Analogue technology can be frustrating – is that part of the appeal?

Bit of a click bait title there.

Sure people love records because they sound good and you can touch them.

From a general perspective sound waves are captured and retransmitted by any music format but fundamentally each medium has a separate experiential dimension which of course can’t be captured by the casual desk journalist.

Tangentially related, this idea of fast and performant digital technology unfortunately does not apply to in-car touchscreens which are slow and personally I hate and consider them dangerous.

I'm at home in both the analog and digital worlds and experience has taught me that both are as important as each other.

One complements the other. Let me explain: leaving aside the peculiarities of quantum effects just about everything in the physical world we experience or perceive conforms or acts and or moves ways that are not what we understand as digital. Things usually don't move in discrete steps, people don't place objects on tables in exactly the same position today as they did yesterday, the volume knob on old-fashioned HiFi is never set in exactly the same position. The real world we observe around us is full of imprecision and it's the amount or degree of imprecision that separates the real world from the digital one which works in discrete steps or levels.

You'll note I did not refer to the real world we experience as the 'analog world' for good reason. Analog means 'in sympathy with', that is to follows in the 'footsteps' of something. Thus analog systems are those that closely mimic something in the real world.

Note: the word 'mimic' here, analog tech isn't the real thing or real world as some claim, it's an analog copy of some real-world phenomenon made by sympathetically (accurately) following what it does.

For example, the sensors in your so-called digital smartphone are all analog devices, that is they act in sympathy with inputs from the physical world. For instance, your speech is converted by the phone's microphone into an electrical signal that's an analog of your speech, also the camera is an analog device at its most basic level. The radio receiving amplifiers in your phone (for phone, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC) amplify the minute incoming electromagnetic signals by using an analog amplifying process.

Digital's great fame comes from its repeatability, once we've gathered our analog data then processing it digitally often makes sense—but not always, sometimes it's easier or more practical to stay within the analog domain.

(Let me amplify that statement a little, with a smartphone it makes sense to convert the analog signals to digital and process them digitally as it would be very cumbersome to leave them unconverted (not only is it impractical to keep everything in the analog domain but some things are much more conveniently done digitally, for instance audio noise canceling is much easier to do mathematically say by FFT (Fast Fourier Transform). That said, when everything is processed and finished, your phone then has to convert everything back into the analog domain for it's there that your eyes and ears work.)

Even though digital electronics is fundamentally analog in the way it works at its physical level, thus subject to imprecision just like any other analog device, it's configured to switch between two states or levels defined as 0 and 1. The imprecision here doesn't matter, if the state of '1' isn't repeated by the next stage in the process exactly as '1' (say at level 0.9) we don't care, we simply round it up to '1' and move on. This way repeatability is ensured.

One of the big problems of recent decades is that the word 'digital' has become fashionable so everything 'had' to become digital. This led to many misconceptions, for example when digital television came in antenna manufacturers sold 'digital' TV antennas when they were nothing of the sort, as previously they were and are analog devices. What they should have said is that the new antennas were optimized for the new digital TV service (frequencies). What they said was misleading.

So then what's the widespread trend to go to analog tech all about? I won't dwell on the deeper social reasons here as that's not my field. What I will say however comes from personal experience and other sources. Analog systems, tech if you will, is simpler and has a more human feel to it, its uses can see what's happening, a tape moves in a cassette or tape recorder, records spins on turntables and a record has grooves (a groove!) that one can see—one can actually single out loud passages on a record just by looking at it.

On the other hand, music on a USB thumb drive is not only invisible but one doesn't even know the drive is working unless informed by some interpreting device—a computer say.

In essence, it's easier to 'connect' with analog tech, it has a more human scale or feel to it, and for many this is its attractive aspect. I could say much more but I'll leave that for others.