Can I get a DSP filter or something to simulate tape and skip the tape :-)
It seems like everything about records and tape is not really technically superior and the sound signature could be emulated.
It seems like everything about records and tape is not really technically superior and the sound signature could be emulated.
https://www.guerrilladigital.cc/2021/03/10/i-spent-the-last-...
and anything AMULETS does:
https://cdm.link/2017/01/heres-make-tape-loop-cassette-tape/
A clay impression directly mirrors your hand by directly mirroring reality... but its a terrible storage mechanism in practice. In practice, a picture of your hand, or a 3d-model of your hand, stored on a reliable hard drive or USB stick, will hold the information more reliably.
Analog impressions, be they clay, or vinyl, are destroyed little-by-little each time you read from it. Simply measuring / reading from film, vinyl, and even tape, causes the magnetic fields to break, or the vinyl to warp and change shape.
Digital impressions of course have the same issue. Except we have these things called "error correction codes" that can reset / wipe-out any such accumulation of errors (to a point). So long as the digital record is reread, and rewritten, before the error-correction codes wear out, you can perpetually store data without any loss. CDROMs and DVD-ROMs are written with absurdly huge amounts of error-correction codes, ensuring that they'll almost never wear out under reasonable circumstances. (Hard drives, and Flash drives have different error correction codes, but the process is the same. Modern filesystems, like ZFS, can even read, analyze, and rewrite data as it degrades automatically)
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In contrast, I watched Star Wars maybe... 20 times? Before the tape started to significantly degrade on my old VHS player. These are technologies that can only be read dozens of times before wearing out.
Not only that, but "copying" tapes, trying to preserve them, doesn't work. The act of reading innately damages the tape, so its not like you actually are "gaining more reads" by copying them.
Only digital has the benefit of error correction codes that _PERFECTLY_ replicate data within a given time frame.
I agree with saying that digital more accurately reproduces that data, because of the playback technology used.
Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal. In other terms, it is random noise applied to the digital data stream to “smooth out” the discrete differences between one sample to the next.
The thing people find pleasing about analog is the inaccuracies in the playback, in the form of harmonic distortion.
I like that harmonic distortion btw, but love digital for clarity.
We have the math which tells you, for a given set of analog channel parameters, how much information it can carry (bits per second) as a theoretical maximum. If you pick a digital channel which exceeds that bits per second value, it is better than that analog one.
> Digital audio requires applying “jitter” to the signal.
It is in fact magnetic tape audio recording that adds jitter, in the form of the bias signal: a high frequency signal mixed with the recorded material, which degausses the tape so that it gets magnetized in a linear way, proportional to the signal. Without the degaussing jitter of the bias signal, the quality will be very poor due to hysteresis.
What you're referring to is dither. I don't think it's required when the A/D conversion has a resolution that is better than the noise floor of the signal being sampled. I suspect it's beneficial in crude applications like eight bit telephony.
If your sampling frequency is high enough, digital captures the signal perfectly. Analog captures less of that signal, and a bunch of noise.
An ideal analog channel is noise-free and has infinite frequency response. An ideal digital channel carries infinite bits per second (and can be carried by the former analog channel).
All digital communications is ultimately carried in an analog medium: e.g. twisted pair ethernet cable or what have you. The performance of that communication is within the limits established by the analog container.
The simple analog coding techniques, though, are inflexible with regard to reallocating noise. E.g. an analog channel is noisy, we can use it to transmit digital information that is noise free, such as UTF-8 text. We reallocate the noise into a bandwidth limitation.
I can never buy the argument that analog recordings are better _because_ they are more faithful. I do think they can sound very beautiful and be aesthetically pleasing, however.
Digital isn't inherently bad. There was a time when recording engineers salivated over stereo CDs and all the problems that just went away. Sure we use compressed audio now, but I can't really tell the difference in any real listening scenario if I am being honest.
Even with a headphone amp and some nice headphones.
A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback.
Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.
You CAN get really lovely sound out of an analog (vinyl) setup, for sure. But it's going to be expensive and fiddly, whereas the digital shit tends to just work.
And nobody can reliably differentiate between high-bitrate streamed digital and CD source. It can't be done.
For the disks: Vinyl can get permanently scratched. The disks can get warped. The playback needle can put too much force on the groove and damage it.
For the playback: It's incredibly difficult to get a motor to spin the disk at a perfectly uniform rate, so you get distortions in the frequencies being played back known as "wow" and "flutter". The groove is not the audio exactly as recorded, but instead equalized to lower bass frequencies so that the needle doesn't skip out of the groove. This RIAA equalization has to be undone for playback, and if it is done with analog components, it's never going to be exact.
Closest I can find so far - https://www.musictimes.com/articles/6349/20140526/7-great-al...
Vinyl records have limitations determined by design decisions and physical properties.
For example deep bass and stereo separation are reduced on vinyl or the stylus would jump out of the groove.
And vinyl records have a lot more noise than good digital formats.
Even if you had perfect humidity control + temperature control vacuum chambers storing these things, they'll still degrade over time due to other aging issues.
It doesn't even take that much time before these older technologies (vinyl, tape, etc. etc.) degrade permanently.
Squeaky-clean 'fidelity' can work against good music. It's like purple fluorescent lights ... antiseptic.