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.
#58
Ahh, but you are still not considering the noise floor. With 16 bits the quantization noise is at -96db. For 24bits it’s at -114db!
A sample is a single value, but when the signal is reconstructed in the hardware, it’s not simply a matter of connecting the dots. It’s about assembling sine waves through SINC interpolation. Sine waves that are continuous I might add. Analog.
ericD…Yes….a sine wave from an audio test CD looks pretty damned good on a scope, and measures pretty damned good under analysis. Even the highest frequencies look perfect.
It’s been a while, but when CDs first arrived we did this analysis in a lab where I worked, and the results compared well with good signal generators. Today’s CD players are FAR better than those first generations, so I assume the results are better, too.
This article is bullcrap. Most music you get to hear in concert halls is ANALOG, unless they have a digital sound board, which is more expensive so most small venues don’t have them. The microphone you’re singing through on stage is analog, it goes via a thick cable thru a mixer that’s analog and that mixer sends a signal to the PA (the speakers). When people say we don’t hear analog, that’s just bogus talk from people that don’t know what they’re talking about. Tube amps on stage are very popular too, and last time I saw a tube amp, it wasn’t digital.
Lucas…most concert halls have digital processors in series with the signals. Same with limiters. Analog desk, digital desk, either way but the processors are virtually ALL digital if you’re buying new.
A high school I manage the sound system for has a pair of these. Typical stuff, common everywhere…been around for well over a decade. Everything amplified in that auditorium becomes digitized. Unless they’ve been left in the stone age, you’ll be hard pressed to find a serious concert hall without something remarkably similar to the DFR11eq.
Real world, friend.
Lucas…if you’re still skeptical, and that’s fine, go here: http://prosoundweb.com/live and poke around. 🙂
A few years back I changed from an old analog cable service to a digital satellite service for my home. For a time the services overlapped. Watching a baseball game on both systems was educational. Most people would have said that the digital satellite was way better than the analog cable. The analog signal did do one thing better than the digital feed. You could tell that the fans were sitting behind a screen on cable. On the satellite the screen did not exist.
Digital conversion throws most of the analog away.
Nyquist never said that sampling at twice your highest frequency was perfect. He said you can get away with it.
WmDE…I remember seeing the same thing on Dish in 1997. Having spent some time in the labs at Zenith in my early days, my video quality standards were fine tuned and I was depressed! Mpeg compression made basketball all but unwatchable…the guys’ legs were a blur.
They eventually added more bandwidth for most channels, especially ESPN. When ESPN started up their HD broadcasts, the standard signal on Dish improved dramatically again. Probably because, finally, the source cameras and processors were better than the broadcast limits, giving us the full picture.
Today, what you get on Dish–with standard def–is better than what we got with OTA signals prior to the digital TV conversion. I can see those screens, no problem. 🙂
No one has mentioned that after 20 or so years telling us that CD is better than vinyl the record companies have recently – maybe within the last 2 years – started to produce and promote the benefits of vinyl over CD. I wonder, is it because it isn’t possible to make perfect copies of vinyl?
Back to the debate, I was once priviledged to hear a real top-end stereo 20 years ago (it started with a £1000 stylus and then got to the expensive equipment) and I’ve never heard anything as good. I doubt CD can get to that level but I’d certainly give it the benefit of the doubt. Was the system worth a third the price of a house? Not unless you’ve got nothing else to spend your money on.
I’ve got reasonable quality vinyl and CD equipment to listen to at home, there is a difference but not so much I’ve ever decided to ditch one in preference.
@ #69 Jess Hurchrist
You can’t download vinyl.
Can everybody please stop assuming that somehow a modern CD SHOULD sound better than vinyl/ older CDs.
Most modern recording and mixing is crap. I know I’m a recording engineer with 40 years of experience. My best work maybe peaked in the first half of the nineties. Record companies / artists expect such rediculous levels on a modern CD that any good mix gets totally screwed up.
Besides a few artists who can record in well equipted major studios, many record in smaller studios with equipment and staff that leave much to be desired.Many record at home. Indeed many “pop” records are deliberately recorded at 44.1khz – 16bit because the way that convertors work, it sounds a bit “louder”.
The weakest part of the chain will be responsable for the much of the final sound. When a studio cost a million dollars to build, it was reasonable to spend thousands of dollars on microphones. When a studio (now a studio in a computer) costs a few thousand dollars,investment in microphones is reduced to hundreds of dollars.
I’m often amazed at audiophiles with directional speaker cable and esoteric amps etc. If they actually knew how many recordings are made…………
You’re an idiot. Digital sounds dead and lifeless on its own, like a brittle piece of glass.
That’s why ALL MODERN DAY RECORDINGS ARE RAN THROUGH HIGH END ANALOG GEAR “before” they GO BACK TO DISK during the mastering process. It gives them the “little” bit of life that they do have.
Learn a little something about the recording industry before you make a fool out of yourself again.
RE: “the beatles suck”
Dude, you will NEVER know anything about songwriting or structure if you stick to that attitude.
…forgot to mention that a LARGE amount aof albums are still being recorded on TAPE, then dumped into Pro Tools for mixing. This allows a more natural type of TAPE saturation to take place on the transients. You can NOT duplicate tape compression on digital.
Final word: anyone who states flat out without a doubt that digital sounds better than analog doesnt know what they’re talking about. Analog is involved in ALL modern day recordings in one way or another. There is no “pure” digital product being released by anyone that matters.
the problem is that music is not “perfect”. music is a living breathing creature and analog allows that music to do that. Digital music can neverl completly replicate itself. something is always lost in the copy.