Does analog move more air. . . ?

[Blue Jinn]

Correct. Digital has the capability to sound much better than analog. Anybody who says different has never had to go through the pain of recording and mastering for vinyl.

That's like saying beef has the capability to taste much better than chicken, anybody who says different has never gone through the pain of plucking and marinating a chicken...

[allen58]

Yes It can sound like there is more Fullness and Depth. Digital will never be able to record a true sine wave like analog. It's a square wave which looks like a stair case. Thats where all this sample rate, over sample and dither crap comes from. Yes it is a storage format that we use for our computers. Front end was glory boxes were never needed to make it sound like analog { That should tell you something } Compressors , Limiters, Line Amps, Analog consoles yes added there colors but were added to Control dynamic range. Digital is like waves in fish tank with a glass top. As volume increases {or loudness} The peaks of the waves start to hit the top glass and is clipped off or dynamic range is reduced. Hence why I always here Can't you get this cd any louder. Analog would saturate at peaks like a sponge. Hence what is called warmer, fuller. You could align your Tape machine's to read +3db @ 0db. You will Never do that with Digital. The tape type and Dolbly noise reduction SR and A are key. Ray dolby was ahead of his time. {Go read some books on Ray you'll be Amazed} It's more about the width of sound than about louder for me, And until you hear a A/B Comparison between True Dolby masters and a In the Box master you may never experience it. Todays technics of Recording are Connivence tooled and that's fine, but todays cd audience's may never know what they missed or Care. Hence Just sing the first chorus we'll fly in the rest and then we'll Auto-tune everything. I believe thats what your hearing here with the term's Fullness and Depth. A

[auddoc]

Your question is kind of wrong. By "moving air" I assume you mean the sound has better low freq response. Analog and digital should have the same or very similar frequency response or there is something wrong with either playback device. Is there an overall difference in sound? I certainly believe so and have proven this many times in blind testing with fellow engineers, using extremely high-end gear, but it has more to do with "soundstage depth and width" and "reverb tails"in my experience. And that is an entirely different argument/ discussion that will never end. Perhaps you should rethink and rephrase the question.
Cheers,
Gregg

[AtoDeficient]

Your question is kind of wrong. Perhaps you should rethink and rephrase the question.
Cheers,
Gregg

Ya THINK ? ? ? ? (It's the first wrong question I have ever asked)

I hereby withdraw my question. . . Is there a way to bump this thread DOWN ? . . .

Note to Moderators. . . Please start a "The Analog Vs. Digital Debate" sticky thread where the analog/digital war may flicker and dance forever like an etenal flame monument. . . That way we could stay on topic with questions like this. . . It really was a science question. I swear.

[mshilarious]

Digital will never be able to record a true sine wave like analog. It's a square wave which looks like a stair case.

That's demonstrably false, and it has been demonstrated here several times, often by me, like earlier on this thread. Digital may *look* like a square wave staircase because your DAW on your computer decides to visually represent it that way, but that is not the way the signal is constructed and deconstructed. It would be *slightly* more accurate to visually represent it as a line between sample points, but that's still not right either. DACs do not output a square wave from a sine wave input; this is a very trivial thing to measure.

Digital is *much* better at sine wave input to output than *any* tape recorder. Let's see if VP can disprove that when his signal analyzer (which is digital BTW) arrives.

[Beck]

That's demonstrably false, and it has been demonstrated here several times, often by me, like earlier on this thread. Digital may *look* like a square wave staircase because your DAW on your computer decides to visually represent it that way, but that is not the way the signal is constructed and deconstructed. It would be *slightly* more accurate to visually represent it as a line between sample points, but that's still not right either. DACs do not output a square wave from a sine wave input; this is a very trivial thing to measure.

Digital is *much* better at sine wave input to output than *any* tape recorder. Let's see if VP can disprove that when his signal analyzer (which is digital BTW) arrives.

Yes, you are correct... but not completely because we really aren't able to accurately measure everything yet. The first mistake most people make is thinking that this generation and it’s technology has fully arrived. The truth is future generations will look back at us as being misguided about many things. If you’re not looking back at the present from the future your arguments are already outdated.

Something I believe only I have ever mentioned on any forum that I know of is even the resolution of a scope is finite like a TV picture tube and none of the established data we rely on has ever been measured on anything that approaches high def. Now we are using digital to measure digital so maybe we will not know until more imaginative visionary minds prevail. The full picture of any single waveform whether recorded with analog or digital eludes us.

