Rock 'N' Roll Inventions on Smithsonian

[mep]

Saw one of the shows on Rock 'N' Roll Inventions and it was interesting. One thing that caught my ear was someone complaining about digital and the comparison he made to digital being sliced bread compared to the whole loaf of analog. He said something to the effect of digital slicing up the loaf of bread, and when you shove the pieces back together to reassemble the loaf, the loaf is shorter compared to the analog loaf of bread because you made all of the slices which left a bunch of crumbs laying around which represents the music you lost. I know that analogy will cause DCPs to wail and gnash their teeth, but I still like it.

[Bill Hart]

The Smithsonian is an awesome place. You could spend a lifetime there, and still only see a fraction of the collection. As to digital, as a dyed in the wool analog guy, I've become far less digi-phobic. Part of it may be the better quality of recording and mastering today, and part of it may simply be conditioning. Certainly most new music starts life in a digitally recorded domain, so unless we hang on to our doggies, Mercurys and geezer pleaser rock records, you are likely to be hearing less than AAA. (Obviously, when I play some musty old record, I can immediately hear the difference between the early analog and the later digitized version but that's for old stuff).

[Johnny Vinyl]

geezer pleaser? Haha! I love it!.

[mep]

I guess I wouldn't consider myself "digi-phobic" since I actually do enjoy DSD recordings derived from tape, but given a choice between purchasing an all analog recording or one where digital crept in somewhere in the recording chain, I would always opt for the pure analog. As you said though, it's getting harder and harder to purchase newly issued/reissued LPs that are pure analog. It doesn't help that the provenance of many recordings is intentionally a bit sketchy either. Seeing the words "Sourced from the analog tapes" doesn't mean that said tapes weren't converted to a digital file and the LP was cut from the digital file.

IMO, the digital music industry has always been its own worst enemy. Every day it seems there is new digital carnival barker announcing the next greatest digital breakthrough. I have simply lost count of how many digital formats there are currently in the market place and how many file formats there are within those digital formats. The funny thing is that probably 99% of the general population is oblivious to the world of hi-rez digital.

One thing I do know is that once you leave the world of a one-box CDP and venture out into the jungle of file servers, networks, external hard drives, outboard DACs, remote apps, etc., you get to find out how complex digital can become. Also, how quirky it becomes too. The remote app will stop talking to your server, your software app that controls your music freezes up and forces a reboot (hello JRiver), your network goes down and everything stops communicating. The list goes on and on. You damn near have to be a software engineer to hook everything up and get all of the piece parts to communicate with each other and then maintain the system.

[Johnny Vinyl]

As a wannabe cook and pretend baker I appreciate that analogy!

As an aside.....I've always wanted to visit the Smithsonian.

[JCOConnell]

I want to eat. I'm willing to cook a little, but farming is out.