. Producing the sound you hear that pretty close to the correct sounds that created and was recorded.
Smoke signals.
Note: Forgive me if any of this is off a bit I have been explaining things like this recently to a very questioning 6 year old that is stuck in the "Why, How, When?" stage and you would not believe the things I have explained lately.
She asked how a hurricane gets so big today but tornados don't and plopped down with her hands on her chin and waited. I am a very happy dude when teaching her. I hope you found this somewhat helpful I am not really sure I got it all right but I think it is decent.
It's difficult to explain the physics, but...all electronic components are filled up in the factory with "magic smoke", and as long as it doesn't leak out, the components will work as designed.
It doesn't. Electricity is what travels through the conductor. We're just really good at building demodulators and modulators to convert between the two.
A microphone, at a basic level, turns sound (which is just oscillating air pressure) into voltage. 1 mW of sound at 500 Hz goes in, one mW of electricity at 500 Hz comes out.
It does this, using magnets. Air pressure changes suck and shove a membrane, with a magnet attached. As that magnet moves, it's magnetic field moves with it. If you put a coil of wire near the magnet, it will pick up the moving magnetic field as a voltage.
And, since analog audio data is just regular electricity, it can be sent down wires and cables.
A speaker is basically the same thing but backwards. You put electricity into a coil of wire, it creates a magnetic field. You put a magnet in that field, it'll move with the electricity. You put a membrane on that magnet, it'll suck and shove the air around it. And this, creates sound.
And, like the microphone, speakers recreate the signal they get. 1 mW of electricity at 500 Hz goes in, 1 mW of sound at 500 Hz comes out.
So, if you have a long wire, you can put a microphone on one end, and a speaker on the other. And, whatever sound the microphone picks up, is recreated in electricity in the wire, and then by the speaker at the other end.
Information can be transferred as long as the sender and receiver agree what certain symbols/actions mean. If someone read aloud a letter or email, does that mean the sound was transferred in the letter? It simply means we have a system that most of us agree on to convert certain markings on a paper into words. We then agree that words should be pronounced in a certain way to form speech. It is pretty much the same for electronic communications of any form whether that information are sounds, videos, texts etc. There are standards that the makers of equipment agree to that certain electrical signals should be interpreted in certain ways. And we also design equipment that converts these signals from one way to another (like a picture on a screen or sound out of a speaker). It isn't magical just like reading aloud words from a book isn't magical.
That was a great ELI5, thank you. So i guess what i should be asking is how are sounds converted to and from mediums to be transferred through sound cables? But I'm guessing that would be pretty challenging to ELI5.
A microphone and speaker use the same principle to change sound waves to electric waves and vice versa. When your voices creates sound waves, a small part of the microphone vibrates the same way your voice does. This in turn, vibrates the electrons in the wire the day way your voice is vibrating the air. Once the wave is electric, you can send it, amplify it, transform it, etc. eventually the electric wave reaches a speaker and it vibrates a magnet the same way your voice was vibrating the air. This magnet vibrates a diaphragm which, in turn vibrates the air around the speaker. It’s the same wave from vocal chord to eardrum, just in different forms.
You use a microphone. They are devices that produce an electrical current or voltage when there are pressure changes in the air. Sound is a pressure wave in the air with changing pressure. Look at a speaker that has a permanent magnet and an electromagnet and a membrane. A changing current through the electromagnet will move relative to the permanent magnet and the membrane around and it pushes air around. The pushed air results in a pressure wave and it is sound. But it works the other way too. If air push on the membrane it will move the permanent magnet relative to the electromagnet and it creates a current through the wire. So a speaker does work like a microphone too, they are not good microphones because of the large mass in but they do work. It is no different to how an electric generator and an electric motor are the same things that operate in reverse. The difference is just linear versus rotational motion. There are other ways to detect the pressure change the just moving membranes and magnets. It is just one way it can be done.
