Quote of the day:
“People need difficulties; they are necessary for health.”
--Carl Jung
If we live in a digital world, we are aliens.
We are not digital. My favorite illustration is hearing. When I see debates about the quality of digital versus analog music sources, I never see any mention that our ears are analog.
Sound waves--variations in air pressure--cause the eardrum to vibrate, which causes the small bones behind it to vibrate. Those vibrations are converted back to electrical signals in the brain.
So, unless you want to plug the digital output of your CD player or computer directly into you brain, those digital signals must be converted to analog before you can hear them. And as a massage therapist once said, there’s the rub.
It’s not possible to say definitively that analog (records) sounds better or worse than digital (CDs or computer), because there is so much variety in recording, encoding and playback across all formats.
Some digital formats (such as mp3) ARE compromised because of low sampling rates or signal compression. Sampling rates are reduced and signals are compressed in order to save disc space and speed up download times.
Virtually everyone with normal hearing can detect degradation from analog or uncompressed digital formats to reduced, compressed formats.
The way basic CDs and lossless, uncompressed computer formats are encoded is just fine, as long as there is good source material and there is a well-designed digital-to-analog converter on the listening end.
Most CD players have a conversion circuit that comprises about half a silicon chip, which determines how the unit sounds. That allows record fanatics with good systems to correctly claim that records sound better than CDs.
On the other hand, with a well-designed digital-to-analog converter, a well-recorded CD will sound as good or better than a high-end turntable, arm, cartridge and phono preamp.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Analog in a Digital World
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2 comments:
Good points but who's to say that our senses are analog? If you think about it, the brain has to process the information in its own way, most likely involving discrete packets of information, just like digital formats.
The brain is just much, much better at doing it!
Good point, John. It's true that our brain is using a digital-like process. But how does the music get from the air into the brain? It takes physical movements--vibrations--an analog process. The same is true for the voice--it's air causing vibrations.
As I say, we can short-circuit the whole analog part of it by skipping the eardrum entirely and plugging the amplifier output directly into the brain. That would take some skill and might be a bit risky.
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