I haven't contributed in earnest to this thread, as I generally dislike these type of heated format debates.
Now that things have calmed down a bit, there is the serious question of what are the Achilles's heels of digital that CAN make it so underwhelming. I am coming at this from the position of being a single format digital adherent who has worked through the struggles to try and get decent sound from the medium.
I thought I would list some observations/thoughts I have made over many years as a both a DIY hobbyist and a former mastering engineer.
- digital is great as a storage medium, able to be copied and transferred with no (this is still debatable) loss.
- processing digital data is great in theory, but I believe this is an area where things fall down. In my years as a mastering engineer I would have to convert music across sample rates. In my opinion, the music never fully survived this process and my preference for doing conversions was to convert back to analog, transferring to tape (@30ips 1/2 inch) and then bringing back in at the new sample rate. I also far preferred to go into the analog domain to use physical compression and EQ rather than digital plug ins.
- further to the point above, digital is a medium where numbers and processing have always been important from a both technical and marketing perspectives. 24bit has to be better that 16bit, 192KHz better than 44.1Khz and 64 times oversampling better than 4 times. I question whether this is correct and I believe that it is this processing element that may give rise to the digital sound and perhaps ever more processing power is not the answer to digital utopia.
- people think of digital as steady state 1s and 0s which it is in storage, but when it is being sent to a DAC it is an analog RF stream subject to the influences that all electrical signals are.
- digital is far more fragile that what one might expect. it is extremely sensitive to power supply quality and is even more sensitive to electrical and mechanical vibration. Turntables are sensitive to placement due to footfall and acoustic feedback, to which digital is immune. However the placement of digital equipment on stands/racks can have a massive bearing on the sound.
- as far as physical digital media goes, I believe that the important factors, in order, are: the recording (and the mixing); the mastering; and then the pressing. Unlike what many people think, digital media is subject to the same degradations in the pressing process as analog media. That is, the further away the pressing from the first run on the first stamper, the more degradation - if you like, you can think of this as jitter encoded into the media.
- Although the earliest CDs copped a lot of flack from both enthusiasts and the media, the industry did try hard to put out a quality product with high dynamic range and good tonal quality. One of the early criticisms of early discs was that many were produced from the vinyl production master rather than the first generation master. The earliest CDs were made at a loss because they went to great lengths in the manufacturing process. The early CDs spent a good 30 seconds in the injection mold compared with something like 1/2 a second in more modern discs. I have been collecting the earliest CDs for about 20 years and have many copies of the same recording made for different countries. It is interesting to hear how different they can sound.
My final thought is that digital can never sound exactly like analog or vice versa. Digital can provide very enjoyable sound if one finds a way to get around it's deficiencies/issues, and this doesn't necessitate extreme expenditure.
Now that things have calmed down a bit, there is the serious question of what are the Achilles's heels of digital that CAN make it so underwhelming. I am coming at this from the position of being a single format digital adherent who has worked through the struggles to try and get decent sound from the medium.
I thought I would list some observations/thoughts I have made over many years as a both a DIY hobbyist and a former mastering engineer.
- digital is great as a storage medium, able to be copied and transferred with no (this is still debatable) loss.
- processing digital data is great in theory, but I believe this is an area where things fall down. In my years as a mastering engineer I would have to convert music across sample rates. In my opinion, the music never fully survived this process and my preference for doing conversions was to convert back to analog, transferring to tape (@30ips 1/2 inch) and then bringing back in at the new sample rate. I also far preferred to go into the analog domain to use physical compression and EQ rather than digital plug ins.
- further to the point above, digital is a medium where numbers and processing have always been important from a both technical and marketing perspectives. 24bit has to be better that 16bit, 192KHz better than 44.1Khz and 64 times oversampling better than 4 times. I question whether this is correct and I believe that it is this processing element that may give rise to the digital sound and perhaps ever more processing power is not the answer to digital utopia.
- people think of digital as steady state 1s and 0s which it is in storage, but when it is being sent to a DAC it is an analog RF stream subject to the influences that all electrical signals are.
- digital is far more fragile that what one might expect. it is extremely sensitive to power supply quality and is even more sensitive to electrical and mechanical vibration. Turntables are sensitive to placement due to footfall and acoustic feedback, to which digital is immune. However the placement of digital equipment on stands/racks can have a massive bearing on the sound.
- as far as physical digital media goes, I believe that the important factors, in order, are: the recording (and the mixing); the mastering; and then the pressing. Unlike what many people think, digital media is subject to the same degradations in the pressing process as analog media. That is, the further away the pressing from the first run on the first stamper, the more degradation - if you like, you can think of this as jitter encoded into the media.
- Although the earliest CDs copped a lot of flack from both enthusiasts and the media, the industry did try hard to put out a quality product with high dynamic range and good tonal quality. One of the early criticisms of early discs was that many were produced from the vinyl production master rather than the first generation master. The earliest CDs were made at a loss because they went to great lengths in the manufacturing process. The early CDs spent a good 30 seconds in the injection mold compared with something like 1/2 a second in more modern discs. I have been collecting the earliest CDs for about 20 years and have many copies of the same recording made for different countries. It is interesting to hear how different they can sound.
My final thought is that digital can never sound exactly like analog or vice versa. Digital can provide very enjoyable sound if one finds a way to get around it's deficiencies/issues, and this doesn't necessitate extreme expenditure.