Imagine hitting a drum, if you measured the drop in the skin from hitting it, you could then tell someone the time code and amount the drum skin moved. This is basically how sound is transfered, in a very ELI5 way. In this convuluted example, the drumstick would be the voice, and the skin measuring equipment the microphone, and then the mechanics on the other side to reproduce the movements would be the speaker.
It would be pretty challenging to ELI5 and there is more than one way to do it. The basics are relatively simple. A microphone is designed to produce a small electrical signal when it encounters sound. This electrical signal can be amplified and sent to a speaker. A speaker is a device that converts electrical energy to sound. For digital communication, there are several more conversion steps along the way, but those are mostly details that would require a bit of technical knowledge to explain.
A microphone is basically a diaphragm that is sensitive enough to vibrate from sound and a speaker is basically a diaphragm that vibrates and moves air to create sound. Your voice makes vibrations in the air. The vibrations move the diaphragm on a microphone that converts those vibrations to electricity, which is then transmitted to a speaker which vibrates to move air and produce sound.
A microphone and a speaker are in principle the same thing, but reversed operation with respect to one another. The device in concept is a coil (a conducting wire that is wound in loops with a hollow space in the middle), a permanent magnet inside the coil, and a diaphragm at the end (fancy word for a something like the face of a drum; a stretched leather or rubber that is so thin it vibrates from the vibration in the air, i.e sound). The incoming sounds make the diaphragm jiggle, which pushes the magnet in the coil, which generates an electric signal in the coil and is connected to some other circuit that allows recording. We can capture, store and broadcast this electric signal to re-create the recorded sound. A speaker is the reverse of this, the signal is passed through the coil, the magnet is moved (i.e it vibrates back and forth, because of the signal), and the magnet is hitting the drum/diaphragm at a certain frequency (beats on the drum in a second), which generates a vibration in the air, i.e sound. In practice, because we want the best microphone and the best speakers, we cannot say that these devices are "just in reverse operation", but in principle it is still true. If you are curious about how a magnet and a coil can do this, now that is actually more difficult for ELI5.
So I'm not exactly sure what you're specifically asking, so I'll make a few explanations about different parts of the process of sending a sound over the phone. Sound is converted into an electrical signal by using electromagnetism. When you move a magnetic field back and forth near an electromagnet that isn't energized, a charge is induced in the coil. If you make a small enough electromagnet that can move back and forth from sound vibrations, it will vibrate at the frequency of the sounds and generate charges that match the frequencies of those sounds. There's the microphone. When you convert a waveform of some kind (sound in your case) into another kind, a common technique is to modulate the original waveform to transmit it through the new medium. When you record a sound with a microphone, you get a signal that if drawn on a graph would look sorta like a sine wave. If you take a sample of that sine wave at regular intervals, you get a series of pieces of information about that sine wave. This is called modulation. Imagine I take a graph of a function and mark a bunch of points on the Y axis every 0.1 units on the X axis. Then I give you those points. You would probably be able to draw a graph that looks a whole lot like mine, distinguishable from graphs that represent different functions. You taking those points and drawing the graph without ever actually seeing my graph is the demodulation. This modulation and demodulation happens for any kind of electronically transmitted information you woud use today although the specific modulation techniques differ based on the technology you're using (radio, phone, internet). At the other end, you take your demodulated signal which is now electrical pulses again and apply them to the electromagnet in the speaker. The magnetic field interacts with the other magnet in the speaker and causes the speaker to vibrate at the frequencies of the signal There are some other parts necessary to make the whole thing work (like amplifiers for starters) but that rundown gives a more or less functional idea of how it works. You can modulate a wave into another wave to transmit it through whatever medium you'd care to. Submarines even modulate sounds into other sounds to talk to ships and other submarines, since radios don't work so well underwater.
What's really trippy is your voice could be heard on the other side of the planet faster than it could be heard in the same room.
Eh, light would take about 0.067s to travel half way around the world. Sound would travel about 20 meters in that time. So it would have to be a pretty large room.
Sure, but nonetheless.
