Digital: The Marriage of Quality and Convenience
Posted on | June 27, 2008 |
I received this question via my Web site yesterday:
“If analog has better resolution than digital (and HD), then why is the U.S. going thru the DTV transition? Also, with analog having better resolution than digital in pictures from a camera, then why in the world are people purchasing digital cameras and taking digital pictures?”
Interesting question. Let’s consider the digital world. Its real benefits might be different than you think…
Most musicians in the world today record music on a computer. Unless you happen to be a niche specialist, a Luddite, or an analog hobbyist you fall into this category.
What computers have done to every corner of modern society is provide us with more options for storing, analyzing and editing information.
What? Did you think I was going to say “make our lives easier”? I think you know that’s not true.
The computer is a wonderful invention and it’s impossible to imagine life without it…especially for anyone born around 1970 or later. But it doesn’t necessarily improve the results of work rendered with it. It’s a tool of convenience. You need look no further than PowerPoint for proof.
Consider an analogy: Computers crunch numbers on the world financial markets around the clock. And you can go online and buy or sell investments to your heart’s content with the click of a mouse. But are financial markets more efficient or growing more effectively than they were 30 years ago? And are people realizing better returns their investment than they were back before the modern computer era? It can easily be argued that, actually, the opposite is true. And this is because while the means for executing opportunities has changed, the fundamentals of investing have not. And, in some ways, the shift has turned people from investors to traders, which is usually a detriment to building wealth.
Now let’s go back to audio. For musicians the computer has taken the place of the tape recorder, as well as the mixing board and processing rack in a lot of cases. And, in turn, the act of recording, editing, and mixing has been streamlined. But are recordings sonically superior to 30 years ago? In some sense yes…but in another sense they’re not.
The sound quality of amateur recordings has improved greatly because a computer with a USB or IEEE input is far superior to an analog cassette recorder in terms of noise floor and dynamic range; and secondary items like microphone preamps and processors bundled with these interfaces have progressed to meet the improved sonic specifications of digital interfaces. But high-end recording has actually sloped downward in the digital era. In fact, more than twenty years after digital recording was made available to the masses, people are now just saying it’s reaching the standard that analog set in the seventies. Listen to top-notch recordings like Pink Floyd or Miles Davis, and compare them to great recordings and bands in the same genre today…you’ll see what I mean. You may even think there’s still a ways to go.
Ironically, it’s not all about sound quality. After sound is captured, much work goes into editing and sound processing; and this is where digital really has it on analog because the amount of time in editing is minimal compared to editing in the analog world. Not to mention precision and flexibility: artists around the world ftp-ing files with hundreds of edit points to other artists for collaboration.
But this is different from capturing sound…and should be realized as such. This is the portion that’s equivalent to making the investment transaction. What you need to keep in perspective is that a marginal investment is still a marginal investment…just like an poor recording is still a poor recording. How easily you can manipulate it after the basic acquisition doesn’t change the fact that the fundamentals of economy and audio still need to be learned and respected to have a successful outcome.
Comments
One Response to “Digital: The Marriage of Quality and Convenience”
Leave a Reply
About This Blog
From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
We welcome comments from readers...pro or con!
June 27th, 2008 @ 10:01 pm
Remember the tag line: “Is it live or is it Memorex?” That saying originated when there was no digital recording.
So to frame the element of convenience which digital brings, shift everything down a notch and ask the question thusly:
If live perfromances are so much better than recorded audio, why in the world are there so many recordings?
With this perspective, it’s easy to see that not everyone can attend a live performance (i.e. analog), so a recorded performance (i.e. digital) is far more convenient, although it may not be the “best” or “most accurate” method for listening.
Even a horrible-sounding Edison grammophone recording sounds better now than if you tried to get the people who originally made it to perform it live. (You’d probably have to dig them up!)
You might also relate this question to watching a cover band:
If Lynryd Skynyrd is so good, then why am I listening to this cover band play “Sweet Home Alabama?”
Well, seeing Lynyrd Skynryd is not feasible tonight, but hey, I’m in a dive bar, and this band’s version still makes me feel good.
The Dead Kennedys summed-up this “argument” best:
Give Me Convenience… Or Give Me Death”
- Rickshaw