The record industry has lied to you. Digital is better than analog they say. CDs are better than cassettes and Vinyl LPs. When the truth is brought to light you may not agree with them. Let me explain where all this started…
My CD player is broken in my car. With the current radio market lacking, I dug around through my old cassette tapes. I found several, with a few that were released before the advent of CDs (pre 1985). On the way to the airport Monday I put in a tape from 1981, never touched by anything digital in its production.
I was pleasantly reminded of the supremacy of analog audio when listening to the tape. Every sound was full in dimension and detail. The high end was clear and not harsh. The low end was full and clear. There is a reason for this. Analog audio is made up a of perfect waveform, with no information about the audio missing. Now there is a little sound added, like high end tape hiss, I will give you that. But that is due to the extended frequency range analog audio offers. That is another discussion…
Digital audio, because it is made up of on and off settings, i.e. 1s and 0s, does not capture the full waveforms produced by audio. Digital audio is a sampled representation of the real thing. You can compare this to a film. A film places a new image on screen often enough to trick your eyes into perceiving the motion in a motion picture. But every movement is not captured. This may seem like it would work for audio as well but our ears are not so forgiving. Most folks can hear the difference in a low quality MP3 file and the actual CD track. But most folks don’t know the CD track is a lower quality version of the actual sound waves produced when the music was first recorded. Check more about this on the link in the title.
Try this test if you can. Find a tape you may have laying around and compare it to its CD counterpart. You will enjoy hearing what you are currently missing with digital audio. I believe the repeated exposure to digitally produced music transmitted over radio waves can be a large factor in road rage. 😉
All my tapes have dirt and Coke in them from laying on the floorboard.
While the above is true, I enjoy the convenience of digital. Capturing music, recording, is a miracle in the first place – taking something that was only in existance for a fraction of time and audibly documenting it. (Wouldn’t it be great to have an actual recording of Beethoven himself his work?)
Now with digital music, some kid in Oregon can write a worship tune and an entire church in Taiwan can hear it and adopt it as a theme song. The possibilities are endless.