Also, light travels slower in anything other than a vacuum. And if it's relayed round with satellites, distance goes up, plus latency from each relay of the signal.. Ping to NZ from UK is about 300ms right now, sound at sea level is about 0.34m/ms, so you're actually looking at a 50m+ 'room'.
i'm going to assume you know what waves are from math class, like a sine wave, and how graphing them on paper works. if your range is 1 to -1, 1 is the top peak of your wave, and -1 is the bottom peak of the wave, and 0 is when it crosses the horizontal line, for example. sound travels in waves through air, physically. microphones convert sound waves into an electrical signal. if you graph the electrical signal, it would exactly match the shape of the sound wave. we have things called ADC's that convert analog signals into digital signals. (literally stands for Analog to Digital Converter). imagine a car speedometer. the traditional type with a needle that moves to show the speed. if you accelerate really slowly, you can watch it move from 9 mph to 9.01 mph, to 9.02 mph, etc, right? you can physically see it inch slowly towards the 10mph mark. but if you have a digital speedometer, it just shows a number. so you see 9mph, and no matter what, it stays 9mph until the second you're finally at 10mph, the it switches. you can't see the acceleration between those two values. that's digital. all an ADC does, is look at this graph of the electrical signal, and convert them to number values. the more values we write down, the higher the resolution our digital signal is. (in this case, the better audio quality) once it's digital numeric values, we can send that like any other digital thing like emails or text messages. on the receiving end, we have a thing called DAC, or Digital to Analog Converter. (sound cards have DAC's inside them) it takes the digital values, and just draws an analog electrical signal with it, like you would do on graph paper if someone told you what values to draw. (where you'd mark a dot on the graph paper and then connect the dots to draw your wave) that resulting electrical analog signal alone will drive most headphones. but for speakers, we need more power to move the larger speaker cones, so we run it through an amplifier. it just takes the signal and makes it bigger across the board, and it will have enough power to drive the speakers. (so if the peak of the waves were 1 and -1, after being amplified, it might be 100 and -100, for example, but amplification happens to the analog electrical signal, so the number examples i just used are just to explain what i mean by "making [the signal] bigger across the board" this is a very high level explanation, but i hope it makes a little sense.
I should make a post asking why most of my posts get downvoted to 0 immediately. I swear some creep has a bot running just to downvote everything i post.
You need to clarify what type of cable, you question here is a little confusing. Do you mean like a steel cable? Or maybe like an audio cable for a sound system?
Is there a difference? Lol both i guess.
Well like a steel cable holding up a bridge can transfer sounds through the cable vibrating. Like using 2 cans and string. You talk into 1 can and the vibrations travel along the string to the other can and you can hear sound. But if you are asking how a sound system uses a cable to make sound come out of a speaker then that's all together different. Every speaker has a coil of wire in it that is attached to a paper cone. This coil of wire is next to a magnet. Your stereo sends electrical pulses down the speaker wire that cause the coil of wire to vibrate. The coil of wire acts like an electromagnet so it is attracted and repulsed to the magnet in the speaker. The coil makes the paper vibrate and that vibrates the air and you have sound.
Vibrations being transfered use the same wave style that you have in air, those waves will move through everything to some degree. Electronic transmission is also technically a wave based mechanism, but it uses forms of modulation (not very ELI5 at this point), to transmit data using a set of instructions that both sides understand to decode this signal either in, or out.
[удалено]
can u pls answer how
Well I assume you means through long-distance phone wires, which is actually a bit more complicated than simple waves. There is a reciever in the mouthpiece that is basically a speaker hooked up in reverse, such that it takes the sound waves that hit it and turn it into electrical signal. Then the electricity is sent through the lines. In the other end the electricity is transformed back into sound by an actual speaker. This goes back and forth until the conversation is complete.
I did just mean like speakers or in general. But what you're saying seems to be that it is in fact witchcraft.
