8 ms·

How do you figure? An analog impression directly mirrors reality, digital is just an approximation. So digital seems inherently inferior.

by kid64 4y ago

caned 4y ago
An analog signal recorded to tape is subject to all manner of distortions that don't apply to digital recordings, including frequency-dependent phase shift, crosstalk between tracks, print-through, tape hiss, and saturation. I can never buy the argument that analog recordings are better _because_ they are more faithful. I do think they can sound very beautiful and be aesthetically pleasing, however.
arielweisberg 4y ago
The two analog mediums I mentioned are both pretty flawed and difficult to get clean sound out of. Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest. Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.
- crmd 4y ago
  One of the non-obvious reasons vinyl albums often sound better than their digital counterparts is that the mastering process for cutting vinyl is extremely “hands on” and is typically performed by senior mastering engineers working with top of the line equipment. The very act of having an old set of ears listening critically to each track, and making subtle changes like shelving equalization, surgical multiband compression, and stereo width reduction in the low end (to keep the needle from bouncing), will often improve the sound of an album before it’s even sent to the vinyl cutting machine.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    This is underacknowledged. A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback. Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  Great digital is absolutely best approach if you want great sound. You CAN get really lovely sound out of an analog (vinyl) setup, for sure. But it's going to be expensive and fiddly, whereas the digital shit tends to just work. And nobody can reliably differentiate between high-bitrate streamed digital and CD source. It can't be done.
- kid64 4y ago
  Not trolling, but can you elaborate on vinyl's flaws? My understanding is that the width of the groove corresponds directly to the frequency. Issues of dust etc are just implementation problems, which can be resolved by placing a small vacuum near the stylus (for example). But maybe I don't fully understand how it works.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    They have inherent noise that you can't escape nor can they faithfully reproduce low frequencies. Variation in all of the mechanical parts affects the sound reproduction and they are damaged on every playback.
  - SaberTail 4y ago
    Off the top of my head: For the disks: Vinyl can get permanently scratched. The disks can get warped. The playback needle can put too much force on the groove and damage it. For the playback: It's incredibly difficult to get a motor to spin the disk at a perfectly uniform rate, so you get distortions in the frequencies being played back known as "wow" and "flutter". The groove is not the audio exactly as recorded, but instead equalized to lower bass frequencies so that the needle doesn't skip out of the groove. This RIAA equalization has to be undone for playback, and if it is done with analog components, it's never going to be exact.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    I'm desperately trying to find the exact source, but Zappa [allegedly(!)] stated that he preferred his lps to be 18-22 mins due to that being the best audio quality available, given the physical size of a disk versus the size/ quality of the grooves thereon. Closest I can find so far - https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-albums-with-just-3-tracks-or-less-frank-zappa-miles-davis.htm https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-al...
  - nelgaard 4y ago
    Yes (depending on the modulation), just as the bits on a CD corresponds directly to the frequency. Vinyl records have limitations determined by design decisions and physical properties. For example deep bass and stereo separation are reduced on vinyl or the stylus would jump out of the groove. And vinyl records have a lot more noise than good digital formats.
- squidsoup 4y ago
  For some genres of music, clean sound is not what you want.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    True true. I like the sound of music from the early days of recording ... foxtrots, rags, blues ... that only sound right with that pre-tape, pre-mike ambience. A 'cleaned-up' 1909 version of "Shine on harvest moon" is a crime against humanity. (Like colorizing 'Citizen Kane', or Laurel and Hardy.) That's the way people heard it then. And (up until the depression, anyway) they bought it and danced to it by the millions. Squeaky-clean 'fidelity' can work against good music. It's like purple fluorescent lights ... antiseptic.
  - mnd999 4y ago
    You want you music to sound less like what was recorded? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
    - squidsoup 4y ago
      I think we're talking across purposes, I was referring to recording on tape.
dragontamer 4y ago
> An analog impression directly mirrors reality A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably. Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape. Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically) -------- In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out. Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them. Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
They’re both approximations. In this case and most cases, the digital approximation is much closer to the original than the analog approximation.
- jcpst 4y ago
  Depends on how you think about it. From a data perspective, digital definitely captures less information than analog. We’re talking about the difference between discrete (digital) and contiguous (analog) data. I agree with saying that digital more accurately reproduces that data, because of the playback technology used. Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal. In other terms, it is random noise applied to the digital data stream to “smooth out” the discrete differences between one sample to the next. The thing people find pleasing about analog is the inaccuracies in the playback, in the form of harmonic distortion. I like that harmonic distortion btw, but love digital for clarity.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    > digital definitely captures less information than analog If your sampling frequency is high enough, digital captures the signal perfectly. Analog captures less of that signal, and a bunch of noise.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      Neither is true. Whether a digital or analog channel carries more information and less noise depends entirely on the channel parameters. An ideal analog channel is noise-free and has infinite frequency response. An ideal digital channel carries infinite bits per second (and can be carried by the former analog channel). All digital communications is ultimately carried in an analog medium: e.g. twisted pair ethernet cable or what have you. The performance of that communication is within the limits established by the analog container. The simple analog coding techniques, though, are inflexible with regard to reallocating noise. E.g. an analog channel is noisy, we can use it to transmit digital information that is noise free, such as UTF-8 text. We reallocate the noise into a bandwidth limitation.

