Hacker News Reader

> I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media.

I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy. Whenever something new overtakes something old, that's going to happen. I'm excited about self-driving cars relieving me from having to drive while other people are still buying manual transmission cars because they love the direct manipulation of the machine. When I want a cup of tea, I dump hot water over a tea bag while other people go through an elaborate ritual.

I don't have a record player, but I do have fond memories of sitting in my room with headphones on while a record played, looking at the large format cover art and studying the sleeve. I'm not a collector of anything, but I think I understand the joy of artifacts.

One thing I am somewhat surprised is that the streaming music services haven't borrowed the idea of filters from Instagram to apply to music. Would anybody be interested in simulating playback through a tube amp? Through a suitcase record player? Through a high quality turntable? Or a low quality turntable that can't quite turn at 33-1/3 RPMs?

I agree. We're emotional creatures and our emotions are driven by perception. A wine that is thought to be expensive in a beautiful setting will be enjoyed more than that same wine thought to be inexpensive, drank out of a plastic cup in the back of MacDonald's. Same wine - different emotional experience.

Also, there is something to delaying gratification that can enhance the experience, and adding a certain kind of ceremony around the act will help too. In "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", it isn't just about the sushi. It's about the experience of knowing that you're being served by a craftsman who dedicated his life to perfecting his craft and being served in the way that he deems enhances the flavor. Rationally, it's silly, but we're emotional beings most of the time. Trump won largely because of emotion - it wasn't really a rational decision that the electorate took.

>I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy.

No, I'm not ignoring that aspect and I understand that physical touch of media can add enjoyment for some people.

What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes. That perspective presents a one-sided view favoring analog such as:

1) physical media you can touch is better than digital bits you can't touch

2) ownership is better than subscription (Spotify streaming)

3) listening in 20-minute side of 1 album is better than instantly jumping around a large music library

... ergo, analog is overall better than digital consumption. (As I stated before, I disagree as a person who straddles both the vinyl and digital eras. I've had extensive experience with both formats and the digital experience is better in my case. Many people besides me have come to this same conclusion.)

Yes, holding in your hand a vinyl album's cover art and reading its lyrics can add joy to music but there's also the opposite view that seems uncool to write about: there's also joy in not handling physical media. It's this second perspective I'm emphasizing and it doesn't take away from anyone who prefers their vinyl records.

You're overlooking the fact that we've already been here before and experienced the rush to digital as a world of perfect reproducibility and consistency without all the inconveniences of analog.

Digital is better if your priority is the things that are more easy with digital. If you ask me to mix your movie soundtrack, I'll head straight for the digital desk hooked up to the Pro Tools rig and it's be plugins for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you invite me to jam for musical pleasure, I'll switch on the 303 that I have wired into a shitty desk that I bought because it sounds so shitty and I enjoy the way it crunches a hot signal.

Multitracking, refining, polishing, can be enjoyable and deliver a sense of accomplishment when you deliver the end product, but it's work. The music I make and listen to for pleasure is typically done with cheaper, crappier gear, pushed beyond its design parameters, and recorded in one pass. I suppose you could cal it a techno-punk aesthetic; when you have sequencers and editing tools at your fingertips, the personal aspects are best expressed (for me) through performance rather than through perfection.

not sure these things are excluding each other.

Of course not, but for years there's been a 'digital can do anything analog can do so why even use analog' from the digital side of music engineering. To which I answer, because I don't want to have perfect consistency and predictability in every context. There are contexts in which I want imprecision, nonlinearity, and surprise so that I can select rather than design.

I'm not sure how to articulate this, but it's a general problem in our technology culture. To me this is not that different from not wanting to write code all the time. You know what I hate about writing code? When I'm working with unfamiliar languages/frameworks/libraries I don't know what all the available options are, whereas when I'm working with more visual tools I can see all the options even if I don't understand what they do, and I can select and experiment and, well, play with the options until I find something useful or interesting. I can't play when I'm writing code because my experiments are just liable to result in syntax errors or suchlike.

Writing code appeals to people who like learning a bunch of things first and then recombining them. I find this kind of learning slow and tedious and I keep wonder why I'm doing all this syntax bullshit instead of letting the computer handle it for me so I can focus on my domain-specific ideas.

