On Sep 26, 2010, at 1:23 PM, Steven wrote:
I only used the term "imaginary" as a sort of insult to digital
files. Yes, they may technically exist, but only in the same way
that a song on the radio exists, not in an immediately available
physical form (I can't very well remove my hard disk and play it in
a CD player).
This is a red herring, unless you actually plan to spin records
yourself and drop a pine needle + styrofoam cup into the groove. In
real life, you're using an electronic playing machine, and if it
breaks, then your music too is imaginary until you fix or replace it,
so you're no better off than with CDs. On the contrary: CDs are
smaller, hold more content at higher resolution, can automatically
seek to track boundaries (or arbitrary locations), can pause reliably,
may contain additional non-audio content, are more durable, and can be
losslessly copied, either disc-to-disc or via rip and burn (if you
avoid lossy compression like MP3, of course).
There is a big difference between analog and digital technologies.
Both vinyl records and compact disc do use plastic circles with
information stored on the surface, but analog information doesn't
need to be "decoded" like digital does. The very minimum you need to
play back a CD is a CD player, with complex mechanics and computer
chips, while you can play a record with nothing more than a paper
cone and a spinning surface that can be moved by hand. Sure, it
won't sound nearly as good as playing the record on a stereo, but
you can still retrieve the data with almost no technology
whatsoever. This is because the scratches on the disc are an imprint
of the actual sound wave, and while they may be recorded and read
electrically (or in the case of some releases since the 1970s, even
mastered digitally), the only real process that goes into recording
and playing most records is electrical amplification and
manipulation. With a CD or any other digital recording, you only get
complex instructions on how to reproduce the file.
Perhaps the simplest way to examine the differences would be to
compare the most primitive versions of analog and digital
recordings, player piano rolls and wax cylinders. The wax cylinder
can reproduce the sound of a full orchestra with nothing more than a
motor, lathe, needle, and horn, while the piano roll needs an actual
piano and is incapable of performing other voices or even simple
stylistic accents like volume and intensity. Both technologies have
come a very long way, but there still remains the fact that an
analog recording contains an imprint of an actual sound wave while
digital recordings are instructions that tell the computer how to go
about reconstructing the sound.
Audio CD contents are data, not instructions. The data are just as
much a waveform as are the scratches on a vinyl record or wax cylinder.
By the way, have you actually *heard* a wax cylinder? Listen to this
1910 recording of the Major General's song by C. H. Workman, or the
1888 recording of Sir Arthur Sullivan addressing Thomas Edison. The
song is enjoyable despite the heavy scratching distortion, but perhaps
more as a historical record than for its entertainment value -- in the
same way that you might place an ancient pot on display in a museum
for viewers to appreciate, though you're not going to cook in it.
The speech however, is barely discernible and considerably less
pleasant to listen to. Maybe encoding the sound wave directly onto a
physical medium is not the best way to go. Or maybe it just
deteriorates over time, which would be another great reason to avoid it.
http://www.metamage.com/savoyard/
Now rather than actually trying to compose a shot and take one good
picture, people have become accustomed to pointing the camera in the
general direction and clicking the shutter as many times as it takes
before they accidentally get a good picture.
Computer-assisted photography is related to but distinct from the
issue of analog vs. digital storage.
Storage can be another problem, because while physical photos do
take up room, digital pictures take up a lot of storage as well, and
a shoebox is quite a bit cheaper than a new hard drive.
One hard drive (which I needed anyway to use the computer at all) is
enough to store every photo I've ever taken at a resolution
appropriate to the camera I used. One hard drive is smaller than many
shoeboxes.
In the end, most people switch to digital and never look back or
care about the problems, but I want a physical master and total
control of the picture, so I'm sticking with film until no one makes
it anymore.
I'd rather have the ability to make lossless backups of my photos than
be stuck with having to guard the unique master copy.
Josh
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