Digital Music vs Analog Music
Neil Young was interviewed by MTV about studio recording in digital format. Neil commented, “We really needed good control over the sound and we got that with digital, but we lost the sound. We don’t have the sound anymore unfortunately, it’s gone.” So what the heck is he talking about? Everyone knows that digital music is superior to analog music, right? Well, it all depends on what aspect you are talking about. If you are looking for a format that can easily be saved in multiple formats, ported to various devices for playback, edited, and remixed, then digital is definitely your format of choice. But if you are looking for the truest form of sound reproduction, the analog is your only choice.
The reason for this is that an analog recording is a continuous sound wave that includes the entire spectrum of sound that was originally produced. If you take an LP record and play it on a cheap turntable with cheap speakers, it will obviously sounds inferior to a CD. But if you take the same LP and play it on a good stereo system, then the sound will be richer and if you listen closely you will hear things on the LP recording that are not present on the CD recordings.
The reason for this is that a digital recording is merely a sampling of the original sound wave, so things necessarily have to be cut out. The BIT RATE of the digital recording defines how many samples per second are captured. On a typical CD recording, the bit rate is 44.1K or 44,100 samples per second. The BIT DEPTH defines how much information is stored in each of those samples, or basically how high are the high tones and how low are the low tones. On a standard CD, the bit depth is 16-bits.
The industry is moving towards improving these standards to 48K and 24-bits, but at the end of the day it will still be a sample of the original sound and not a true reproduction of the sound like an LP record is. This is why a lot of artists are insisting on analog studio recordings. They are willing to pay extra to have the master produced in the truest form.