And here I thought I'd have to go to Facebook for rants like this.
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Digital vs Analog
- Thread starter icarus88
- Start date
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Multichannel auditioning, or surround as you wanna call it, started in the analog realm.
Imagine if we could read it in the full glory of analog type on physical paper without digital pixelation degrading the soul of the rant.
If it were analog would the rant be less wrong or more wrong? Or would it be just as wrong but you wouldn't be able to read it unless it was printed on a printing press?
you're gonna shirt your pants when you find out how class D amplifiers work.
To listen to analog in all its beauty, you would need to go serious lengths.
1. You have to make sure the entire production of a piece of music, from the moment the artist struck a chord up until the moment the speaker in your home vibrates that chord into the air, has been 100% analog. Not a single piece of digital gear involved anywhere in that process. That's kinda hard to find.
2. You need to use gear that is able to reproduce that music with a frightening faithfulness. I'm talking about a stereo system that is at least five figures.
There's not much sense if those tiny details that make out the mojo of analog gear dissipate in the lack of quality of the system that plays the music.
Both are big hurdles.
Then there are the limitations of working analog.
Analog audio tape has, under ideal circumstances, a dynamic range of 77 dB
That seems plenty, given that an LP that's perfectly cut from perfect vinyl can get up to 70dB.
However, between recording and releasing, there will be multiple instances where tape will be copied to tape.
Let's say you record the instruments separately, then process each track with EQ, compression and what else is needed in one go,
then combine them all on one tape and then master that tape, you'll have a minimum of three times tape was copied to tape. Each of these processes limits the dynamic range because it raises the noise floor. Let's assume everyone did a good job and the increase in noise floor is only 3dB in each instance,
you'll be looking at 68dB dynamic range on the master tape - and that's assuming a lot.
In a more real world scenario you'd be starting out around 75dB and copied 5 times and lost 5dB each time, ending up with 50dB on the master tape.
When you record to a HD digital system, you start out with a much higher dynamic range and you keep that exact range throughout the entire process because there is no loss when copying digital formats.
Furthermore it's not fair to say "I hate MP3, digital is inferior to analog".
If you bring up MP3, you would have to be fair and compare it to a regular casette tape. One that was copied from LP on a home stereo system and kept in a car where it was played regularly for two years.
If you take analog audio tape as your reference for analog, which is the best the analog world has to offer, you will have to take a lossless HD format for your digital oponent.
A HD player loaded with files that have 24bit, 96khz or more.
Plus you will have to listen to a piece that was recorded and processed in digital HD.
If you compare a Jimi Hendrix or Beatles "HD remastered" thing to the original LP or tape you have to understand that while the digital format is capable of so much more, both the HD remix and the original come from the same tape.
1. You have to make sure the entire production of a piece of music, from the moment the artist struck a chord up until the moment the speaker in your home vibrates that chord into the air, has been 100% analog. Not a single piece of digital gear involved anywhere in that process. That's kinda hard to find.
2. You need to use gear that is able to reproduce that music with a frightening faithfulness. I'm talking about a stereo system that is at least five figures.
There's not much sense if those tiny details that make out the mojo of analog gear dissipate in the lack of quality of the system that plays the music.
Both are big hurdles.
Then there are the limitations of working analog.
Analog audio tape has, under ideal circumstances, a dynamic range of 77 dB
That seems plenty, given that an LP that's perfectly cut from perfect vinyl can get up to 70dB.
However, between recording and releasing, there will be multiple instances where tape will be copied to tape.
Let's say you record the instruments separately, then process each track with EQ, compression and what else is needed in one go,
then combine them all on one tape and then master that tape, you'll have a minimum of three times tape was copied to tape. Each of these processes limits the dynamic range because it raises the noise floor. Let's assume everyone did a good job and the increase in noise floor is only 3dB in each instance,
you'll be looking at 68dB dynamic range on the master tape - and that's assuming a lot.
In a more real world scenario you'd be starting out around 75dB and copied 5 times and lost 5dB each time, ending up with 50dB on the master tape.
When you record to a HD digital system, you start out with a much higher dynamic range and you keep that exact range throughout the entire process because there is no loss when copying digital formats.
Furthermore it's not fair to say "I hate MP3, digital is inferior to analog".
If you bring up MP3, you would have to be fair and compare it to a regular casette tape. One that was copied from LP on a home stereo system and kept in a car where it was played regularly for two years.
If you take analog audio tape as your reference for analog, which is the best the analog world has to offer, you will have to take a lossless HD format for your digital oponent.
A HD player loaded with files that have 24bit, 96khz or more.
Plus you will have to listen to a piece that was recorded and processed in digital HD.
If you compare a Jimi Hendrix or Beatles "HD remastered" thing to the original LP or tape you have to understand that while the digital format is capable of so much more, both the HD remix and the original come from the same tape.
I used to think like this.... not any more.
This argument is not a night-and-day difference that some people think it is.
A heavily compressed digital recording on spotify VS a top notch analog recording is not a fair comparison. The same way a lazy mixing engineer who scoops the mids out of every single source to make their job faster, should not be compared with an engineer who spends the time to balance a mix.
So lets be fair.
We might be able to tell the difference between CD's and Vinyl in a blind test, but both of these media have obvious limitations & benefits.
IME, anyone listening to an uncompressed, top quality digital recording and an analog source , will have a hard time consistently telling the difference in a blind test, if it weren't for artifacts (pops, hiss etc.) in many analog sources. And I would suggest a blind test would surprise some people how often they pick the uncompressed digital files as being superior.
