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 have a friend who can easily tell the difference between vinyl and acrylic. I can, too – sometimes. But he’s a purist. His amplifier still uses vacuum tubes – which he has to order from Russia! He swears the sound is better. Me? My ear thinks CDs are great and a lot more convenient. But no MP3s please. Those sound like crap on a real audio system. I guess they’re okay for putting on your MP3 player and listening to through $10 earbuds. But not serious listening. I know a lady who has hundreds of albums compressed into 96 kbs MP3s. She feeds them into a very nice sound system and cranks the huge speakers way up and listens to that crap.
I’d grant you easily that digital sounds better on mainstream gear, as the artifacts of analog replay are eliminated/minimized. If you take the trouble to put together an analog replay system that minimizes background, wow, flutter, clicks and pops, surface noise, skating, and hiss you get music that does sound richer (probably because there is no brick-wall filtering and compression) and therefore “better” then digital.
When I first started converting my music to mp3 I took a passage of music with highs and lows and encoded from 40kbs to 320 and with 22,000 to 44,000 hz. Then I had a friend play the converted passages as I rated them for acceptability. This was done in a quiet room with excellent speakers–not the real world of ear buds and conflicting noise.
My main collection is encoded at 64kbs at 22,050 Hz because I can’t tell any difference at higher encoding rates. Yes, sometimes a piece will sound better at higher rates, but sometimes better at lower rates. Don’t know what variable causes that, but that is my “considered” testing results.
I still reencode down to 40 kbs for use on my Ipod when outside the house. No need for clarity and allows for more tunes.
Same with video encoding BTW. Snobs will counter and I say: whatever floats your boat, but who’s kidding whom?
AND–I am happy to announce as I “recompile” my mp3 collection I have not yet found a bad CD that was recorded 10 years ago. I hope that continues as I get to my older, up to 20 years ago, collection of disks. I had big problems with video DVD’s but the music CD are proving to be more robust. My plan is to copy my entire collection to hard drive and take out the dupes and bad names etc and then reburn onto DvD’s keeping the CD and even casette sources as my originals. Backing up my back ups. Good to hear some of the old tunes, and even discover a new artist or two in the heap of stuff I collected.
There is a clear difference between digital MP3 players, cellphones, laptops, computers, etc. This is clear both from an audio perspective and from a technology perspective (compression).
The real question is; do you care?
Yes, Vynil sounds better, in all possible ways. Even if you encode a 96kHz we as humans can still hear the difference in ‘mood’ of the sound, even though we can not pick up the actual missing parts of the waves.
So, in general, why worry? Unless you’re spending buckets on a system in your house that you listen to, you clearly have no reason for concern. Whatever you’re playing on can’t make you hear the difference of a good digital recording.
And if you can afford the really nice system at home, you can afford to fly to concerts in Brazil and hear it better than any recording can bring you.
🙂
Enjoy.
Humans are analog to begin with… So is the original media
Right?
Popularity has nothing to do with quality! This is an issue of cost, availability and ease of use. Maybe when the sampling rates get high enough and large file size is meaningless we will have Analog quality from our digital devices.
In the mean time our brains will continue to have to work very hard, filling in the compression lost information. (Studies show that hormones released from the emotion segments of the brain are more intense when listening to music/sound that is closer to analog) Perhaps in the future the pleasant melodious tones will arrive from our output devices and our brains will not have to make stuff up to fill in the spaces.
Dumb Hippies, and nostalgia psychos like the old way of doing things and will never admit they are wrong.
Case in Point, protesting doesnt stop wars, Analog sounds nothing like digital, Older Micrphones dont capture what new microphones capture. The Beatles will always suck.
Magnetic tape recordings on a good reel-to-reel are the best.
Sound is too subjective to determine what format is better than another. As a musician and a project recording studio owner, it’s the content that matters and less the medium. For most American music listeners though, they care about the sound quality about as much as they about the quality of the music. Also, a poster mentioned brick wall limiting…I think that’s bigger issue to the ‘harshness’ of digital sound today. Return the dynamic range and it can be tough to deny how good digital can sound.
-LF
Bill–not into electronic music/Hearts of Space/moog/synthesizers eh?
We are all analogue creatures and the final product we actually hear is analogue==from the speakers.
Does the brain really react differently to sound as Sam #7 avers? Possible, but I doubt it so I think Michael #5 has it just so.
From my own testing, and various food tasting classes, its proven over and over again that people claim to be able to tell A from B and when tested: can’t.
I held the First International Imported Beer In a Glass Bottle Tasting Fair at my house. Everyone brought a six pack of their favorite. The ladies prepared 2 oz samplers in the kitchen while the boys tasted and ranked the various samples. At the end of the evening the verdict was well centered on Entry No 8. The girls had a good laugh. They had put all the left over beer into a pitcher and when they had enough they added their own brew to the contest. Maybe mixing all the variables together really is the better brew, or maybe we were drunk?
Same with wine. Totally unrelated to cost.
#8 “The Beatles will always suck”
That statement calls into question anything else you might say.
“This article ought to start a few arguments”
And people in the media wonder why they are so look down on as worthless!
One needs to distinguish between digital audio as such and psycho acoustic compression, which is to say MP3s and such.
With a non-destructive audio format, there is no missing information.
Of course, Steve Guttenberg authored a companion post a few days earlier.
Why does analog sound better than digital?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-20024387-47.html
Guttenberg is not staking out a definitive position, just stating the arguments.
I would agree if we were not stuck with 1977 sample rates for CDs. DVD and Blu-Ray audio prove this point.
If you have a DVD or BD concert video and also have the CD you can hear a huge difference.
#8 – I fart in your general direction.
Listening to MP3 is the equivalent of looking at a work of art through a screen. That is all.