Most important of all and what makes everything else moot however is if you try to analyze music with anything other than human perception you will always lose the analog-digital debate, no matter which side you're on. When people start writing music for machines rather than human beings perhaps this will change. And in a way maybe that is already happening with how people approach music... looking at it with display and test instruments, trying to reduce it to individual waveforms and snapping everything to a grid. Probably why it sucks more and more all the time too.

Some of us refuse to do that and that’s the larger issue in which the digital-analog debate lives.

[mshilarious]

It is trivial to measure to many many mHz and in the audio bandwidth (and well above, let's say 100kHz) down below the analog noise floor (which in a good digital converter is far below what tape is capable of). Any distortion below noise (not integrated noise, but true noise floor) cannot be measured . . . or heard. I can also demonstrate that if you like.

Let's wait for VP's measurements, all will be revealed . . .

[Beck]

It is trivial to measure to many many mHz and in the audio bandwidth (and well above, let's say 100kHz) down below the analog noise floor (which in a good digital converter is far below what tape is capable of). Any distortion below noise (not integrated noise, but true noise floor) cannot be measured . . . or heard. I can also demonstrate that if you like.

Let's wait for VP's measurements, all will be revealed . . .

You're still not getting it... can't think outside of it. All you know is based on test instruments that are inadequate to do what you believe they do, but more than anything are inadequate because they are not human ears. I don't care about anyone's measurements. It's all been done before ad nauseum. It's not where the debate should be. I also don't think you get what I'm talking about with traditional scope displays, but my recording career begin in television audio/video, so I do know exactly what I mean.

[mshilarious]

I don't think you understand the real constraints of audio engineering. Pop quiz, rank these in order of resolution:

- reference-grade microphone
- top-quality tape recorder
- reference-grade amplifier
- top-quality digital converter
- reference-grade speaker

Once you greatly exceed the possible resolution of the signal chain, further increases in resolution don't accomplish anything. Period.

All I want to know is for a reasonable sample of quality tape recorders, properly calibrated and in good working order, spectral analysis of the following:

- noise floor from 4Hz to 40kHz; or at least 20Hz to 20kHz;

- white noise response at same (happily I already know this from that link, but I'd like to see it for any units under test so we know if they greatly vary from the linked measurements, which might be an indication of a problem with the unit under test that makes it not representative);

- 100Hz, 1kHz, 10kHz sine wave input to output, or at least measurement of THD of the same, at a reasonable nominal operating level.

Use whatever you want to generate those measurements, analog or digital signal generators/analyzers. Sine waves and white noise are pretty easy to generate in analogland. Any quality analyzer will far exceed the resolution of tape, so that really isn't the issue you make it out to be.

These are all trivial measurements that should take an engineer less than a half-hour. I have provided this several times on this board for a few different converters over the course of *years*. I've also measured a cassette tape deck (one that I sincerely hope is not representative of typical cassette quality). I've measured a VCR (after a suggestion that was a superior mixdown format to cassette, which it just might be). Next I'll have to repair my Porta and measure that.

Once we have real measurements for at least two or three recorders of sufficient quality we can resume. Until then it's all just a bunch of speculation.

And ears? Ears suck for measurement, sorry. You cannot hear the difference between 0.001% THD and 0.005% THD, but it's easily measured. Ears might clue us in to look for something, but they are pretty bad at accurately describing what that something is, and more importantly how to fix it. I see this all the time in people's psychoacoustic reactions to nonlinearities in analog circuits (which is what I do after all). Give them some LF saturation and they think the bass response is better. Give them flat HF response and they think there is no midrange, etc. People can't even reliably pick microphones with which they are familiar in listening tests--I'm not talking preference, I mean which mic is which, until you do something drastic like use a condenser vs. a dynamic.

We have plenty of ear BS in digiland too--the whole external clocking claptrap for example. That reared its ugly head here today, I had to slap it down. One of two things must be true: that guy couldn't really hear any difference in external vs. internal clock and he was suffering from expectation bias; or, he could hear a difference and perceived the external clock as lower jitter when it was actually higher jitter. So we know that ears constantly fail at measuring and describing jitter, otherwise I wouldn't have to read silly posts like that.

[PRHunt]

In blind listening tests like this one the insertion of a AD - DA diversion was audibly indistinguishable from the all-analog path. And note that the test mentioned here occurred in 1984, and digital technology has improved since then.

The euphonic effects of certain Analog equipment are additive (eg 2nd harmonic distortions, "bloom", rolled off high frequencies) can be captured and reproduced by digital recording equipment.

There. Someone had to say it.