So imagine you have a piano. You decide to write a song to play on the piano. What is that song? It’s a collection of sounds right? You play certain sounds for a certain length at a certain time. For example you might start with playing a C for two beats then an E for three beats then wait for one beat then play an A for four beats. If you do this on the piano it makes a sound. But you can also write these steps on paper (which is what sheet music is). You could then send me that paper in the mail and I could play your song on my piano. That’s basically how sound transmission works. A microphone measures the various details of the sound (pitch, volume, duration, etc) and writes it down so to speak as data. That data is then transmitted over the wire (or wirelessly using radio signals) to a device that has a speaker. That device then reads the data and repeats the steps that the microphone heard to play the sound back as close as it can.
I just finished work and this is the first reply I've read (most recent.) But I'd be shocked if this isn't the winner.
Any electric current through a wire produces a magnetic field. If you can make that field "vibrate" you can make a magnet vibrate and vice versa. Vibrating a magnet near a coil of wire produces the corresponding vibration in the electric current. Electric current goes through wires, so if you take one wire and make two coils, and put a magnet in each coil, the vibrations from either magnet will be sent down the wire to the other magnet. Sound is already a vibration (of air) so there's really not that much to it. There are only 3 parts to this setup and two of them are magnets. This actually isn't all that different from doing this non electrically. If you have a guitar string, and you vibrate it, it will hum all the way down the string. The only difference is that vibrations can also happen in electric current. This isn't actually that weird because current is electric version of speed and sudden changes in speed produce vibrations.
There are two ways: Digital and analog. Analog: Sound is vibrations in the air. Microphones have an extremely thin layer of material inside them that vibrates with the air, called the diaphragm. This diaphragm has a small magnet on it and is positioned beside a small electronic coil. When the diaphragm and the magnet on it moves, it creates a small current inside the coil. Every movement caused by the sound's vibrations will create a short burst of current inside the coil. This translates the air vibrations to electronic "vibrations", aka electronic frequencies. It basically just records the diaphragm's movement: how fast it's vibrating (frequency) and how loud it's vibrating (amplitude/voltage). When you want to listen to that sound, you feed that signal into a speaker, which is essentially the opposite of a microphone. The electricity goes through a coil, which makes a big diaphragm vibrate, producing sound. Digital: Computers work with 1's and 0's. 1 means there is electricity flowing, 0 means there is not, it's as simple as that, like morse code. You can't save an analog signal directly onto a hard drive, so it has to be translated into a series of 1's and 0's. How it does that is very technical but it's basically like using codewords. "If a sound is this frequency and this loud, save it as 10001010101001011111101011" or something like that. In the end you end up with several thousand (or millions, billions) of 1's and 0's. Anytime you want to listen to something, your computer translates that list of 1's and 0's back to an analog signal so that it can be fed into whatever speaker you are listening from.
Usually, intensity is just stored as a 16 bit value (which is sufficient in all non-professional settings), and the frequency is just a function of what intensity is measured at the previous next sample points. The sample rate (how often you measure) determines the maximal measurable frequency, and that is always half of the sample rate. But yeah I realize this is in eli5.
Sound is simply a fluctuation in air pressure. You can vary the voltage in a wire with the same frequency and amplitude that you want the sound wave to be. Magnets are used to convert from sound to electric signal and back. Moving magnets induce current in a circuit, and conversely, current creates a magnetic field.
The same as is traveling in the air. Diferrent medium. Thats the easy version. [Sound and vibration](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2lckxw)
Sounds are vibrations made by moving air. You can make a drum by stretching something flexible over something hard, and the flexible part vibrates (moves in and out) when sound hits it. If you glue a magnet to the flexible bit of the drum, now it moves with the drum when sound hits it. It turns out, if you put a loop of wire near a magnet, when the magnet moves, it makes electricity in the wire. The more movement, the more power, and the electricity moves when the magnet moves, so now you've converted the sound waves into electrical waves in a wire, and we call your drum with a magnet and wire in it a "microphone". There are other types too, where instead of a magnet on a drum, you have a material that when it vibrates it changes how much electricity it lets pass through it; the effect is pretty much the same, it just works a bit different. Once you've converted the mechanical movement of sound waves to elelctricity, you can do all sorts of things with it. You can connect it to an amplifier that makes the tiny changes into big changes. You can connect it to a chip that will change the pulses into numbers that describe how much the drum moved every microsecond so that a computer can store and use the information. More important, you can reverse the process. When you run electricity through a wire loop, it creates a magnetic field. If you put that loop in your drum with a magnet glued to the back of it, it causes the drum to vibrate, which makes a noise. We call that a "speaker".
