Why do I hate everything digital?

Walter Benjamin to thread?

This would have been a lot less likely to exist in the pre-digital era.

Digital is not a format, its kind of an encoding but it even more basic than that.

Almost every facet of current western life is based on digital technology at some level.

Saying you hate digital is like saying I hate the concept of language or I hate atoms.

So you hate mp3s, what about CDs?

they don't make them like they used to...

andy

..or has already solved by using 24bit/96k+ at the recording/mixing/mastering end of things, dithering to 16/44.1k for the delivery format. Benefits of higher-res delivery format even to the golden-eared audiophile = dubious. Benefits of making folks buy their classik rokk record collections AGAIN to record companies = immense. The grey area is where old rekkids are remixed for 5.1 (itself enough of a novelty to encourage take up) and this very act of remixing through modern desks means that even the reissued stereo versh is radically different = hence great proclamations for SACD/DVD-A's superiority in two-channel mode.

Otherwise, Ed OTM.

For the vast majority of people whatever problems digital music standards have with percieved quality are vastly outweighed by the convenience of compressed digital formats such as mp3.

But DVD-A is losslessly packed, right? So each channel = 24/48k at least. Something similar with SACD 5-ch I expect.

Love for analogue kit I can understand. Old synths are a joy, aesthetically and sonically. Ditto a lot of stuff like compressors and such. A lot of peoples beef with digital kit is down to interface. Many people can't take to controlling a whole project on a computer screen when previously they had a full desk etc. to work with.

In fact, in the audio production world I think a lot of the hostility came/comes from the fact that a lot of engineers spent years and years learning the techniques and quirks of analogue systems and digital started making a lot of them redundant. And of course the digi kit was nowhere near good enough at the time which seemed to give their arguements weight. I've met some frustrating people who tried digital recording back at the start and have refused to use it again even now when its evolved beyond recognition.

What I really like about people making music digitally on computers these days is how libertarian it is. Stuff like Fruity Loops, Reason etc. have really allowed a large amount of people to get creative and start making music who wouldn't have before. These easy-to-use packages get people started and get them results that sound pleasing really quickly, and probably the main thing that makes people quit any forays into making music early on is when it becomes too hard or sounds horrible. How many kids quit music in schools because of the recorder or Nazi violin teachers etc.?

Eesh, I'm rambling a bit. Let me just have a go at some individual points and I'll be out of here

for music digital encoding compresses so much bandwidth, it's like eating a peanut butter sandwich that got run over by the school bus

All digital encoding? Tosser. I have a battered old TDK cassette which wows and flutters. Ergo 20 grand proffesional reel-to-reels are shite.

I'm not fooled by computer animation

If by this you infer that you thought that the Borrowers was a live action movie I am praying for your soul.

And besides, these photos were just digitally PRINTED. It could have very well been printed from film.

but i'm talking about AC3 encoded music DVDS.

DVD-A and SACD 5.1 are different beasts altogether.

'The delta-sigma analog-to-digital converter basically consists of integrator, 1bit quantizer and negative feedback loop path. The amplitude of the input analog signal is represented by the density of pulses output. The density of output pulses increases with increasing input signal amplitude.

On a more academic level, Lipshitz and co had a paper a few years ago 'exposing' why 1-bit delta-sigma in Direct Stream Digital (Sony's proprietary name for the non-PCM format behind SACD) was a really bad idea from an archival/recording point-of-view. Sony's pre-emptive response was to say, "A-ha, we never said it was actually 1-bit - it's, er, more than that." Hence, something called Wide-DSD.

Counterarguments have run along the lines of "Hmm, I always knew there was something funny about that there PCM," from lots of notables in the industry, and the alternative 'analog-like' coding has won a lot of high-profile supporters.

I don't keep up with this thing enough any more to know whether multi-track DSD recording is being pursued (or even that feasible), or who's winning the format war or whether people are really convinced that the Dylan remasters are magical because of the new format or just because they went back to the tapes and did them properly or because they were extensively remixed or a mad mix of all three or whatever.

It's all about copy protection, innit?

I think people are forgetting that digital is better for economic reasons and (arguably) for data integrity. But as a recording format itself, it has all the horrible limitations of digital existence - which is to say pixels instead of grains, sample rates, bit depth, etc. Theoretically, vector based data might be able to lessen some of these problems, but would that just be digital analogue? I heard the research has been going on for sometime on an analogue computer for this reason, actually. Wish I had more info on that.

Anyway, digital = convenience and durability (again, assuming no obsolescence), analogue = more latent quality (if used to full potential).

On a point-and-shoot digicam the sensor is smaller than APS film, and on the prosumer SLR bodies (Canon D60, Nikon D100), the sensor is APS sized (or about 2/3 the size of a 35mm film frame). So when you use a normal 35mm lens on a digital SLR body, the image is being drawn largely from the center, where every manufacturer's product is decent-to-good. Where you get stuck paying big money is for lenses that don't fall off in quality at the edges, and have resolving power that exceeds the limits of digital sensors. So this is, really, a good thing for most users.

For the art world, I think we'll see prices go up for 'analogue' work in the future as more people convert to digital. It will be the anomaly, someone shooting traditional black-and-white silver film and printing on paper, and that will command some premium, esp. for larger images.

You can see the potential if you look at DVCPRO50 , HDCAM or XDCAM footage.

Tonal range difficulties; problems with certain image representations based on optical vs. electronic light; photochemical effects that can only be approximated via computer effects.

Furthermore, there still is a lot of work that can be done (cheaply) to improve existing film projection technology with vast resultant improvement. Things like vacuum gates, anti-scratch systems, and so on. Some of these things are already being implemented with the new IMAX projectors.

There are certainly things that DV can do that film can't. But as far as image itself, a digitally sampled image cannot compete, especially with matrix data algorithms.

Kodak's also doing some amazing emulsion work lately. The Vision2 series is just the beginning of a new type of emulsion that will make 1600 speed film look like today's 500 speed film. To say the least. In any case, I certainly believe that digital will have a greater role in virtually every aspect of movies, EXCEPT for that of image origination (and hopefully projection too). Well, them's my or-pin-yerns.

Purity? If there one thing digital recording isn't, it's pure.

I don't like digital music production much. It can do some things that analog can't, but most of those things I don't like, aesthetically. It's why I prefer 70s reggae to dancehall/ragga.

xpost i'm talking about the music as a whole, how it sounds.

I do have to say that I miss playing my vinyl records; to me, there's nothing like the feel of the vinyl on your fingertips and the little giddiness felt when you land the needle on the exact place you want it to go, but when a record player is slowly going out of commission, what else can a person do but rely on something else? I used to be a vinyl/cassette snob and thought CDs were cold, but then I became much more appreciative of CDs when I acquired a vehicle that plays CDs. There's nothing like just being able to go to a specific track without having to do any sort of mental countdown or any other bit of guesswork that would take away from concentrating on the road. I've been seriously thinking of saving up to upgrade my stereo system to where I can play MP3 CDs as well. That would be, like, totally awesome! *grin*

As Ed points out, this is a bit daft. There are limits to analogue media just as there are with digital, perhaps not as hard and fast, but they're fairly well defined.

The best digital audio now available outstrips what can be captured on any tape machine in terms of the common measures of bandwidth and dynamic range. Unless you're taking up the extreme position that breaking down audio into a stream of digits somehow destroys the temporal coherence of a musical peformance (see S1mon Y0rke, T1m de Parav1nc1 et al) then the 'tape captures more' argument doesn't really hold water thesedays.

If analog recorded everything then why would there be different qualitys of analog media?