How do you figure? An analog impression directly mirrors reality, digital is just an approximation. So digital seems inherently inferior.

by kid64 4y ago

How do you figure? An analog impression directly mirrors reality, digital is just an approximation. So digital seems inherently inferior.

caned 4y ago

An analog signal recorded to tape is subject to all manner of distortions that don't apply to digital recordings, including frequency-dependent phase shift, crosstalk between tracks, print-through, tape hiss, and saturation. I can never buy the argument that analog recordings are better _because_ they are more faithful. I do think they can sound very beautiful and be aesthetically pleasing, however.

arielweisberg 4y ago

The two analog mediums I mentioned are both pretty flawed and difficult to get clean sound out of. Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest. Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.

crmd 4y ago
One of the non-obvious reasons vinyl albums often sound better than their digital counterparts is that the mastering process for cutting vinyl is extremely “hands on” and is typically performed by senior mastering engineers working with top of the line equipment. The very act of having an old set of ears listening critically to each track, and making subtle changes like shelving equalization, surgical multiband compression, and stereo width reduction in the low end (to keep the needle from bouncing), will often improve the sound of an album before it’s even sent to the vinyl cutting machine.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  This is underacknowledged. A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback. Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.
ubermonkey 4y ago
Great digital is absolutely best approach if you want great sound. You CAN get really lovely sound out of an analog (vinyl) setup, for sure. But it's going to be expensive and fiddly, whereas the digital shit tends to just work. And nobody can reliably differentiate between high-bitrate streamed digital and CD source. It can't be done.
kid64 4y ago
Not trolling, but can you elaborate on vinyl's flaws? My understanding is that the width of the groove corresponds directly to the frequency. Issues of dust etc are just implementation problems, which can be resolved by placing a small vacuum near the stylus (for example). But maybe I don't fully understand how it works.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  They have inherent noise that you can't escape nor can they faithfully reproduce low frequencies. Variation in all of the mechanical parts affects the sound reproduction and they are damaged on every playback.
- SaberTail 4y ago
  Off the top of my head: For the disks: Vinyl can get permanently scratched. The disks can get warped. The playback needle can put too much force on the groove and damage it. For the playback: It's incredibly difficult to get a motor to spin the disk at a perfectly uniform rate, so you get distortions in the frequencies being played back known as "wow" and "flutter". The groove is not the audio exactly as recorded, but instead equalized to lower bass frequencies so that the needle doesn't skip out of the groove. This RIAA equalization has to be undone for playback, and if it is done with analog components, it's never going to be exact.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  I'm desperately trying to find the exact source, but Zappa [allegedly(!)] stated that he preferred his lps to be 18-22 mins due to that being the best audio quality available, given the physical size of a disk versus the size/ quality of the grooves thereon. Closest I can find so far - https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-albums-with-just-3-tracks-or-less-frank-zappa-miles-davis.htm https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-al...
- nelgaard 4y ago
  Yes (depending on the modulation), just as the bits on a CD corresponds directly to the frequency. Vinyl records have limitations determined by design decisions and physical properties. For example deep bass and stereo separation are reduced on vinyl or the stylus would jump out of the groove. And vinyl records have a lot more noise than good digital formats.
squidsoup 4y ago
For some genres of music, clean sound is not what you want.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  True true. I like the sound of music from the early days of recording ... foxtrots, rags, blues ... that only sound right with that pre-tape, pre-mike ambience. A 'cleaned-up' 1909 version of "Shine on harvest moon" is a crime against humanity. (Like colorizing 'Citizen Kane', or Laurel and Hardy.) That's the way people heard it then. And (up until the depression, anyway) they bought it and danced to it by the millions. Squeaky-clean 'fidelity' can work against good music. It's like purple fluorescent lights ... antiseptic.
- mnd999 4y ago
  You want you music to sound less like what was recorded? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
  - squidsoup 4y ago
    I think we're talking across purposes, I was referring to recording on tape.

dragontamer 4y ago

> An analog impression directly mirrors reality A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably. Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape. Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically) -------- In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out. Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them. Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

They’re both approximations. In this case and most cases, the digital approximation is much closer to the original than the analog approximation.

jcpst 4y ago
Depends on how you think about it. From a data perspective, digital definitely captures less information than analog. We’re talking about the difference between discrete (digital) and contiguous (analog) data. I agree with saying that digital more accurately reproduces that data, because of the playback technology used. Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal. In other terms, it is random noise applied to the digital data stream to “smooth out” the discrete differences between one sample to the next. The thing people find pleasing about analog is the inaccuracies in the playback, in the form of harmonic distortion. I like that harmonic distortion btw, but love digital for clarity.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  > digital definitely captures less information than analog If your sampling frequency is high enough, digital captures the signal perfectly. Analog captures less of that signal, and a bunch of noise.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Neither is true. Whether a digital or analog channel carries more information and less noise depends entirely on the channel parameters. An ideal analog channel is noise-free and has infinite frequency response. An ideal digital channel carries infinite bits per second (and can be carried by the former analog channel). All digital communications is ultimately carried in an analog medium: e.g. twisted pair ethernet cable or what have you. The performance of that communication is within the limits established by the analog container. The simple analog coding techniques, though, are inflexible with regard to reallocating noise. E.g. an analog channel is noisy, we can use it to transmit digital information that is noise free, such as UTF-8 text. We reallocate the noise into a bandwidth limitation.