Most musical instruments are analog. Digitizing them is inherently lossy. I mean, it doesn’t matter, you can get both digital and analog recordings that are orders of magnitude more accurate than human hearing, but claiming that analog is more inherently lossy than digital is just factually incorrect, unless the music is produced purely digitally. Including no human voices, because those are analog.
Analog is inherently lossy due to the materials and playback method. Vinyl records sound different when they are dusty.
Digital is inherently lossless because the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem guarantees that, given a sufficiently high sample rate, all information from the ordinal signal is preserved.
Your speakers are analog. They sound different when they are dusty. Your ears are analog. Things sound different when you have dirty ears. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem only applies when there are no frequencies outside of the sample range, which doesn’t happen in real life. None of this matters, because like I said it’s trivial to have orders of magnitude more accuracy than you need. Digital is just way cheaper to copy accurately, so that’s why it has become dominant, and that’s fine, but the idea that it’s inherently more representative of reality is just gibberish.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn’t copy it to another one a checksum won’t help you.
The analog storage you are referring to from thousands of years ago has degraded substantially since its creation. Yes it’s still useful but I wouldn’t use that as evidence it’s a better medium. Case in point: texts (a digital storage form) from thousands of years ago can be retransacribed to be exact copies of the original (with respect to the knowledge contained within of course) whereas paintings from the Renaissance have changed dramatically due to aging and can never be returned to their original form since the needed data is lost.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they’re so easy to copy that it’s not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn’t trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it’s not magically better in every way.
But if you lose the information how to turn those bits into music, it is gone forever. That Edison cylinder is pretty easy to play compared to that opus or mp3 file you found from the grave 40000 years from now.
Not just any time it’s copied or generally over time, but each playback can degrade the quality. Record pins erode the channels, magnetic heads affect the strength of the magnetic field they read.
Reads, copies, and time don’t (necessarily) degrade digital media, even with lossy compression (time can, but any time it’s copied, it resets the clock to as good as the media can give; analog doesn’t get that reset). Lossy compression only degrades it on conversion and there’s a bunch of control over the shape of that degradation (with the intent of it not being detectable to our ears, though it obviously also depends on the bandwidth available).
You can sit here and have an argument about Nyquist-Shannon, but it isn’t relevant for lots of music made in the past 40 years since it was made or recorded digitally.
If your work was made with a DAW there’s no point to analog.
I’ve got a record from a smaller artist somewhere that I swear has fucking mp3 compression in it, because they don’t know how to export their shit like an adult.
The only meaningful difference between them is that digital is cheaper to copy. Your ears are analog though, so everything you’ve ever heard in your entire life is 100% pure analog, and I explicitly said in the post you seem to think that you’re disagreeing with that they’re both orders of magnitude better than they need to be.
@zephr_c@nifty The character in the drawing is Hatsune Miku, so this is alluding to vocaloid music which could be produced purely digitally as you say.
Sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re both plenty good enough, and digital is cheaper to copy accurately. It’s also actually possible to make a copy of a copy of a copy digitally and have it still be accurate. I wasn’t attempting to say we shouldn’t use digital, or that it has no advantages, just that the argument in the original post makes no sense.
True. I wasn’t trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn’t make sense.
Most musical instruments are analog. Digitizing them is inherently lossy. I mean, it doesn’t matter, you can get both digital and analog recordings that are orders of magnitude more accurate than human hearing, but claiming that analog is more inherently lossy than digital is just factually incorrect, unless the music is produced purely digitally. Including no human voices, because those are analog.
Analog is inherently lossy due to the materials and playback method. Vinyl records sound different when they are dusty.
Digital is inherently lossless because the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem guarantees that, given a sufficiently high sample rate, all information from the ordinal signal is preserved.
But isn’t live music analogue?
Vinyl sounds different per use, since it wears out.
Your speakers are analog. They sound different when they are dusty. Your ears are analog. Things sound different when you have dirty ears. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem only applies when there are no frequencies outside of the sample range, which doesn’t happen in real life. None of this matters, because like I said it’s trivial to have orders of magnitude more accuracy than you need. Digital is just way cheaper to copy accurately, so that’s why it has become dominant, and that’s fine, but the idea that it’s inherently more representative of reality is just gibberish.
It is inherently more representative of reality. Measurably so. Vinyl doesn’t and cannot have the same dynamic range as digital.
You know that vinyl is not the only way of recording analog information, right?
There is also cassette tapes, reels, wax cylinders, laser discs… Analog supports degrade over time. Digital files do not.
Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.
Digital files have checksums. You literally know when something has changed and you lost information. And then you have error-correction on top.
How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn’t copy it to another one a checksum won’t help you.
The analog storage you are referring to from thousands of years ago has degraded substantially since its creation. Yes it’s still useful but I wouldn’t use that as evidence it’s a better medium. Case in point: texts (a digital storage form) from thousands of years ago can be retransacribed to be exact copies of the original (with respect to the knowledge contained within of course) whereas paintings from the Renaissance have changed dramatically due to aging and can never be returned to their original form since the needed data is lost.
What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.
Digitizing is only lossy once*. Analog is lossy every time you copy it and degrades over time.
*Assuming you use a lossless digital format
That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they’re so easy to copy that it’s not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn’t trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it’s not magically better in every way.
But if you lose the information how to turn those bits into music, it is gone forever. That Edison cylinder is pretty easy to play compared to that opus or mp3 file you found from the grave 40000 years from now.
Not just any time it’s copied or generally over time, but each playback can degrade the quality. Record pins erode the channels, magnetic heads affect the strength of the magnetic field they read.
Reads, copies, and time don’t (necessarily) degrade digital media, even with lossy compression (time can, but any time it’s copied, it resets the clock to as good as the media can give; analog doesn’t get that reset). Lossy compression only degrades it on conversion and there’s a bunch of control over the shape of that degradation (with the intent of it not being detectable to our ears, though it obviously also depends on the bandwidth available).
You can sit here and have an argument about Nyquist-Shannon, but it isn’t relevant for lots of music made in the past 40 years since it was made or recorded digitally.
If your work was made with a DAW there’s no point to analog.
I’ve got a record from a smaller artist somewhere that I swear has fucking mp3 compression in it, because they don’t know how to export their shit like an adult.
The only meaningful difference between them is that digital is cheaper to copy. Your ears are analog though, so everything you’ve ever heard in your entire life is 100% pure analog, and I explicitly said in the post you seem to think that you’re disagreeing with that they’re both orders of magnitude better than they need to be.
@zephr_c @nifty The character in the drawing is Hatsune Miku, so this is alluding to vocaloid music which could be produced purely digitally as you say.
Completely agreed otherwise, though.
Nearly all music is recorded digitally, anyway, and has been for a while.
Sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re both plenty good enough, and digital is cheaper to copy accurately. It’s also actually possible to make a copy of a copy of a copy digitally and have it still be accurate. I wasn’t attempting to say we shouldn’t use digital, or that it has no advantages, just that the argument in the original post makes no sense.
But there’s a difference between converting a JPEG to a PNG and re-compressing a JPEG as another JPEG.
Relevant
True. I wasn’t trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn’t make sense.