When Ry Cooder's "Bop Till You Drop" album was released in 1979, it was the first major-label digital recording. But not how younger people might think. It was recorded on a 32 channel digital tape machine built by 3M, with digital and analog mastering steps before being fed to a cutting lathe so analog-playback LPs could be made.. It had a sound different from anything ever put on vinyl before it. Cold, bright, spatially-flattened, immediate, fast, gnawing sound. We didn't know it for sure at the time, but we were being introduced a "digital sound" as quite apart from analog sound even though its replay was entirely analog.This was three years before the introduction of the CD in the US in 1982. That "Bop" exemplified digital sound was demonstrated when the CD was finally introduced and vinyl "Bop" sounded much more like the new medium than the 12" plastic reigning-champ medium it was pressed on.
Pretty much from 1982 through about 2002, that sonic digital-analog divide warranted the language McGowan is now questioning. Just when engineers began to understand how to properly allow R2R ladder DACs to convey a more natural digital presentation, mass economics tilted industry preference (and chip supplies) to delta-sigma processors. Setback. Once-positive sonic trends in digital worsened for awhile. During that period, as digital only incrementally improved (in both hardware and software) analog getting closer to the sound of live music was a daily-proven given. Then, the vinyl revival put a lot of new digital music on vinyl discs, confusing the difference. More to the point, it seems that for the past 20 years at least, newer phono cartridge "innovators" have as often as not designed their transducers to a brittle, bright digital sensibility rather than an organic one with tone and flow. No wonder began an SPU and Koetsu revival!
Since the mid-2000s, however, more musically-informed engineering talent has been applied to digital music. More designers are tempering raw engineering with listening before release. We're not slaves to 16/44. For people outside our audiophile realm, compressed files and then compressed streaming have dulled interest and discernibility wrt sound quality. THAT digital signature is a lot different from the digital sound that prompted the divided references in the first place. The return of high quality R2R, NOS DACs, and better delta-sigma models, FPGA processors and more serious post-DAC analog output sections have collectively narrowed the differences considerably. There are now digital experiences that would have been considered "analog" not too many years ago. At the same time, some producers in the vinyl resurgence era have also upped their game from capture through to pressing quality, so that digital strengths in bass quality and non-intrusive noise floor are approached or closely hewed to.
Now, from a strict fidelity reference to live music, both types of capture and reproduction are at best equally wrong. But still for the most part you can get more of the intrinsic organic continuity and flow for less cash from analog than from digital. A lot of very young new entrants into this world may not notice nor care, however.
For most people here, enough age is represented that "analog" and "digital" references will likely have comparative utility for some years to come. But I hear enough wrong in both methods I am more interested in, and comment on, "convincing musicality," musical authenticity," etc. The reason for this is that analog isn't always great at either. For instance, much more often than analog v. digital, I notice a divide roughly bounded as pre-1963 and the time since. The culprit being the surge in multi-mic'ing, multi-tracking and time-shifted tracks compared to the earlier era of relatively simple mic'ing, no more than needed, and the performers were in the studio together at the same time. The efficiency and tech-enabled creative shift to multi-tracking, complex mic'ing, asynchronous laying of tracks, etc. opened up new artistic possibilities ala "Sgt. Pepper.." but also resulted in worse sound on complex, multiple-simultaneous-events music. Those older albums recorded with minimal numbers of mics, often large diaphragm types, in studios with vacuum tube consoles, had a big, organic, space-projecting, dynamic sound. The shift to great numbers of recordings to multi-track complex techniques introduced a "pre-digital" degradation in convincing sound quality while greatly expanding the creative potential of recorded music. The studio and its technology-enablement became an instrument itself.
It took engineers about ten years to really grok stereo as an advance over mono. Quad in all its forms failed to launch beyond the gimmick stage. Digital was a new challenge few people understood at the time. It took most of 20 years for everyone in the music arts chain to fully grok it and make it a contender qualitatively, despite it having won the commercial war in its first 5 or 6 years. Analog still wins more dedicated music listening hours from me than digital, if I exclude the modest amount of time I stream Tidal Hifi while multi-tasking.
The two recording and playback processes are now both able to produce convincing, credible sound, when the base material is up to it. At first, people liked "Bop Till You Drop" because they were supposed to like it -- it was the future! Soon enough, they noticed they couldn't listen to it -- nor wanted to -- as often as Ry's earlier, more relaxed analog recordings. "Bop's" immediate predecessor was "Jazz," a juicy record with flow. But on "Bop," the admitted high standard of musicianship was obscured by the pain of the record's digital hash and relentless ice-picking. Even in the era of the 13kHz tweeter speaker, one couldn't help but notice.
Sonny Rollins' "Way Out West" and The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" were separated by a decade. No matter what one thinks about the creative freedom on "Pepper's," that newer album sounds worse than "West" in every way that's pertinent to convincing musicality. If digital had existed for the Beatles in 1967, it wouldn't have influenced that outcome. There are fidelity and qualitative drivers larger than the analog-digital divide. Believe it or not, there were people who lamented the passing of the 78 after the debut of the LP and 45. Wide as it seemed at the outset, I think the digital-analog difference was and certainly now is smaller than all those other transitions mentioned. What did not happen in digital music is that it never got on the Moore's Law innovation and capacity curve. Great digital became ridiculously expensive and still is, though near-great digital is much more accessible than 20 years ago. Real innovation has been slow. CPU density and performance gains in general computing are not aggressively tapped in digital music. And at the end of the day, digital needs analog output. For audio, in technical terms, it takes a village.
Phil
