ANALOG vs DIGITAL - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

What now sounds best,
analog or digital? Not
so long ago few audiophiles
would even have
asked the question. A considerable
proportion of audiophiles would have
rejected the notion that digital could
ever compete with the magic of analog.
Another considerable proportion would
have associated vinyl with floor tiles
rather than recordings.
Vinyl, as we now call long-playing
records, has made a major comeback, but
then digital has not exactly stood still
either. So…what’s better? I mean today,
right now?
This would be a short column if I
could answer with a single word. Unfortunately
— or perhaps fortunately —
things aren’t so simple.
When I tell my colleagues that an
equipment review is going to be done
entirely with vinyl, there are smiles all
around. We still love analog, and perhaps
you do too. We’re glad that the LP is
enjoying a resurgence. But we’re not
blind. Or deaf either.
There were in fact good reasons for
the recording industry to move to digital.
The first, and the least valid in my
view, was that it was new and shiny and
hi-tech, and might reverse the near collapse
of record sales in the early 80’s. Yes,
you read that right…record sales began
to collapse a decade and a half before
the Internet really got going. A better
argument was convenience. The CD was
smaller and easier to manipulate than an
LP, and although “perfect sound forever”
was a crock, the CD at least appeared to
be less vulnerable to mishandling. Nor
could you mishandle the laser the way
you might the phono cartridge, since a
machine did the handling for you. If you
didn’t like the song you heard, pressing a
button would whisk you to the next one.
For record producers, digital had its
advantages too. In the age of multitrack
pop music recording, with endless track
bounce-downs, deterioration of sound
with generations of copying was a
problem. Digital would solve that. True,
there was a hard edge to digital that
82 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
State of the Art
by Gerard Rejskind
drove producers around the bend, and
they would discreetly go back to their
beloved analog tape machines, just so
their ears would stop bleeding, but they
would avoid pointing that out.
But that was in the early days of
digital, when the typical “16-bit” player
would actually have only 14 bits of
resolution, and the crudest of filters
would be inserted into both recording
and playback chain to avoid aliasing.
The CD still uses the same amount
of data — a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz
and 16-bit words — but both recording
and playback equipment is vastly better.
What’s more, we’re no longer stuck with
the (relatively) low-resolution system
launched all those years ago by Philips
and Sony.
The first system-wide improvement
to digital was HDCD, co-invented by
Keith O. Johnson of Reference Recordings
(HDCD was later bought by
Microsoft, which recognized that it was a
way to push more data through a narrow
pipeline, exactly what Microsoft was
trying to do on the Internet). Then came
the DVD, which was a movie format, but
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whose standard included the ability of
playing back files with 24-bit words and
96 kHz sampling rate. Following that
was a failed standard called DVD-Audio,
which attempted to add surround sound
to the mix. Sony and Philips, which were
still collecting royalties on the CD, tried
to continue their run with the Super
Audio Compact Disc (SACD). Sony
pushed it, but then lost interest. Does it
suffer from ADD?
And don’t get me started on Blu-ray!
In the meantime sales of music were
shifting more and more to the Internet.
Though iTunes, the leader in Net music
sales, offers only compressed music, a
number of companies offer downloadable
files with 24 bits and either 88.2
or 96 kHz. You can buy for your home
a converter that can handle files with a
sampling rate of 192 or even 384 kHz.
Such files don’t yet exist, but you can see
where we’re headed.
So what’s better? Today? Right now?
Vinyl records sound better than they
ever have before, because the equipment
for playing them is immensely superior.
That’s true even if you don’t have the
funds for the kind of gear we have at
UHF. We know more about what a
turntable and arm should or should not
do, and a good modern cartridge can
play parts of a groove that has never been
touched before. At very low level the LP
is handicapped by its higher noise level,
but it has nearly infinite resolution even
at those very low levels. That’s where the
perceived warmth of the LP comes from.
But as the resolution of digital
increases, its low-level performance
does too. The dynamics of the highresolution
digital recording can now
rival those of the LP.
We’ve gotten to the point where even
the 1982 Red Book CD standard sounds
better than we had ever expected. By
comparison, though, the LP is leagues
ahead, even if reproducing it well is
costly. As for the new high-density
digital files, they have the potential to
equal the LP. The ultimate victory may
be years away, but that’s because there’s
still a lot of work to do.