When is digital going to get the soul of music?

Both digital and analog have distortion. Neither will truly compare with live music. That said, there is a big difference between the distortion caused by analog, and that caused by digital. To grossly summarize it, there is actually more distortion in analog, as digital fans are fond of pointing out. However, the distortion is almost entirely at quite low frequencies. The distortion in digital, though much less, is still MUCH more musically objectionable, as it takes place at higher frequencies, and is much more audible all of the time. As some have said, advances have been made in the quality of digital reproduction; however, this fundamental distortion of the frequencies that are the most used in music cannot be helped, and that is why despite the advances in resolution, etc., digital will never really rival analog. Close, maybe, but definitely no cigar.

Tomcy6 - you are correct, there are a great many different perceptions out there in the audiophile world. My well-trained ears remark was meant to be much more specific to professional performing musicians. And yes, we are unfortunately most definitely a very tiny minority. However, I do not mean to imply that only professionals have or can have trained ears. I am actually trained in ear-training, and have helped many people in this respect. I just wish that alot more folks who call themselves audiophiles would actually use their ears, instead of quoting engineers and reciting specs and numbers. There is way too much love of technology in this hobby, and not nearly enough love for music, which is the reason the hobby exists.

The only other thing I would add is that your comment that most people can't afford a vinyl rig good enough to rival digital is sadly mistaken. It is very much the other way around. Digital has improved, yes, but only the very highest quality equipment, I would say at a minimum cost of at least $50,000, can even begin to be spoken of in the same conversation, sound-quality wise, as a properly set-up vinyl rig costing in the neighborhood of $2500. This will eventually change, of course, as music server technology is further developed (the direction digital is clearly headed in), but the sound quality of that technology is still far behind the best digital can offer. It will be a very long time yet before the sound quality catches up to the technology, and then another very long time before the price becomes affordable for most of us.

Tvad, Shadorne, Albertporter, you guys have made my arguments much clearer than I did, and I appreciate it. Once again, I am glad that I decided to become a professional musician instead of writer. You guys both make great points, Newbee as well.

Oh, and by the way, Kijanki, just to clarify, I am not the sort of "music teacher" you so disparage. I play full time in a major professional orchestra, and am blessed to play almost every day in one of the great concert halls this country has to offer. I do teach on the side, both privately and at a major university. I have also been interested in high end audio ever since my college days, and know a little about recording, though more from the acoustical rather than technical standpoint.

Speaking of ears again, Mapman brings up an interesting point about the human ear hearing above 20000Hz. Recent research has actually proven that the brain IS sensitive to these extremely high frequencies, it just doesn't process them the same way, so we don't "hear" the actual pitch of those tones. One of the very biggest differences between digital and analog, and why digital sounds like it has something missing to many of us, is that digital processing deliberately cuts out these supposedly inaudible frequencies. Engineers have claimed so far that we won't miss what we can't hear, but it has finally been proven that this is simply not the case - the human ear is most definitely more sensitive to sound than any machine yet invented. So I continue to urge everyone to use their ears and not rely on some engineer's specs - the better your ears become, the more enjoyment you will receive from your music, no matter what type it is, or what form it shows up in, or what type of equipment you are using.

Kijanki, as you no doubt are aware, every digital processer is totally different, so it is impossible to generalize about all of the different designs. I see, re-reading my post, that that was not worded very well, and was too broad a generalization. Many designers do in fact cut off many of these supposedly inaudible frequencies, however, considering them extraneous. And even in the very best products, the processing itself has unintended effects that they have yet to figure out. Many believe that it is not ultimately possible to take sound, turn it into ones and zeros, change it back again, and have it come out the same. Without turning this into a very boring technical discussion, two common examples are harmonic overtones being removed, and the disappearance of the sense of the surrounding air. Digital processing, again very generally speaking, tends to take away, or at any rate cloud the differences between the timbres of individual instruments (especially acoustic instruments), and also tends to blur the soundstage, making it harder to determine exactly where the instruments are located in the original space. This accounts for why many people find digital sound sterile or fake. The very best digital is getting better at presenting a three-dimensional space, but it is incredibly difficult for digital to do this, and they are still working on it. Analog does all of these things with ease. And I am a little surprised no one has mentioned the jitter factor, which is a huge degradation in sound quality, and which even the very best products you mentioned with 24 bit/96kHz sampling have failed to eliminate entirely. I think I've said enough on the subject, I hope that was more clear.

