totally right benoit, excellent point...although i do personally know some people who lay it down in the studio onto tape with little to no digital in the mix, but that's besides the point. the important question is whether the difference is significant, which comes down to psychoacoustics....depending on how your brain communicates with your ears, it may or may not be discernible. we're already at a point where digital recording is technically superior, when you look at statistics and numbers etc -- but psychoacoustically, it's fundamentally different, like the difference between polyester and silk, or something. actually i think we are probably beyond that, just not at the consumer level. i was thinking about how digital recordings are "pixellated" at the most microscopic level -- and how that might be compared to grains of sand as well. but glass is made of sand. we are getting to the point, or have already gotten to the point, where digital recordings can contain so much absolutely minute detail that the "pixels" can not be discerned even psychoacoustically, the recording is "glass".
but this is veering off-track into analog v digital technical nonsense. i see the view that digital _files_ are now a complete solution to music, making former physical formats obsolete, as a philosophical question dealing with the importance of physical reality and experience (in this case, disregarding it). shake wrote me something that sums it up succinctly "if you never knew what the real things was or were, it is almost impossible to explain." the access to music that digital files allow and all that is great when viewed narrowly -- valuing the music only and disregarding context. but it is inarguably a deeper experience which allows deeper understanding to hold a record/tape/cd in your hands than to have a digital file of it. the object may only be connected to the artist by degrees of separation, but it still contains actual insight into the artist/music and tells a story just by virtue of existing in the physical world. digital files tell no story (yet), it is pure audio and nothing else but a file extension, file creation date, and stuff like that, all of which are not "solid", they can manipulated, lost...it ain't real. we had this discussion on c-b-s, and a professional digital archiver chimed in to support the power of the real, and that giving digital files more attributes, a way to record their virtual existence, is the next step towards giving them any sort of the power and cultural relevance that objects in the real world have. > Maybe this has already been discussed, but most of the electronic music, > even produced by analogue instrument, is recorded on a digital medium > (computer, DAT, CD...), isn't it ? I don't even talk about music > produced with digital instruments or going though digital mixers (which > can be even used during the mastering process). > > I mean, Ive never seen in my life any producer bringing all his analogue > instruments to play live the track through the mastering studio to > record the vinyl galvanics. So even the vinyl has some part of 'digital' > in it IMO. To me there is no perfect 'analogue' electronic vinyl. > > Agreed another more A>D + D>A conversion due to vinyl encoding removes > anyway some more 'data', but is that significant compared to what I've > just described ? > > > -- > Benoît. >
