Comment by equalarrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by equalarrow | Hacker News Reader

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I have a friend like this. I've been in bands in the past and worked in (even built my own) studios. I seen and partaken the 24/96 vs. 16/48 debate (spoiler: that only matters in the studio). I've worked with high end mics, pres, dacs, boards, tape, etc.

The big thing we tangle on is always digital vs. analog. Oh boy.... Zzzzz... I've cut tape and editing on analog sucks. Noise on analog is not ideal. Compression and 'natural' bottom end warmth are nice. But that's where it stops. Most of (all of?) these things can now be simulated by plugins. We don't even have to say digital has won because it's so obvious. Analog is there for the minority purists.

This debate has between us has taken many hours over many years. Oh yah, let's not forget vinyl too!..

I've had to recently redirect the argument to musicianmanship, which I feel is really where the rubber meets the road. It all starts at the source. If your source sucks, then you'll have some work to do to fix it. Stuff like autotune, sample triggers, etc. In this way, analog is better as it will demand more of the musician's performance. Hard to swap out the kick drum on analog.

All in all, I personally don't think any non-studio experienced audiophiles would know if something was recorded digitally vs. analog. There are so many things you can do now and unless you know those studio 'tricks', you can't even tell. This has already been the case since the 90's I think. Everything can pretty much be simulated, processed, filtered, chopped, moved, etc.

One great resource for all this is Ken Andrews. Look him up. He's got a lot of great stories and insight on recording.

My advice to my friend: learn the tools and use what make sense artistically. But debate for theory's sake is pointless in my mind.

My theory about audiophiles is that a lot of them grew up in the 1970s-1990s where there really was a huge difference between "high end" and consumer grade audio. That gap has narrowed considerably. I think there's also a lot more people these days out there actually explaining the engineering and science in good audio (in the old days technical details were considerably harder to look up), this makes it hard to push "marketing oriented" product (eg those infamous audiophile cables). My impression currently is that the audiophile hobby kind of was dying off.

I do think there's a few areas where analog still is a bit better technically (mostly from the musician perspective, things such as distortion and resonant filters), but digital is both often better and just so much more convenient for 90% of things. Those that embrace analog as a religion are rather annoying.

Now, I do remember in the 1980s there was a huge push of digital everything -- digital playback, "digitally remastered", etc. A fair bit of that at the time had major issues -- eg not very nice sounding DA stages, aliasing problems, etc. Perhaps this is where some of this attitude comes from.

Modern "audiophile" gear is much better today than in the 90s, especially for the same price points, but my observation is that there's a divergence between hipsters that prefer gear older than themselves looking for something unique and those that seek technical specs religiously and know where to optimize for best technical sound. I just want the best sound I can get within a reasonable budget even if I could tell the difference if I spent $1000+ more on a better amp.

Most of the anti-digital people I know fall into two overlapping camps - technophobes that don't know how basic DACs work (believing that digital audio means output of literal square and stepper waves into the air) or those that simply prefer older recordings from a point of nostalgia or artistic taste. Showing conclusively that some of their favorite records were mastered digitally before being compressed and filtered for LP is similar to watching climate change deniers try to reason via strawman and red herring arguments.

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