A magnetic resonance imaging apparatus includes one or more digital transmitters (B), one or more digital receivers (C), and digital data processing circuitry (D) which are all clocked and controlled by a single clock (F). Each digital transmitter includes a numerically controlled modulated oscillator (20) which processes digital phase and frequency signals to produce an output which addresses a wave-form map stored in a PROM (22). Each wave-form output of the PROM is multiplied (24) by a digital amplitude profile signal to generate a phase, frequency, and amplitude modulated digital RF signals. A clock gate (30) controls clocking of the digital modulation to create RF pulses. A digital-to-analog converter (28) converts the digital information to an analog RF pulse which is applied to a subject in an image region. The receivers each include an analog-to-digital converter (60) which digitizes the magnetic resonance signal emanating from the subject in the image region with four fold oversampling. A pair of FIR filters (62a, 62b) multiply the digital resonance signal by digital sine and cosine filter coefficients to create in-phase and out-of-phase digital magnetic resonance signal components. After additional digital filtering (64a, 64b), the digital in-phase and quadrature components are Fourier transformed (70) and accumulated in an image memory (72) to form an image representation.