Likewise when I talk with DSP programmers about how I like the unpredictability and nonlinearities of analog signals, they say things like 'I could add a random noise generator to the oscillator algorithm' or so (I'm simplifying, but that's a design reality on many electronic musical instruments). This is often a self-defeatinmg strategy, at least in the short term - witness Roland corporation bending over backwards to do The! Most! Accurate! Component! simulation! Ever! in a recent line of digital devices featuring 'analog circuit behavior'. Meanwhile their smaller rival Korg has completely crushed them in the very important entry and mid-level market segments by simply producing what the market wanted - a wide variety of cheap analog gear, mixing both classic and new designs, and labeling the boards and publishing the schematics so people can mod them if they're handy with a soldering iron.

> What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes.

Do you want writers to start every sentence with "in my opinion" or "I think" or "it's my belief that"? From the context you can usually figure when a writer is expressing an opinion vs stating an objective fact.

I agree with you that digital has expanded my ability to enjoy music. When I read the line "Spotify shows people coming back to the same tunes over and over" I was surprised. I'm probably younger than you, I only had a few CD's before I started listening to all my music on an iPod Shuffle in Jr. High but I remember being elated to buy 20 new songs on iTunes and listen to them over and over. After making the jump to Spotify and later Apple Music I've found the desire to seek out new music grow exponentially, in fact I almost never come back to the same music, I can't help but find new songs

The other side is that sites like Soundcloud are a godsend for bedroom producers. I've found an incredible diversity of sounds from there also

Music for playback is one thing. If you make music, analog and digital are worlds apart. Digital can do great things, but the one thing it can't do is fail gracefully. It's too consistent; because it's always perfectly accurate, it's never yours. Take two analog devices that came off the production line together; over time, they will end up sounding different from each other.

This is what musicians like. It's the individuality and texture of things that appeal to artists as much as the overarching form; that's why people still put paint on canvas with brushes or other tools despite the vast possibilities offered by graphics software.

I am very skeptical of your argument. Musicians like that their carefully-planned tracks are warped & distorted in unexpected ways by analog playback devices - as opposed to digital distribution, where the listener hears precisely what the musician intended each time and every time?

Even if I agreed with that notion, it still isn't an argument against digital distribution per se. Digitally, we can add (in software) distortion that is similar to that you'd encounter with vinyl. I have some digitally produced tracks that are done this way, actually: even end-to-end digital, the tracks sound as though they are coming off a vinyl record. The aesthetic is maintained and played back exactly as the artist intended.

Some folks even introduce distortion after the conversion back to analog, e.g. with "warm sounding" tube amps.

That's not the argument I'm making.

> I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media. Digital has allowed me to appreciate music even more.

Has it? You're jumping from one thing to another rather than just playing one thing, sitting back, and enjoying.

Yes it has! I used to listen to the entire 20-minute side of a vinyl or cassette. Now that I use software to play music (Foobar, and Winamp before that), I realized that I my old listening habit was a dictated by the physical analog format. That's actually not how I prefer to listen to music. I like to jump around from genre to genre and the convenience of digital technology revealed that preference to me. Reducing friction lets me listen to more music.

Put a different way, a real-life radio station has to constrain itself to one genre. Because of the economics of advertisers/demographics, a media conglomerate can't create a radio station that plays pop+classical+jazz. However, with digital (Spotify or desktop Foobar), I can create my own "multi-genre radio station" for my listening pleasure.

One cannot appreciate an orchestra one piece at a time. It is an interesting acedemic exercise but there are good reasons that such pieces are still recorded in one room, in one grand take. Digital cannot mimic the communication and timing between instruments playing in the same room.

I appreciate your argument of the whole vs sum, but might it also be more expensive? Even if each member played perfectly in a single take, you'd need lots more recording time; member*lengthOfPiece instead of just lengthOfPiece

But that is how it is done. One big room with potentially dozens of mics covering the orchestra. I ask this: if each records individually, why bother with a conductor? That job cannot be replaced by a blinking light.

If you are a fan of music, especially guitar-based music like classic rock, there is no substitute for a vinyl record created through a 100% analog mastering process. Analog captures harmonics that digital simply can't. Analog mastering also has much wider dynamic range than does digital mastering.

As for virtual instruments, those are like video game emulators: they give future generations some semblance of what the original was like, but it's just not the same as actual hardware.

