Digital audio won the popularity contest years ago, and nowadays almost every sound you hear coming out of a speaker is digitally encoded. Sound is always digital, whether it’s on your phone, computer, radio, TV, home theater, or in a concert hall. I’d go so far as to say most people never hear analog recordings anymore. Unless you’re a musician, or live with one, virtually all the music you hear live or recorded is digital.
Digital audio eliminated all of analog audio’s distortions and noise-related problems. In that sense digital is “perfect.” When analog recordings are copied, there are significant generation-to-generation losses, added distortion, and noise; digital-to-digital copies are perfect clones. Some recording engineers believe digital doesn’t have a sound per se, and that it’s a completely transparent recording medium. Analog, with its distortions, noise, and speed variations imparts its own sound to music. Perfect, it is not.
This article ought to start a few arguments.
I am impressed by the high levels of audio awareness of today’s contributors.
Captain…chops the peaks? huh?
crazier…while technically true, very few people can hear the difference. Double blind tests confirm this all the time. And your analogy is flawed. Digital is better in terms of reproduction, durability, and transportation. In the old analog days the difference between the studio multitrack quality and the record quality was very large for the vast majority of records. Today the diff between the digital signal on the hdd in the studio and the sound from a CD is much narrower than in analog days, and it’s a LOT easier to maintain that relative high quality throughout the process. Durability differences should be obvious. Same with transportation…digital is 100% when transported and analog always loses something along the way.
Chris…you sound like some Mac fans I know.
Why is it that all the smarty-pants who try to sound intelligent by quoting the Nyquist Theorem are the very same people who don’t have a clue what quantization means?
This is not a 1-dimensional issue, guys.
#42 I’m just saying that records are special for reasons only somewhat related to sound.
A well preserved Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, or Beatles LP is a thing of art. It almost certainly doesn’t get used much. Like a classic car, the original function is now secondary.
Only if I told you that I bought ALL my music on records because of these “feel” effects would I sound like an Apple person.
Why is it that all the smarty-pants who try to sound intelligent by making unwarranted assumptions and insults never actually contribute to a discussion?
Go be a pick a fight some place else.
chris, lol this is true. My son, a musician, found my old LP collection and has a dozen of them on the wall in his apartment. I don’t miss those LPs, not for a second. (hope he didn’t find any seeds in the double-albums….)
But for fun, swap ‘Mac’ for ‘record’ in your earlier post…and you wrote some good stuff. Made me laugh, anyway.
Almost all modern pop/rock CDs distort at the playback stage on the CD player as they are mastered to a higher level than was originally planned in the Red Book standard.
I actually believe that some people find mp3s sound better because (with reasonable settings) mp3 players do not distort the digital to analog convertor.
CDs became popular because the record companies decided to phase out vinyl anyway and because you get to use a remote control. DVD Audio and Super Audio CD offered no real advantage in this respect.
The main difference in digital recording compared to analog recording is that digital captures the transient response much better. However this is not so pleasing to the ear. That’s why we in the recording industry use a lot of expensive equipment to make digital sound analog with somewhat limited success.
Digital was ment to be better then analog. But it depends on how you use digital. One thing Digital allows for is reductions in sampling rates. Some cannot tell and some can. The problem I see is that in the end its still analog that produces music. Its a electrical signal applied to a speaker. That too me is still the problem if not a worse one today. Apple is notorious for providing lousy ear buds with iPods. Its sad that we have some of the best technology in Digital audio and yet we kill it by using bad sampling rates and poor sound reproduction.
I’m 100% in agreement with #36 (Captain Har).
For my electronica, synth pop, and modern (read: overproduced) music, digital is fine: lots of square waves easily appoximated.
But for stringed music, especially with multiple strings, it sounds garbled to me.
Whenever i have this argument with others, i turn to Eagles Hotel California as my clearest example. Listen, if you will on vinyl then on CD and you will hear the difference even on a normal sound system (i use an early 2000s entry level Denon).
OH, YES! Those snaps, crackles and pops I spent so much money trying to eliminate by buying ridiculous turntables and stylii when playing all my vinyl records were SO much clearer in analog days!
“This article ought to start a few arguments.”
