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Digital vs Analog
- Thread starter icarus88
- Start date
Yes. It’s called distortion.
Not necessarily true. Digital circuits can respond to playing dynamics. In many cases even more than analog circuits. It all just depends on the design.
It is not a fact. And merely stating something as a fact doesn’t make it true.
A lot of modern recorded music lacks soul because of the way things get recorded and songs are produced these days. Digital recording has nothing to do with it.
Recording separate tracks to a click and then assembling them like Lego blocks into a song changes the performance dynamics of having a whole group in a room playing at the same time, then selecting the best takes, and punching in overdubs to correct the most egregious flaws. Modern recordings assemble songs. Old school recordings were more like live studio performances.
Then there’s the mastering process and which CODECs get used if it’s digital. Because there are lossless and lossy file formats and some (like MP3) have sub versions that use fixed or can use variable compression ratios. And some formats (like FLAC) don’t compress at all and offer higher playback fidelity than even the best analog formats can accomplish.
So I wouldn’t be too quick to pass sweeping judgements. Because the devil is always in the details.
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Do you understand the difference between loosy and lossless compression?
I mostly agree with you except for this part. ^^^ Often true, but not always.
Before digital, they cut a poopie ton of tape to comp together songs. You can even go to back to Glenn Gould's recordings of the Goldberg Variations in the 50s. Those recordings are heavily edited, and he was quite involved in the process.
Digital just made it much, much easier to comp. And speaking as a drummer, it opened up the ability to punch and fix drum takes just like guitarists, bassists, and everyone else had been able to do with tape. Having said that, in most popular music these days, drummers are little more than glorified MIDI programmers, since most of their performances are quantized and sample enhanced/replaced.
I think it's less the production technology than the production philosophy.
You could just as easily decide to use a DAW in the same way you would analog tape and avoid all of the advanced editing. Sadly, there's about 20 years of over-quantized, over-tuned, over-limited music to compete with and people's expectations have been set.
I've come to view music production as something closer to film-making than live performance. Movies are almost never shot in sequence, they are assembled via editing as one of the last steps in production, and we would all be kind of shocked at how many unnatural techniques (especially lighting) have to be applied to make things look natural. If the ultimate goal is to tell a story, then do whatever is most effective to tell the story. Same goes for a song or album.
Someone else up thread said it, but recorded music is an illusion. A great one when it's done well, but it's still an illusion. It was with analog, it is with digital, and it will be with whatever comes next.
Are we still listing to the living, breathing, real analog music through our phone speakers or Bluetooth connected earbuds?
A signed 16-bit integer has steps, +/- 32767 of them. 32 bit is north of 2 billion. compression reduces the range these steps must subdivide.
All of this hair splitting for consumers to listen to crushed downloaded music through their phone over Wal Mart earbuds. All steam, no light.
Also, among his many fascinating articles, Uwe Beis has a pretty good explanation of oversampling, here:
An Introduction to Delta Sigma Converters
An introduction to delta sigma converters without much theory and mathematics
www.beis.de
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To put it in layman's terms, if it's known that a signal is limited to a specific bandwidth (such as the frequency range of human hearing), then a correctly designed digital recording and playback system reproduces the input signal exactly, including the stuff "between" the samples. Misunderstanding this principle is the mistake made by most arguments against digital recording systems.
That’s almost treading into musique concrète territory if you’re doing that amount of tape splicing. What I’m referring to is the way a lot of music in the 70s and early 80s got recorded. Band would come in and play until it got some good takes. And then you’d pick the best of those. I didn’t see any actual tape splicing. But I did see a lot of track bounce edits and punch ins. Maybe splicing was used a little more than what I saw. But the sessions I was involved with didn’t have huge budgets. So you had to get in and pretty much nail it in two or three takes. Any booked time left over was usually used on additional vocal takes and then the guitar solos if there was still time left.
Kinda how I still do it with my DAW.
I like music to sound human. But I’m a bit of a dinosaur about some things despite me being in computer technology for most of my adult work life.Only real difference is I now have virtually unlimited tracks and the ability to use virtual instruments and studio gear I could never afford to by the physical versions of.
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The argument that digital recording is killing music is laughable. If analog recording and playback was the life force behind music then there was only a narrow window of human history when music was alive.
For ages music was produced without notation. After notation was created music was produced without recording. Tubes and tape and transistors weren’t even ideas, let alone critical components in music creation. To say that they’re some necessary life force behind music is to imply music never really existed before the last 100 years.
For ages music was produced without notation. After notation was created music was produced without recording. Tubes and tape and transistors weren’t even ideas, let alone critical components in music creation. To say that they’re some necessary life force behind music is to imply music never really existed before the last 100 years.
The point where your argument is wrong is that before analog devices were invented, music was transmitted through collective memory. There were no recordings, there was live music. Our ears, vocal cords and brains also work analogously. There are no 0s or 1s. Humanity has made analog music for 300,000 years. That's why the 40-year digital revolution is against the nature of humanity.
Does the music of recent years seem natural to you? It doesn't seem natural to me.
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Music of any time period is difficult to classify as natural. Instruments are manmade and not naturally occurring, so it could be argued that any music made with instruments is inherently unnatural. This would leave vocal music as possibly being natural. However music is an ordered succession of sounds over time to produce rhythms, melodies, and harmonies. There are a number of scientists who wrestle with the question of whether the concept of time is natural or a subjective human illusion, so “an ordered succession over time” could be argued as an unnatural based on the time requirement. As for rhythm, harmony, and melody, these are patterns selected by humans to be desirable. There are an infinite number of sounds in the natural world that have harmonic relationships and interactions but only a select few are determined by humans to be harmonies for a limited musical definition.
So…
No, music of recent years doesn’t seem natural to me, nor does music from any time period. Music is as natural as a Twinkie.