The frequency response of microphones generally plummets at (or below) 20 kilohertz.

Digital sampling can capture 20 kilohertz just fine. An analog recording pathway isn't really going to capture much more information than a digital one.

Not only that, filtering above the audible range is a feature. Ultrasound can give audible artifacts, for example intermodulation between close tones. And all sorts of high frequency noise exists even from the equipment itself. (This is just one reason 96 kHz material doesn't make sense for the consumer. Any good playback chain would filter it out.)

> If you are a fan of music, especially guitar-based music like classic rock, there is no substitute for a vinyl record created through a 100% analog mastering process. Analog captures harmonics that digital simply can't. Analog mastering also has much wider dynamic range than does digital mastering.

Analog mastering doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range of digital; a CD with its paltry 16 bit has a noise floor below -90dB. There are staggeringly few analog mastering setups that can do that. Move to 20+ bits (i.e. all pro digital mastering setups) and you are getting to the point where an analog setup might be able to maintain the SNR, but would be astronomically expensive.

As far as the harmonics, there is little evidence that humans can detect 22kHz+ sound at safe listening levels, and once you talk about 96 samples/s most speakers can't reproduce anything like the original signal at 40kHz+. It might make a physical difference if you have a $20k electrostatic setup, but you won't be able to hear it.

As for the skeptics here, NPR has a pretty good test so you can see for yourself whether you can hear compressed vs high-range audio:

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h...

> Analog mastering also has much wider dynamic range than does digital mastering.

This tends to be true in practice due to "loudness war" problems - many CDs are mastered not for accuracy but for popularity.

What's the typical line-level input voltage for an audio signal? Something like two volts? Four, peak-to-peak? A 16-bit ADC quantizes that four volts into 65,536 distinct quantities which are reproduced as voltage levels and hence, sound by a DAC on playback. Okay, fine, whatever. BUT... in a 100% analog process, the line-level input max is much greater than two volts. I've heard of analog equipment being able to register signals in excess of 70 V. This gives the audio engineer practically infinite headroom in which to record and mix sound without losing detail.

Where analog generally falls down on the job is, you typically need actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual studio to lay down a track. None of this wave-table-synth, virtual instrument shit. And no Auto-Tune or other automatic correction either; if a musician flubs a track, generally they have to rerecord it. Pop producers consider this a bug; serious musicians consider it a feature.

Voltage isn't particularly relevant of itself; what's that in dB above the noise floor?

And a 24 bit ADC that quantizes the lower 16 bits into 4Vpp would be capable of registering signals at 512Vpp. No analog devices have such a large headroom (granted they don't build such a device, but if you attenuate the signal at the entrance to the ADC, you get something similar).

This, btw. is why nobody masters at 16 bits; the insufficient headroom. 16 bits is plenty for playback though.

[edit]

I do want to acknowledge the big weakness of a digital setup that you touch on here, which is the hard clipping. If you ever clip in digital, you have ruined the recording while many analog setups will have a soft rolloff (Tube amps v. BJT amps are similar; the soft clipping of a tube amp is much less unpleasant than the hard clipping of a BJT amp. You can "get away" with a lower wattage tube amp for this reason; a properly sized BJT amp is more accurate though). All this is moot for professional recordings though as a sound engineer who regularly clips by accident (rather than to intentionally get a particular sound) will get fired.

> No analog devices have such a large headroom

Obviously you've never mastered a Disaster Area album. :)

Precision is so boring though. It's like mapping the inside of a cathedral with lidar or something; yeah it's awesomely accurate but it's not substitute for just walking in and enjoying the spectacle. You won't have a better aesthetic experience from knowing the position of every individual block of stone with micrometer precision.

Not an equivalent comparison.

Perhaps a grainy photograph vs. the lidar is a more apt comparison. The former has character, but the latter is a much better approximation of the real thing. Also you can generate a grainy photograph from your accurate digital measurements if you so choose.

Why a grainy photograph and not a good quality one? I feel you're begging the question here by assuming your conclusion as your premise.

Maybe a better metaphor would be a laser pointed vs a flashlight - assuming they emit the name # of lumens, which one is more useful for exploring a dark room? This is why I think the pursuit of endless precision in calculating the value of irrational/transcendental numbers is an amusing hobby but ultimately a waste of time.