Hi Fas42 - I want to respond to a couple of points you make: "distortion is distortion is distortion," and "A key indicator of digital working well is that there is no such thing as a bad recording, you can enjoy the "soul" of everything you have."

Am I correct in guessing that you listen to primarily, perhaps almost exclusively, electronically produced music? This would be the only context in which I personally can conceive of anyone making the two above statements. Certainly digital can come close to analog in that arena. But if we are talking about recording the human voice, or other acoustic instruments, such as a full symphony orchestra, then sadly, there are indeed very very bad digital recordings; in fact, the vast majority. To give just one, but to me the most damning example, digital processing simply removes too much timbral information, something that designers have always acknowledged and have never been able to fix, despite the great advances digital has indeed made. This is what most people mean when they talk about missing the "soul" in digital recordings.

And I would vehemently disagree with the first of those quotes as well. It has always baffled me when some audiophiles make this statement. Analog recording has much more distortion in it than digital, you are certainly correct there. However, the distortions inherent in the digital recording medium take place at higher, and therefore MUCH more musically objectionable frequencies. I am no electrical engineer, and others have explained the reasons behind this much better than I; I am sure this thread has multiple examples. I am, however, a professional orchestral musician, and I can tell you that I have never heard a digital recording of an orchestra, as good as many of them are, that sounds remotely as close to real as even an average analog recording. Besides the timbral issues I mentioned earlier, there is also the relative lack of ambient information from the original recording space - almost all digital recordings are multi-miked and then remixed so that any sense of the music happening in a real space, so important for most classical music, is gone. Even worse, the worst digital recording engineers will add to the mix a very fake sounding reverb in order to try to get that concert hall sound back again. Yes, analog has more surface noise - but this type of distortion is not embedded in the music itself, and can be listened through. Many of the ways digital processing distorts musical realities cannot be listened through, as they are embedded in the recording itself. Digital has indeed come a very long way, but in mine and many other musician's opinions, a few of it's flaws can never quite be overcome.

Please understand that I am in no way implying that digital is unlistenable or anything of the sort. There are many great performances that were only recorded digitally, and I am certainly not going to pass them up just because they were digitally recorded. I merely maintain that analog is a superior recording medium, if musical realism is the goal.

Frank, Kijanki, some very good questions. I'll do my best to answer them briefly. I'll start with Frank's discussion of playback at the recording site. I have had to record myself, or have a professional record me, more times than I care to count. More than a few times, I have convinced the engineer (always when it was a personal friend) to experiment with me, using both an analog and a digital set-up. I assure you, there are clearly heard differences between what is heard in the hall live, what is on the analog recording, and what is on the digital recording. It's a fun experiment to do, listening to the differences in timbre, and to the sense of space, or as audiophiles would have it, soundstaging and imaging and bloom and other such terms.

As far as orchestral recording goes, what I was thinking of was the difference between say recordings from the 50's and 60's, the so-called "golden age" of orchestral recording, and the way it is done digitally today. In the golden age, pretty much all of the best labels just hung a couple of mikes up out in the hall (or in the case of Mercury, high above the orchestra, usually about 15 to 20 feet, if I remember correctly). There was then very little done to the recording in the way of mixing, in the modern sense. Done in this way, the recording sounds about as close as it can get to what it actually sounds like to a live audience member sitting in the best seats in the hall.

