We don’t live forever and neither should our art*
Analogue or Digital – Why With Music There Is No Contest.
Why does an AAA recording seem to possess special qualities? Why even when played back over a crap analogue system does it still seems to have an indefinable unique something? What sets it apart? Why does a digital version of the same recording on a great system seem to be missing this quality? Its not a matter of word length or sampling frequency. Nor is it the quality of bit stream. And these days its not the converters or the clocks. Its the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Entropy. Yes thats right – not a word we associate with the Arts. But in the recording (and playback) of Music it is one of the 2 main psycho-acoustic factors affecting the listeners emotional engagement and enjoyment of the work. The other is “The Original Wave”.
Value is often associated with Rarity. There is only one analogue Sgt Pepper’s master tape – making it very rare & valuable indeed – while there many analogue and digital copies that have much less value comparatively speaking. One reason is that The Master tape decays and eventually become unplayable, i.e. – dies – it experiences entropy, and because of this has a finite lifetime of existence. Conversely a modern digital master can be cloned exactly & indefinitely making the safety copy et al worth the same as the original master itself. It can never die because it’s never been alive so to speak.
OK but why do even the AAA copies sound better than the ADA or ADD ones? That would be the phenomena of the Original Wave. When say, a vocal artist’s original pressure wave from the word, “hey!”, is transduced by the mic and electronics, then recorded onto magnetic tape and further processed, copied, whatever, all in the analogue domain, and you listen to it on even a low resolution cassette, you are still listening to the original performance waveform! No matter how degraded or distorted it is still the original.
So rarity & original wave. Digital audio no matter good or bad it may sound will always lack these 2 qualities. It is a Simulation – a replication of the original performance – decimated & interpolated into code and can be cloned infinitum. There can never be any Rarity and the Original Wave has been destroyed.
Its subtle but not really too deep. We don’t live forever nor should our art and we can hear that!
Cheers, SAM
SOUND ART M A G A Z I N E 