#17: Sure. I’d say that the difference comes down to bit depth rather than sample rate, plus maybe the rather wonky process with which CD:s are typically mastered these days.
Either way, I’m not suggesting that there is no difference between different sample formats. Just that within the defined band of the format, a digital representation is 100% complete.
Well, well, well. Actually, in my personal experience, comparing CDs to LPs, sometimes the analog sounds better, sometimes the CD sounds better. More to the point, in a few cases, early CD releases of older material were sometimes very poorly done and show it while later CD releases of the same material are just fine.
Some of the tracks on my early 1980s “Best of Tommy James and the Shondells” sound like they were lifted from 45’s that had lived in a barroom jukebox for a decade before being used to make the CD.
Of course, there’s another aspect to things. Sometimes, a small amount of surface noise actually enhances the “listening experience” if not the music itself.
More important that source, in most cases, are the speakers or headphones used to listen. Since my most recent speaker upgrade, I’ve been hearing things I never heard before, in music I’ve listened to for decades. And the old speakers weren’t exactly slouches, and my hearing, while still pretty good for a 48 year old, certainly isn’t improving.
As to the original article, what sort of digital is used in concert halls? I’m referring to classical music in real concert halls, live small venue jazz, etc. Not arena rock concerts. But, I guess “most people” could pretty much exclude anyone listening to classical music. It seems to me that all that is needed is perhaps some amplification which generally isn’t digital anyway.
The older I get the more I appreciate digital for it’s convenience. Analog is for younger, less abused ears than mine. I’d only be able to tell if a record was being played if there was lint on the needle; but then I’d forget to listen and start to reminisce about my childhood listening to battered and abused Disney records in my room; the “follow-along” records I kept stored in an old wooden toy box with the real metal hinges that would pinch your fingers if you weren’t careful with a lid so heavy, if you dropped it you’d smash a few fingers and loss a fingernail. You know; back when kids played in the backseat and your dad drove the car with his lap-belt tucked under one leg to stop the annoying buzzer that was there to remind him to put on his seat belt… (I’m tangent-ing into Dvoark.) **sigh**
“Why Does Digital Sound Better than Analog?”
Because I say it does.
The column ends with:
Digitally recorded music may be technically superior to analog, but it misses a lot. It doesn’t seem to connect with listeners as well as analog did. My proof? That’s easy, as perfect as digital recordings can be, very few people can actually listen to music without doing something else. There’s not enough there there to hold their interest.
That’s some good reasoneering that guy’s got there… Just because two things happen at around the same time (like the rise of digital music and people multitasking) doesn’t mean that there’s a connection between them…
I’m not sure I understand… all the music you listen to is analog. If it isn’t already analog, it is converted to analog before you hear it.
I have digitally recorded LPs, regular LPs, good CDs and bad CDs, Great Audio DVDs with ranges of sound that just don’t show up on LPs that I’ve listened to sorry.
Yes, you’ll lose some range of sound on CDs but generally they’re in the range notes that you can’t hear anyway unless you’re a newborn.
CD’s are more convenient to carry and store, last longer and are easier to copy. No brainer why they are more popular.
#20: It seems to me that all that is needed is perhaps some amplification which generally isn’t digital anyway.
It’s worse than you think…most music halls have processors in series with the amps. Limiters, compressors, eq’s, crossovers, etc. Virtually all of them made in the last 15 years are digital. Plus, the pro audio world is shifting to digital mixers, although analog mixers are still widely used.
#21..seat belt buzzers? You whipper snapper! When I was a kid, lots of cars didn’t have seat belts. I was about 12 when the first of the buzzers showed up.
#23…Indeed. Perhaps people don’t pay attention to “modern” music because it isn’t worth paying attention to? Or, even if it is, people have much busier lives than they did 25 years ago.
#24..I question the idea of CD’s lasting longer. I’ve had several that rotted away, and I have scores of LPs that predate them. Heck, I have a 78 from 1904 that still plays.
#25…Oh, I suspected as much might be going on. Just as well I don’t have the money to go out to such things these days. Ditto for movies.
Next!….
WE need a BS meter on this…
as I watch Broadcast TV, I get BOTH.. AND DIGITAL IS CRAP…as anything can bother the signal..AND it takes more power to USE digital..
I just prefer the act of finding my songs on a cassette tape, and having to flip it. Also, I never get sick of songs on cassette tape, because the tape wears out and dies, and I have to buy a new cassette tape. since no one sells cassette tapes anymore, I am relegated to the cassette tapes and music options that I can find at good will.
I mean, if you like the analog distortion on records, then you will love the analog distortion on cassette tapes.
Cassette tapes forever man. Groovy.
Also, I don’t like the convience of just downloading a song (because we all know the song is irrelevant in all this, it is all about the sound) more or less instantly on my phone. That is too easy, I prefer having to go to the store and dig through the albums to find one I want. Also, I really hate how, if you want, music files are basically free.
Nope, digital is obviously inferior, because you know, when I am driving down the road partying friday night, or on a cross country road trip, I am all about the nuances in the background sound. The song is completely irrelevant.
#27 Digital requires far less power to transmit. But you’re right, digital does not “fail gracefully” when the signal goes bad. However, it looks GREAT right up until it fails.
From a music standpoint: I can’t really tell a difference between most analog and digital sources. HOWEVER, hearing a needle drop on an LP will ALWAYS bring fond memories. Not sure what today’s generation will replace it with…. but I’m sure it will be something.
Regardless of the measurable ‘quality’ of a digital recording it can never be more than a symbolic representation of the original sound. Something metaphysical has got to be lost in the process of sampling and quantization that is preserved in an analogue recording. People can feel that.
I love my albums much more than any other medium.