Only dipshit retards take anything written at CNet seriously, let alone argue about it.
#49
Are you referring to the Eagle’s Greatest Hits Album? In my opinion that CD was badly mastered. It’s unlikely the fault of being digital.
-oldman
Yikes. So – the pure digital is better than what the ear was constructed to listen to? I don’t think so. Pure analog is better than anything!
It is very much as whole, killed virus compared to recombinants for immunity inducement. And no surprise – nature normally wins. And no big surprise in that, And as audio goes I consider myself as ‘nature’. So bugger off with this ‘digital’ brainwash! And Bo Diddley rambles on……
Sound like the old VHS v. BetaMax debate, and we know how that turned out…
I hate CD recordings of violins because the digital sampling rate necessarily limits bandwidth and cuts off harmonics /overtones of violin string beyond the sampling rate and therefore distorts the sound of the note or timbre. Even though my hearing may be limited in the high frequency end, I can hear the distortion of the high violin notes. They become screechie to my ears. Good highspeed analog taping produces the best reproduction,but sometimes can’t handle high dynamic ranges without using some compression which also distorts.
What a load of drivel. Solid state devices have hundreds of components in the signal path. Each one of those components introduces phase shift that varies with frequency. Massive feedback is require to keep them anywhere linear which also introduces phase shift. There is so much phase shift in digital and solid state devices that you can actually hear the harmonics of a note as much as 720 degrees ahead of the fundamental note.
Vinyl recorded with tube amps and preamps, played on tubes are far better because there are so few components in the signal path that phase shift is minimal.
When was the last time you were able yo visualize a true soundstage front to back and left to right. To actually be able to point at instrument locations in that soundstage?
In my sound room you can turn off the lights and I defy anyone to locate the speakers but locating every instrument in the orchestra is childs play with good vinyl recordings.
High sample rate (96k minimum) 24 bit digital *can* sound better than an LP. An LP played with a costly cartridge on a precisely lined up tonearm on a quiet, speed-accurate table. With a spotlessly clean unworn piece of firmware (vinyl). Digital’s greatest strength is that it can be copied perfectly (in the digital domain). If highly precise conversion to and from digital occurs then it becomes difficult to tell the difference on a high resolution system and nearly impossible on typical playback equipment.
CDs can sound very good, or they can sound like crap. LPs can sound incredible, or they can sound like crap. SACDs, DVD Audio, and Blu Ray audio can sound incredible (I don’t have any that sound like crap, but I don’t have many). CDs are pervasive because they’re sturdy and convenient. And once enough people lose their hard-drive music collections to crashed disks, the predictions of the demise of the optical disk will go away.
#39 Sam –
“However, the speaker vibrates thousands of times a second to create pressure waves that you hear as, say a note.”
The speaker is being driven by the amplifier which is getting an analog signal from the audio CD player, let’s say. The thousands of times a second is from the sampling rate, 44.1 kHz. Meaning that 44,100 times a second one of 2^16 (65,536) possible voltages is generated by the CD player, one for each channel in order to reproduce stereo.
When you speak of compression, don’t confuse this with digital lossy compression such as the mp3 format. That’s where psychoacoustics comes into play.
#40 ericD –
In CD sampling, a sample is an integer value. one of 2^16, not a formula as in vector graphics. The Nyquist frequency is for the highest possible frequency to be recorded.
“From there the signal can theoretically be reproduced perfectly.” It can not. This is where quantization value or bit depth comes into play.
#47 audiodragon -
The record stores wanted to stock one format and cds sounded much better in cars. Cds are also more durable than Lps or cassettes. Super Audio CD uses a different way of digitally encoding the audio signal. It can provide better sound with more than two channels reproduced.
Say what you want but I’ll never give up the needle drop as the embers die while Floyd dances off the grooves. Sometimes it’s only a tron effect riding the mass stylus between the quivering valley
T-Bone Burnett (an audio genius, IMHO) recorded John Mellencamp’s latest album in analog.
He wanted a certain sound not possible with digital.
http://tinyurl.com/26ty4p8
As a former producer (a hack, I admit), I prefer digital — but I don’t worship it. You’d have a hard time convincing me that the rock classics would have been any better on digital. And they might not have sounded the same.