Today, in a typical orchestral recording session, there may be as many as twenty mikes onstage, as well as overhead. Almost never are any placed out in the hall anymore. These mikes are much closer to the instruments than they should be, and then all of these separate tracks have to be mixed, which is almost never done on site (with the reference to the live sound). The resulting mix is therefore more what the engineer thinks sounds good (often even the conductor is not involved anymore, except on site) rather than a re-creation of what the performance actually sounded like in the space it was recorded in. You lose much more of the sense of a real space on this type of recording. And this is not to even go into how many edits are done nowadays compared to in the past. Often, what you are listening to on a modern orchestra recording has no real resemblance to any single take that was actually done. This is one reason why many people complain that modern orchestras do not sound as "musical" somehow as the older ones did - the "life" they are missing has indeed been taken out by the process. The average symphonic recording nowadays has hundreds of edits on it.

So to the playback - on a well-done recording, tape hiss is all but inaudible, and if one takes good care of their LP's, one can get dozens if not hundreds of plays from many of them without ever hearing a pop or crackle. Other times, these things are very audible; sometimes the pressing was bad and there is nothing one can do about it. Regardless, this is merely surface noise. I personally will put up with this if it means that I get a more accurate (meaning lifelike) representation/resolution of the sound of the instruments and voices I am listening to, and a better sense of the space that they are in (which, of course, very much affects their performance, which will change in subtle ways in a different venue on a tour, for example). Analog recording captures these things so much better than digital recording does - this is easily demonstrated on any decent system. There is no mistaking the difference between the best orchestral recordings of the golden age, and the ones done today that may have much less surface noise, but sound so much more characterless in comparison (speaking of the recording, of course, not the performance).

LOL Kijanki, funny last comment on your latest post. It is not necessarily that I want to convert everyone to my beliefs, in fact there is more good vinyl for me if they don't! I am just trying to explain my own point of view. As always, it depends on what one's personal sonic priorities are. Those who place eliminating surface noise as their highest priority will of course always go the digital route.

I have never been involved with an orchestral recording session that did not involve multiple mikes. Even for my orchestra's archival recordings, which are broadcast on the local classical station, they use at least eight. I am not sure why this came about, either; as you say it doesn't really make any sense. I think it may be a case of "because they can." It also gives the recording engineer MUCH more personal control over what the end result of his mixing sounds like (as well as being much easier to edit - any idiot can make a recording with a laptop now). They almost never listen to what the musicians have to say about it, even the conductors nowadays very rarely get involved in what the actual end product actually sounds like. It's a crying shame, really. Technology winning out over aesthetics yet again.

Frank, your "thought experiment," unless I am mistaken somehow, is the exact experiment I was talking about having made several times, most recently about a year and a half ago. I am also not sure how you can conclude that a recording must have worked right without playing it back...

To put a finer point on this, I could agree that digital can decently capture the experience you mention (Beethoven 7 several rows back), this I am not denying; my argument is that an analog recording will capture it much better yet. Again, it depends on what your sonic priorities are. If one's priority is to recreate the timbre of the instrument, especially it's overtones, and the ambient noise of the room along with it, then yes, the analog recording was indeed markedly superior every time. Digital processing simply removes too many overtones from the very complex timbres of most acoustic instruments - something many designers are still trying to solve. Unfortunately, though in other aspects the technology has markedly improved, in this particular area (which is of course fundamental to musicians, who work very hard to get as close as possible to the exact sound they want) there has been very little, if any progress since the technology was invented.

Hi Rgs92 - I do not own an SACD player, so my experience with them is limited - a couple of friends of mine have one, but they live pretty far away and like me, mostly listen to vinyl anyway. Certainly the quality of SACD is higher than redbook, and there are some very good sounding ones out there. But if we are comparing them to the "golden age" of analog recording, they just don't measure up. Also, isn't it true now that there are not very many SACD recordings being made anymore? For me, the cost of them is prohibitive.

Ooh, Mapman, gonna have to disagree with you when you say in your last post - "Has nothing to do with getting the soul though." It has EVERYTHING to do with that, especially in large scale orchestral music, where there is such a HUGE range of different emotions expressed in say a lengthy Mahler symphony. It also has to do with the "low level detail" discussion we have been having on a different thread. A very great deal of the emotional subtleties are lost, since so much of the subtleties of the huge range of timbres are lost. That's not a well written sentence at all, LOL, but I think the point is nevertheless clear?

