Alanog vs Figital PART 00000001

On the 'analog' vs 'digital' debate, or Alanog vs Figital, as I has recently renamed it, I've mainly heard the arguments from the stand point of music production and reproduction.

My guess that in the dawn of this new digital information age this debate has been raging across multiple media and technologies – books vs ebooks, digital vs true lithographic printing, and film vs digital image capture (still and motion). In the music scene the debate has raged particularly hard as there are, like film, so many stages in the process of getting the finished work to the audience. There are advantages to digital in its convenience of use, but also like the new Kindle Single, digital in music seems to offer opportunities to the artist that simply weren't there before: cheap accessible music production with limitless creative potential, and independent distribution in lengths and even formats of the artist's choosing – to a certain extent. But there are losses in the nature of the mediumLike film and print there is a loss of something about the nature of the medium that was nearly nice – the book's touch and ease of reading in comparison to the screen, the different sound of vinyl to mp3. But the alanog vs figital debate goes through every room of the pre-production, production, distribution and 'consumption' corridor.

Much of the components of the analog enthusiasts' points seem to come from a loss of depth, or the loss of something real: books bring about a physical interaction between the reader and the object – you turn the pages, you keep it on the shelving and walk towards it them scanning, head tilted across the titles on the spines (except in the case of War and Peace where the title comfortably fits horizontally); real printing has greater depths of blacks and the intaglio process is a physical interaction between paper and ink, with the colo(u)r being pushed in to the paper, with massive rollers by hand giving additional character to the art. In film, there is a continuous set of colours not just millions, and the colours are richer, deeper than digital and have their own quality, not just a bland uniform capture of everything on an equal footing.

There are just purely technological comparisons, ones that deal with the communication technology rather than effect of digital on the stories, art, design and music itself: digital vs analog radio for example. This is a debate about whether a slightly scratchy signal that is available across the entire country is better than a pristine one only available where the signal level is adequate. Personally I think that if you were alone in the Outer Hebrides one would rather have a scratchy signal than none, and on this point it is a political debate perhaps rather than a technical one. However with digital vs analog screens I'm not sure that many people have complained about how the colour screens on their laptop are simply not as good as those old CRT ones.

But there are also technical areas that affect the creation as well as the delivery mechanism.

In music the debate is harsh going through all the stages of creation to listening: the instruments and machines that make or capture the sound, the machines on which it is captured, the way the multiple tracks of a multitrack track recording are added (or summed) together, the medium on to which the stereo (or other) final is put, the medium through which it is 'mastered' (akin to 'grading' in film – the final touches), the medium from which it is played by the consumer and the technology on which it is played.

The problem here is that at some point we have to admit unless we are the same room as the musicians who are creating the music who are writing original folk songs passed down through the oral tradition, then at some point some mediation has got in between in the form of recording or distribution. Even if we were in the same room each person would hear a different version of the same piece of music, and that piece of music would itself be subject to change over repetitive plays.

The point of reproduction is to capture and distribute or capture and record for later representation and that inherently gives us compromises.

Digital has affected our lives from before the state machine was a twinkle in Alan Turing's eye. Switches and relays have been part and parcel of electricity, and have allowed communications to improve, with the original telegraph with morse code (an almost digital means of communication) allowed information to get across the world almost instantaneously, rather than in a matter of weeks.

Marshall McLuhan's famous 'Medium is the Me(/a)ssage', “Global Village', and his Tetrad of the effects of media change explore how changes in media change consciousness, and how they obsolesce previous media, how when pushed to extremes they flip into something else. We all know how our memories for facts have been surrendered to smartphone Google access, though in my case I could never remember any of those things one Googles down the pub anyway – 'who was the director of...' - I didn't know before the smartphone and will probably forget straight after Googling it.

Many of the people who seem to have a reverence for the analog are the same people who remember the names of every producer without the need for a smartphone. I always admired those people, it shows commitment to the art form. But it is also very 'Alan'y: just because you know something doesn't mean your passion about it is (a) interesting (b) of any value.

In music much of the claims of the 'Alan' analog purists centre around how a continuous analog waveform (think looking at a wave in the water from the side on) recorded or created in analog must be purer or superior to its recording, creation or reproduction in digital.

Digital recordings 'sample' or capture a continuous waveform at particular intervals – lots of them, but only particular intervals, and therefore in the eyes of the analog purist it can not possibly be as pure as the capturing of a continuous waveform of by analog, which is itself a continuous process rather than a series of discreet ones.

The claim is that analog literally just converts one form of energy (sound) into another (electrical) and then back again; digital must necessarily miss out all the bits of the signal in between the 'samples' or captures.

However I don't hear people complaining about how film only has 30 frames per second and doesn't capture visual changes continuously.

In reality there are multiple problems all the way along the line from creation, through recording, through manufacture and distribution to delivery and reproduction that affect whether the original creation is in fact an accurate representation of the original source, transduced via analog or not. People cite vinyl as sounding better but the problem here is really that the cheapest analog consumer devices can probably produce sound a bit better than the cheapest digital ones. Simply because digital has gone so cheap and mp3s can be compressed to really poor quality now.

People often confuse the so called purity of the technological process with the way it sounds. Analog is deeper and fatter people say. If you listen to an analog synth in comparison to a computer emulation digital you will say that the analog one is outrageous and big where as the computer is tinny sounding. There is some truth to that, but its not really to do with analog vs digital. I have several early samplers that all have digital sources with far less depth than today's but have their own analog filters and amps, and they sound big too. A new Dave Smith Tetra is unequalled in the digital realm, but then no-one has thought to make anything sounding like it and Dave Smith is a genius of synth manufacturing. Analog stuff has massive amplifiers dedicated to making it sound very loud. Digital stuff comes through a computer's digital to analog converter which is probably the same price or less than the synth you are comparing it too. If you bought digital to analog converters that were four times the price of your synthesizers you would probably hear the digital emulation and go, wow, that sounds awesome. But you don't you hear the £600 dedicated synth next to the £300 converter that has to do everything from record your vocal to play the synth emulation to the latest Boards of Canada album in mp3 you are complaining about being better on vinyl. If you could hear it in 24 bit 96kHz on half decent converters you would be enjoying it far more than you could with vinyl with its limited bit depth and scratches.

In some ways that's part of the economics of the change. At the end of analog, the medium was expensive in the days of analog and so was much of the playback equipment. But now with digital it goes very cheap and equally quality free. A pop song coming out of a laptop sounds little better than a scratchy 78 on a wind-up gramophone.