Pulse Code Modulation To send a person's voice down the wire of the telephone required amplification to ensure the signal would reach the person on the other end. The early telephone system was entirely analog, this meant that when the signal was amplified, the unwanted noise was amplified along with the message. In 1937, Alec Reeves saw a solution in the emerging field of computing. His algorithm was so radical, it couldn't be implemented practically for 20 years. The computer designs at the time could not handle the bandwith of data created by the process Reeves invented. Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) was a process of taking continuous readings or samples of an analog signal and returning a set of values in 1s and 0s. Instead of transmitting the signal itself, the set of values would be transmitted and the receiver would translate the binary code into a signal again. The frequency of the readings taken of the original signal determines the quality of the recorded media, amplification of the signal in transmission is not needed for each part of a binary code is either on or off. Although Reeves initially invented the PCM process for transmitting voice over telephone lines, he soon showed it was compatible with audio, pictures, and video. Radio could be used just as well as wire for the transmission of PCM, Reeves invention was a method of moving information. The transmission of a signal in the form of PCM data was essentially lossless, no 1s and 0s were lost along the way. Given this lossless nature of the PCM process and the resilience to wear of the magnetic recording method invented by Poulsen, a sound recording uniting the two visions should naturally arise. Once computing power was sufficient to create reliable PCM sound recordings, it was pushed to take the maximum number of samples possible in a PCM stream. What remained was for sound artists to decide when the number of samples resulted in digital recordings that were equal in fidelity to their analog counterparts. By the time computing power caught up in the late 60s and early 70s, radical sound artists were quick to forgo fidelity in favor of flexibility. In case you haven't been paying attention, Reeves' invention is the process behind modern telephone and television systems, the .wav recording, and CD-Audio. The algorithms that encode most of the media we experience today are based on his original analog to digital computations. Can there ever be enough samples of a PCM stream? Some say no and insist that a direct to disc analog vinyl format is the highest fidelity recording possible.