Ironically, if you spin a record super-fast for higher quality audio, it will probably sound horrible. The holes often aren't perfectly in center; and it create

Ironically, if you spin a record super-fast for higher quality audio, it will probably sound horrible. The holes often aren't perfectly in center; and it creates a waawaawaawaawaa (or wawawawawa on 45s) sound in any long sustained note. Playing a record super-slow for a long playback would result in everything sounding off-key. (This is why cd players make a shushushushush sound when you hold them up to your ear, it's the laser rapidly adjusting to an off-center hole.) This also gets into an important difference between digital and analog: The ability to abstract away the physical playback mechanism from the representation allows for buffering so that playback is at the correct speed, even if the physical medium has an inconsistent speed. Digital also allows a continuous signal to be constructed from a broken signal: IE, streaming audio is constructed from many separate network packets. In contrast, analog audio equipment is usually "instant," and digital audio equipment sometimes has a delay.