Analog Vs. Audio Recording: What's The Difference??

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Mike Freze

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You hear people talk about audio recording, analog recording, audio devices/inputs, analog devices/inputs. I'm confused. It it one and the same thing?

How about "line level audio inputs/analog line level inputs" on your audio interface? Again, the same thing?

Mike Freze
 
google search

analog vs digital recording

that should answer most everything.. lol
 
Guys, the OP is just confused about the interchangeability of two terms- analog and audio. Obviously, you two are not teachers.

Mike, audio refers to the wave spectrum that we perceive as SOUND- what we HEAR. Regardless of how it's recorded (more later,) if we HEAR it, it's AUDIO RECORDING. The "other" kind of recording is VIDEO- visual images. Turn on the radio, and you are hearing AUDIO, turn on the TV with the sound muted and you are seeing VIDEO. Turn up the sound on the TV, and you are now hearing AUDIO and seeing VIDEO.

Analog is a type of circuitry that reproduces (either later in time- recording, or in another place- like radio) a signal using non-computerized means. Before computers, but after the invention of various electronic devices, ALL recording was analog (although no one called it that back then- there was no need to differentiate between SOMETHING (analog) and NOTHING (digital, which didn't exist.) Now, some recording is done in the DIGITAL realm, some in the ANALOG realm. Most people who still "go analog" for either recording or playback do do because the believe it is more life-like, while they believe digital is too sterile and artificial. Digital lovers think of the analog folks as luddites; analog folks think digital freaks are "tin-ears."

Summation:
Once upon a time, all signals were analog. Now, some are analog, some are digital.

AUDIO is sound. VIDEO is sight.

Got it?
 
Great explanation stevie!

Just a few more notes:

Analog recording involves sending an electrical signal representation of sound waves (created by a microphone in most cases) through wires to create physical representation of said waves in some medium (be it grooves and bumps on vinyl or magnetic signatures on tape). To play back, another physical interface (needle or tape head) is caused to run over the recording medium and recreate the electronic signal, which can then be turned back into sound waves using a speaker.

Digital recording takes that same electronic signal representation of the sound waves and "samples" it. That is, slices up the wave into thousands of points every second and then measures the level of the wave at each point. This information is encoded "digitally" (into 0's and 1's) in a computer. The sound here is recreated by another software (or hardware) "decoder" that reads the digital information and decides what kind of electronic signal that should represent.

The main issue is that when sampling, you will ALWAYS LOSE SOME INFORMATION in between the samples. Digital is like a mosaic...you have many little parts that don't make sense alone, but you put them together, stand back, and low and behold your brain reconstructs an entire image. Samples are like pixels. Analog on the other hand is like a painting composed of smooth, continuous brush strokes.

Hope that helps!
 
Acousticles said:
The main issue is that when sampling, you will ALWAYS LOSE SOME INFORMATION in between the samples. Digital is like a mosaic...you have many little parts that don't make sense alone, but you put them together, stand back, and low and behold your brain reconstructs an entire image. Samples are like pixels. Analog on the other hand is like a painting composed of smooth, continuous brush strokes.
Hope that helps!
Click to expand...

yeah....but we ARE talking aboutover 44 thousand tiles for every second....I don't think you have to stand back more than an 1/8th of an inch or so.
 
stevieb said:
Obviously, you two are not teachers.
Click to expand...

Lol. Fuck no. That's the worst profession ever. Still, I assumed that even n00bs know the definitions of simple terms that aren't even home-recording specific.
 
re

Mike Freze said:
You hear people talk about audio recording, analog recording, audio devices/inputs, analog devices/inputs. I'm confused. It it one and the same thing?

How about "line level audio inputs/analog line level inputs" on your audio interface? Again, the same thing?

Mike Freze
Click to expand...

"line level audio inputs/analog line level inputs" = yup the same thing

when it comes to recording all the inputs (on your recording device), aside from adat and spdif if you have them, are analog.

once the signal your recording reachs the converters it becomes digital (see below)

mic>audio input (on device)>preamp>converter>DAW/hard drive

but before the converter it's technically it's analog...

hope this helps :)
 
Mike Freze said:
You hear people talk about audio recording, analog recording, audio devices/inputs, analog devices/inputs. I'm confused. It it one and the same thing?
Click to expand...

Are you totally confused yet? No? Let me help.

Anything that happens inside of a computer is composed of either 1's or 0's (bits). This is the 'digital domain' where audio is manipulated and stored in the modern world. But we don't speak digital, and we don't hear digital. We speak and hear analog. Analog/digital/analog converters (A/D/A) move what we say, sing, and hear between the real world (analog) and the 'digital domain'. There are A/D converters, D/A converters, and the vastly more popular A/D/A converters. These are also referred to as 'interfaces', 'soundcards', and less socially acceptable terms.

