Ask an Audio geek

[Alex K]

I'm sorry folks, but DIGITAL IS NOT AN EXACT RECORDING of the original. It is slices pieced together and part of what is missing, is the information between the slices.

Speakers are analog. Guitars are analog. Violins are analog. Percussion is analog. Horns and trumpets are analog. Sax, clarinet, bassoon, they are all analog. No matter how digital one thinks they may have gone, it all started off analog.

The biggest problem with digital (besides the lack of similar harmonics) is that it tends to 'clean up' the analog signal and it is not an exact copy of the original performance. Digital is close, but it cannot compare with analog on so many levels. The only real advantage to digital is the ability to replicate the original copy precisely

This sounds all very vague. You have heard of the sampling theorem and how dithering roughly works I presume. It is a mathematical theorem that sampling the signal at discrete time intervals is enough to reproduce a signal precisely as long as it has limited bandwidth, i.e. what you lose is frequencies above ~ half the sampling rate. After dithering, the limited bit depth translates to a noise floor you can calculate, limiting your S/N. Both of these things are limitations which are also present in an analog recording device, usually much more so. Now, both of these things can only work properly in digital if you apply suitable filters to the raw DAC output which again makes sure that the signal between the sampling points is averaged and the discrete steps of the output translated into smooth noise floor. This can go wrong with bad DACs. Also, the clock signal of the DAC needs to be steady. But those are all well understood manageable problems. If applying steep filters below 20 khz as needed for CD recording is too difficult, go to 96 khz or whatever.

Unless you specify where in this process analog has an advantage, this makes the talk about chopping up the signal being bad or unnatural a purely emotional argument.