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Originally Posted by Kiwiburger "Digital has the potential to be the cleanest means of record and playback we have ever had." followed by "The idea that digital is "accurate" or "perfect" or "precise" is a joke... If you think it is, you have been reading to many digidesign papers..."
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potential a. possible; latent; having power to become; ie. It is not there yet. Any allusion to digital being perfect or accurate or precise as it stands is a premature to say the least. Any notion that digital will not improve as time passes is naive.
While analog summing may have distortion and noise the biggest difference it has to digital is continuity... the ability to deal with and treat sources in a continuously variable way. Once digital audio leaves the DAW as an analog waveform (while still an approximation of the original source) it is treated in true realtime. Not 96000 times a second, but continuously. Curves are treated as curves... Add analog eq's, compressors, etc... to the summing box. They still treat sound in a continuous way. The result is not approximated, even given variations. The result will be what is actually happening. It is the sum of an event. Digital approximates the initial numbers then will sum them... a process which is can never be accurate.
Digital audio probably has more inaccurate variations and intolerances than an analog console. Inaccuracies which are applied to every single digital process. Forget to the nearest electron. 96000 samples a second won't get you anywhere near that kind of resolution.
Analog being a bunch of intolerences would be all well and good if digital was accurate, but even digital audio passes through analog stages... applied to individual variations...
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The exact argument that analog has vasty more shades of decibels than digital is exactly my point here. A temperature change in the room will affect analog - not digital.
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Yes this is exactly my arguement! For digital to be able to handle any effect of the temperature change in a room it must first be able to handle the vastly more shades of decibels first.
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an analog path is a stream of electrons
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. You hit the nail on the head. An analog path is a stream of continuous electrons... like the minute hand on an analog clock. It is smooth and continuous and probably remains so at any resolution. Passing every minute, every second, every millisecond and beyond...
Digital audio is like the second hand... It ticks... it is far from continuous and it lacks great chunks of infomation that fall between each second... instead it approximates. An approximation which is probably far less accurate than the slight variation that may occur with the minute hand.