Once upon a time all sound recording, manipulation, and storage was 'analog' (e.g., did not use computers) but those days are arguably dead and gone.

Inputs on audio devices can be either digital (S/PDIF, AES/EBU, ADAT, 1394 (Firewire), USB, etc.) or analog (TRS, XLR, DIN, semaphore) but the digital inputs (and outputs) exist only to move 1's and 0's between devices. Every signal chain starts analog, and ends analog.

Mike Freze said:
How about "line level audio inputs/analog line level inputs" on your audio interface? Again, the same thing?
Click to expand...

Yes.

Luck.
 
Every signal chain starts analog, and ends analog.

Think a synthesizer using an SPDIF output...
 
Greg_L said:
Lol. Fuck no. That's the worst profession ever. Still, I assumed that even n00bs know the definitions of simple terms that aren't even home-recording specific.
Click to expand...

What does n00b mean anyway? I still interchange the words 'track' and 'channel' and have plenty of my own terminology that only means what it does to myself and people I work with. It's a perfectly legitimate question to clarify terms others frequently use. 'Analog' gets tossed around a lot and not necessarily all related to recorders and tape-vs-hard-drive like most people rightly assume it refers to (distortion pedals for instance). Just sayin man, no need to be rude, its the right forum for questions like this innit?

anyways

Just a little laymans definition, when it comes to a recording: analog theoretically sounds warmer and costs more. Digital is cheap.

Why does it sound 'warmer'?
When you listen to a CD you are listening to a digital recording, whether or not the origional was recorded with all the pure, cool vintagey awesome analog gear that makes it sound so warm and fuzzy etc etc, sooner or later it gets turned into 1's and 0's. What tracks on a master reel of tape have going for them is that they naturally compress the sound into the constraints of the tape's headroom, where as origional tracks recorded digitally don't have that added layer of niceness, they are cold, exact duplicates of the signal put in and brittle in that if it exceeds a certain level it 'clips' and sounds impossibly bad, wheras the same signal onto an analog tape would just scrunch up at the high and low thresholds which, when used in a small amount, is really nice sounding, letting everything sound nice and thick without sounding too 'processed'.

People who are big into analog sound don't necessarily use it because it is more pristine or clean, our ears aren't fine-tuned enough to recognize that given how high the pixellation is, its actually because a magnetic tape signal, when recorded up slightly above its headrome, kind of naturally compresses a tone, which is usually very strong sounding, but not harsh and precise like digital effect processor compression.
 
AbuseTheMuses said:
What does n00b mean anyway? I still interchange the words 'track' and 'channel' and have plenty of my own terminology that only means what it does to myself and people I work with. It's a perfectly legitimate question to clarify terms others frequently use. 'Analog' gets tossed around a lot and not necessarily all related to recorders and tape-vs-hard-drive like most people rightly assume it refers to (distortion pedals for instance). Just sayin man, no need to be rude, its the right forum for questions like this innit?
.
Click to expand...

I wasn't being rude. Analog is an actual word. So is Audio. They mean the same thing in pretty much whatever context you use them in. I'm not knocking anyone for not knowing what they mean in a recording sense. I'm knocking someone not knowing what they mean in any sense.
 
bdenton said:
Every signal chain starts analog, and ends analog.

Think a synthesizer using an SPDIF output...
Click to expand...

Sigh

Whether you're waving your hands in the air to control a Theremin or depressing a key to generate a noise on a Moog you are performing an analog act, and there ain't anyone able to 'hear' a S/PDIF signal. While this may not be true with quantum physics, for our purposes anything that is NOT digital is analog.

:rolleyes:
 
I like how almost everyone started their post with something along the lines of "I'll keep this simple for you....", and then went on to give the most clusterfucked explanation possible. :laughings:
 
RAMI said:
I like how almost everyone started their post with something along the lines of "I'll keep this simple for you....", and then went on to give the most clusterfucked explanation possible. :laughings:
Click to expand...

Ol' Mikey does have a habit of asking these really basic "Please explain" questions that could just as easily, and perhaps more reliably, be googled, and he can't possibly be as confused as he claims to be or he'd have trouble doing anything at all, but I do enjoy reading the responses and often learn something I didn't know... :laughings:
 
Audio - any technological representation of sound for the purpose of storage or transmission. When sound goes into a microphone it becomes audio. When audio goes into a speaker it becomes sound again.

Analog - any audio format that represents sound with analogous variations in some property of a medium (voltage on a wire, squiggly lines in vinyl, magnetic fields on tape).

Digital - any audio format that uses numbers to store or transmit sound.
 
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