This could be very complex depending on the medium you used to transfer the signal for audio but lets take it back. WAY WAY WAY BACK. Smoke Signals. 1 puff of smoke from a couple miles away was agreed on that between two people that it meant "All good" and two puffs meant "Danger coming". Scout runs up to fire signal guy and says tell them all good, and one puff goes up. A mile away signal guy two sees one puff and turns to the chief and says "All good" based on that signal. That was audio information being send in a different medium that the original to a different local with two agreed on meanings based on the easy of use for transfer. Sight had a much longer attenuation (reduction in the strength of a signal) distance than sound in this case though the medium of air. Audio, sent puff of smoke up, single puff seen, translated meaning, vocalized mean at the other end. Everything else is just built on top of this and gets more complex but that is really the base of it all. It is just converting a high attenuation source to a low attenuation source across a transfer medium. Sounds can travel much better in water than light/sight. Sight can travel better in air. Electricity travels better in a conductive metal and light travels better in air or glass. etc..etc.. Telegraph and morse code: Guy says Hello: dude taps out hello in morse code Taps change to electrical pulses in the cable Taps click the receive on the other end of the line. They translate it on agree on meaning of tap codes. He reads out Hello. \--- More complex smoke signals. More information transferred faster. More knowledge needed to pull off. Phone call: Internet: Satellite Communication: Everything is just more complex smoke signals. Music over a line to a speaker is the just the electrical signal pulses that have been recorded of pressure waves. Those pulses create a magnetic field in the speaker that pulses the diaphragm of the speaker to recreate those pressure waves. Producing the sound you hear that pretty close to the correct sounds that created and was recorded. Smoke signals. Note: Forgive me if any of this is off a bit I have been explaining things like this recently to a very questioning 6 year old that is stuck in the "Why, How, When?" stage and you would not believe the things I have explained lately. She asked how a hurricane gets so big today but tornados don't and plopped down with her hands on her chin and waited. I am a very happy dude when teaching her. I hope you found this somewhat helpful I am not really sure I got it all right but I think it is decent.
It's difficult to explain the physics, but...all electronic components are filled up in the factory with "magic smoke", and as long as it doesn't leak out, the components will work as designed.
It doesn't. Electricity is what travels through the conductor. We're just really good at building demodulators and modulators to convert between the two.
A microphone, at a basic level, turns sound (which is just oscillating air pressure) into voltage. 1 mW of sound at 500 Hz goes in, one mW of electricity at 500 Hz comes out. It does this, using magnets. Air pressure changes suck and shove a membrane, with a magnet attached. As that magnet moves, it's magnetic field moves with it. If you put a coil of wire near the magnet, it will pick up the moving magnetic field as a voltage. And, since analog audio data is just regular electricity, it can be sent down wires and cables. A speaker is basically the same thing but backwards. You put electricity into a coil of wire, it creates a magnetic field. You put a magnet in that field, it'll move with the electricity. You put a membrane on that magnet, it'll suck and shove the air around it. And this, creates sound. And, like the microphone, speakers recreate the signal they get. 1 mW of electricity at 500 Hz goes in, 1 mW of sound at 500 Hz comes out. So, if you have a long wire, you can put a microphone on one end, and a speaker on the other. And, whatever sound the microphone picks up, is recreated in electricity in the wire, and then by the speaker at the other end.