Kijanki, if you are speaking of new recordings, just about all are digitally recorded in the first place. Almost no one does analog recording anymore - digital is so much cheaper, is far easier to edit, and can be done with much less equipment. However, if you are speaking of re-releases, as I think you were, many "audiophile" re-releases of older recordings made in analog are remastered from the original analog tapes, though there are of course digital ones as well.

Many of those who say that digital surpasses analog in sound quality are those who are listening only superficially, and are too caught up in surface noise (and yes, I include many people that call themselves audiophiles in that group). Those of us who truly listen to music with well-trained ears know better. Digital simply does not have the sheer dynamic range of analog, nor does it recreate the sense of the original recording space nearly as much, in terms of soundstaging, imaging, air, bloom, etc. Also, again because of the different type of distortion and the frequency at which this distortion occurs, it does not resolve instrumental or vocal timbres nearly as well - they don't have the body and breadth and complexity they do in analog. All of these things add up - digital simply does not sound as alive and real as analog does, and so it cannot catch the soul of music in the same way, as the original poster put it.

Is digital reproduction improving as resolution gets better? Yes. Is it more convenient? Yes. I am not arguing that it is "done wrong," as someone suggested. And I am not arguing that it is obviously the way of the future. But that doesn't mean that it is therefore better. It means that it is cheaper, more convenient, and sounds "good enough" for most. Audiophiles are an extremely small percentage of the market, lest anyone forget. Because of the inherent types of distortion, no matter how good it gets in the future, digitally reproduced sound will never rival a good, properly set-up analog rig (I do not argue that it certainly rivals bad or improperly set up rigs). This is easily heard by direct comparison of the same recording on the same system, and you would find very few professional musicians who disagree. Not one person I have ever done this type of demonstration for, professional or otherwise, has ever preferred the digital recording to the analog. It is not a question of having an open mind, Mapman, it is a question of having open ears. Those of us who have open ears are the ones keeping analog alive.

Kijanki, your last couple of posts are simply inaccurate. Analog was not made from some digital master tape, except in the last 20 years or so, and as I said before, some of it is still not. Digital recording technology did not even exist before the very late 70's, and I don't think it was commercially available until 79, though I don't know the exact date. And again, the amount of distortion, in either medium, is not small. And in the digital medium, it occurs at much more musically objectionable frequencies, which cannot be helped, no matter how much better the medium gets. I am not talking numbers here, I am talking in terms of the audible difference to the human auditory system, which is much more sophisticated than any machine yet invented. In respect to it's resolution of harmonic overtones produced by the voice and other acoustic instruments in particular, analog is much closer to the sound of these instruments. Which is why von Karajan later retracted that statement, which was made in the early days of digital when it was hoped that this harmonic distortion problem could be solved. When so-called sound engineers try to "prove" otherwise, you can be sure they are crunching numbers instead of using their ears. Those are the same engineers that maintain that there is no audible difference between two pieces of equipment with the exact same specs. Most audiophiles actually use their ears, and know otherwise. This is getting us into the classic subjectivist vs. objectivist debate. I repeat - no one I know who has ever heard the same recording on the same system has ever preferred the digital to the analog. There are many fine recordings one can use to test this - my brother's favorite is the Reiner/Chicago Symphony recording of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra.

Seems simple enough. Obviously the entertainment industry, broadly speaking, has concentrated most of their research on video, not audio. They make much more money off of film than music. Any audiophile who is concerned with the progress of home theater systems knows this painfully well. The industry has always chosen formats much more suited to video, and audio has lagged far behind. In fact, they just did it again, as anyone who has been following all that mess knows.