Question - have you ever recorded to tape? Cos I feel this is a troll post.
I ask, cos it's a massive pain compared to digital. Not only is it more expensive, it's more time consuming, and has limitations, like how many tracks you can record to. Lets not even get into recording a group that isn't well rehearsed.....
Even during recording if you run out of tracks and need to bounce multiple tracks down to a stereo pair and record over the original tracks.
And we've all heard the story of Queen holding the Bohemian Rhapsody tape up to the light and it was nearly transparent and they had to transfer it to a new tape to carry on recording.
This exact argument has been made since the early 80s.
People have continued to make the same argument for over forty years despite big advances in tech.
CDs MP3 and iPod are all old things. Even crusty old iPods have been able to play better formats for a very long time.
I think people just WANT to believe that all digital audio is bad.
Analog is as much of a religion as it is a format at this point.
There are thousands of examples of both great and terrible recordings made with both analog and digital technologies.
People have continued to make the same argument for over forty years despite big advances in tech.
CDs MP3 and iPod are all old things. Even crusty old iPods have been able to play better formats for a very long time.
I think people just WANT to believe that all digital audio is bad.
Analog is as much of a religion as it is a format at this point.
There are thousands of examples of both great and terrible recordings made with both analog and digital technologies.
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Not too terribly long after people started moving to digital, the loudness wars started. Albums/songs were compressed and with that we started loosing all of our dynamics and it's no good imho. Along with things moving to digital it made it easier for people to record and mix their own stuff, resulting in a lot more questionably mixed music out in the wild.
Methinks OP is blaming it all on digital, maybe because it is challenging to understand(?) when instead OP should be blaming it on those things.
Methinks OP is blaming it all on digital, maybe because it is challenging to understand(?) when instead OP should be blaming it on those things.
Sorry to be pedantic, but just to clarify the math a bit, hopefully in understandable terms.
There are two separate mechanisms at play: sampling and quantization.
Sampling is fully reversible, if the original signal does not contain frequency components above half the sampling rate, doing the sampling does not lose any information; interpolating the sampled signal rebuilds the original analog signal exactly. The idea here is that human ears cannot hear anything above a certain frequency (around 20000 Hz for the most sensible humans) so if there is anything above that frequency (ultrasounds) they are always erased by filters at some point, because they could not be heard by anyone but still consume power and may cause interference to other systems. 44000 Hz is chosen to be a good 10% more than the minimum, just to be even more sure no frequencies are lost.
Quantization is indeed non-reversible. If there is any loss of information, it is because of quantization. 16 bits should mean about 65000 different levels of instantaneous amplitude of the audio signal, either positive or negative, so you get more than 30000 possible values between 0 and maximum possible amplitude. There are people who claim to be able to perceive differences that small, so you can claim it too. Generally speaking, 30000 was considered sufficient for everyone not to be able to tell the difference in audio applications, but YMMV.
Also, Ether doesn't exist.
But you are right that CDs are flat.
Dear Icarus,
As someone with a master’s degree in electric engineering and computer science, I’ll just say sampling has been around since 1937 and it works as advertised.
Feel free to engage in the analog vs.digital argument all you like but it’s far more complicated than just saying a particular CD sounds flat compared to the vinyl or tape version.
I’ve purchased a few HD recordings just to see if the hype is justified. Well it is and it isn’t. The main problem is that for every format, whether LP, tape, CD, DVD, DSD, etc. there is a new master required. Read that again. A new master is required. So of course the they all sound different!
Many reissues are proudly advertised as “remastered from the original tapes” which means a new mastering engineer is making new decisions about how it should sound. For some CDs, they have been remastered multiple times. In the vinyl market some LP reissues are available from multiple labels remastered by different engineers, pressed at different plants, etc. Audiophiles will spend hours arguing over which master and which pressing suits the music best.
I bought HD copies of Abbey Road, Bitches Brew and Who’s Next along with a few other albums to try out the format. All three sound spectacular in terms of separation and imaging, but they sound vastly different from the LPs I listened to for decades. For Abbey Road and Who’s Next the bass guitar is nowhere near as fat and in your face because that’s how it was remixed and remastered.
For Bitches Brew the remix has exposed instrumental parts that were hidden in the original LP mixes. However, since it was remixed from the original multitracks, this required many hours of duplicating all the echo effects and tape splicing that had been done during the original two-track mix. It literally is not the same recording any more.
I enjoy listening to the HD version of Bitches Brew, but Abbey Road and Who’s Next not so much, though I have to admit that when really cranking up the volume the illusion of being there in the room with the musicians is impressive, far beyond any LP I’ve ever heard.
I’ve experienced this with many remastered CDs as well. The old LP sounds better to me partly because I'm more familiar with it and partly because for rock music in particular the low end punches more if it's mixed and mastered to sound good on the mediocre playback systems that most people use.
No, it’s because that’s what we are used to hearing, at least those of us who were old enough to remember playing vinyl on tube-powered phonographs.
Digital emulation is all about saving time and saving money. It’s nothing new, how long have solid state amps chased the sound of tube amps? Why do people buy solid state preamps for their pedalboards that claim to give the sound of a classic tube amp? Why do electonic musicians use samples of mellotrons and analog synths rather than the real thing?
Analog is not real. All recordings are illusions, they are not the same as being present when the music is being performed. I struggled with this for years whn I started gigging. Why can’t I get that sound I heard on that record? Because that record is an illusion. The real sound is what I’m hearing on stage.
That’s it for me, enjoy the discussion.