Speaking of cameras, the same debate does still exist among professional photographers. Many like the convenience and speed of digital, and will take a digital camera on their first trip to a site and take literally hundreds of pictures, sorting through them later to figure out their perfect shot or shots. They will then take what they call their "real" camera on a subsequent trip to the site, and concentrate on the shot or shots they actually want to sell, and this is the one that is actually printed in your magazines, books, catalogues, brochures, what have you. I have a cousin who does that, and as recently as this summer was saying that that is still how all of the best professional photographers work. In this way, they get the best of both worlds, and save alot of time and precious film. Since digital video is so far ahead of digital audio though, this is much more of a real debate (amongst the pros, I mean). As I said before, very few professional performing musicians will argue that the best digital sound reproduction has surpassed analog. Unfortunately, we aren't the ones making the decisions in the industry. Profit rules - that's the American way.

Tomcy6, let me quote part of your last post - "Sophisticated musicians, not rock, hiphop, etc., must train their ears to be able to play proper pitch, tone, etc. To other people, this practice will interfere with your finding the soul of the music." I have a serious disagreement with the second sentence here. As I stated a couple of times earlier in this thread, ear training always increases people's involvement with and enjoyment of music. The more you can hear of the details, the more you can appreciate and enjoy them. I have helped laymen (for lack of a better term) as well as music students with ear training, and in every case they were and are still very appreciative, saying that it opened up new worlds for them in their listening. This is not just for classical music - understanding harmony enhances the enjoyment of all types of music. One can be much more appreciative, for instance, of a great jazz artist's live or recorded improvisations if you have more understanding of what he is doing. The more you understand of rhythm, the better you can appreciate a great drummer in a rock band. I helped one lady in particular who now cannot help harmonizing along with her favorite country singers when listening to the radio in her car. Music is the universal language, and the more you can speak it, the more it will communicate to you.

Kijanki, you are correct that I was speaking of the recording process, and not the playback; you are also correct that most audiophiles will be much more concerned about the playback. My objection is much more to the process of digital recording and processing, and what it does to the sound in the first place, long before anyone's playback system can get involved. Digital playback systems have indeed come a long way - I agree that SACD sounds better than CD, and I have heard a couple of 24/192 masters, which do sound pretty good.

Mapman, you are certainly correct about younger people hearing high frequencies better. It is also an unfortunate fact that everyone in my profession is guaranteed to lose at least 20% of their hearing during the course of our careers, due to the sheer decibel levels onstage. I'm not anywhere near that mark yet, but I should be wearing earplugs more than I do. I try to resist temptation to play my system loudly at home, and I try to avoid any other noisy environment when not at work.

Charles1dad, I didn't and wouldn't say that being a professional musician gave me any more authority on the technology; I was just explaining where I was coming from. That said, I do obviously have great familiarity with what acoustic instruments and voices sound like before they are recorded, and I am well qualified to judge whether a recording has captured this or no (even if I don't always completely understand the technical why of it). A performer's passion for the music should come through no matter how bad the recording and how bad the system it is played on; this is not what I was speaking of, nor was I speaking at all of enjoyment derived from listening to performances - for me, that goes without saying. For any musician, the performance always comes first - the recording is a very distant second, even among those musicians who also consider themselves audiophiles. If one is too busy listening to the recording or the system to enjoy the music, than priorities are most definitely in the wrong place, IMO.

Frank, while I think I understand where you are coming from now, we will definitely have to agree to disagree that "distortion is distortion is..." For me, it is not a matter of what types of distortion digital has managed to eliminate; it is a matter of what is not present in a digital recording that is in an analog one. To say that digital throws the baby out with the bathwater would be grossly exaggerating the case; but I and many of my fellow musicians do believe that digital recording/processing simply removes too much information (especially timbral and spatial information) from the music somehow, and I know more than a few recording engineers and equipment designers who agree.

Frank - I see that I have missed quite a few posts on here today! This is a very busy season for me, as you can imagine. Anyway, Albert and Aplhifi have certainly gone much farther than I ever could towards answering the question you last put to me - all I can say is "yeah, what they said!" :) Seriously, though, one of the reasons I love this site is that I can read such posts by Albert or Atmasphere, who are both excellent at describing the technical reasons in layman's terms for things that I know I can hear, but don't have the technical knowledge to explain to someone else why I am hearing it. I realize that's a terrible sentence I just wrote, but it's late, and there is a reason I am a musician, not a writer, LOL!