Is... Analog Dead?

[thebes]

.Back on topic. Vinyls are certainly not dead,  far from it.

 

It's everything else that's doomed.

 

Cd's are about dead, cassettes are dead, RTR is on life support, 8 tracts are dead, and several digital formats are dead.

 

Digital?

 

You bet!

 

Remember floppies?  Still got all your music on the large ones, or maybe a few cuts on the small ones? Try finding something to play that on.

 

How about ATA hard drives?  Most computers these days, you have a choice, either a  dvd player or a ATA drive because there are not enough slots for both, because everybody went to SATA.

 

MP3's are a dinosaur. Now that digital space for the purposes of storage is darn well infinite, their day is done. They were designed to shrink space and they did a horrible job of it.

 

DVD-A. SACD. Nonstarters as a mass medium whit  little content.  HD? For how Long? Remember Dolby?

 

BluRay? For Music?  DAC's? What will they be replaced with?

 

How about The Cloud?  Which one and for how long. What happens when industry consolidation or a bankruptcy leaves millions and billions and Tera bits of music vanishing into the netherworld, a simple key stroke from a programmer, or hell, some drone functionary, rendering all those tunes gone, gone, gone.

 

Oh yes, the digital realm is such a safe place to put important things.  Like a bank vault made of swiss cheese.

 

Whistle while ye may, because after your zeros and ones all disappear, you'll have to entertain yourself by whistling, whilst I spin a platter.

Edited September 30, 2014 by thebes

[Schu]

DSD is where we're all going in the short term because it allows for ongoing file format upgrades that are via software based instead of hardware based.

[Schu]

I didn't think loudness has anything to do with compressed dynamic range

:facepalm:

Loudness wars much

Edited October 1, 2014 by Schu

[dtel]

"some folks are simply just into "Loudness"... and therefore compressed dynamic range."

 

I misunderstood, and misread what you were talking about, I was thinking volume when you said loudness. I understand the loudness wars mess but was thinking about it compared to uncompressed dynamic range as far as total volume goes.

Edited October 1, 2014 by dtel

[Quiet_Hollow]

Whistle while ye may, because after your zeros and ones all disappear, you'll have to entertain yourself by whistling, whilst I spin a platter.

 I'll be entertaining myself reading letters from you via carrier pigeon. 

 

I'm surprised your keyboard hasn't blown a gasket in revolt of all this digital slander. 

[ClaudeJ1]

Most of us here were all Analog kids and all have grown into digital men in some way or form, not necessarily by choice for many though. Sorry about the RUSH quip, but it sums most of us up I think.

 

If it had been available at reasonable production cost, we would have been digital kids.  In 1980, I designed a main board for a revolutionary 10 Megabyte 5 1/4" hard drive with built-in digital tape backup (Irwin), which was 4 times the capacity of a "state of the art" 2.5 Megabyte Seagate at the time. It's OEM cost was $2,500 to be sold to Olivetti in Europe for word processing (text only, no graphics). By 1986, the cost of RAM had dropped to $1,000/Megabyte after being almost that for 256 kilobytes for years. Now it's about $10/Gigabyte, which is 1,000 Megabytes. So the price of storage has come down 100,000 times cheaper in about 30 years, which is 1 cent per Megabyte and about 1/3 of a penny on a 3 Terabye Hard drive. A writeable CD is now 25 cents, vs. $20 when it first became available. We just keep chewing it up with more and more data, as represented by 4K HDTV video, which is an amazing 9 megapixels at 30 X per second, and a 50 Gigabyte Blue Ray Disc is too small for storing it.

 

So it's the cost of storage and computing horsepower on silicon that has made all things digital possible. You can copy forward all digital data to a different storage device without any losses. Try that with our analog stuff and build up some more noise why don't we.

Edited October 1, 2014 by ClaudeJ1

[ClaudeJ1]

Let's just say that I would rather replicate bits going forward on new media without loss from that or playing it 100 times. Unlike dragging a miniature rock on the end a small stick mounted to a large stick through a non-linear ditch at 20,000 lbs./square in inch of destructive pressure on variable materials with inconsistent velocities that shaves a few more Hz. of high frequencies each time it's  played and accumulates foreign objects in it's path that were not part of the original signal.

 

I said goodbye to ticks and pops over 30 years ago and they are not welcome back. Just like when I became Michigan's first digital photogapher in the 90's, I said goodbye to film grain and darkroom dust forever.

[RT FAN]

 Tell us how you really feel Claude!  I too am slowly moving forward and dropping the audio/media baggage I have been lugging around with me all these years.

[Max2]

 

Most of us here were all Analog kids and all have grown into digital men in some way or form, not necessarily by choice for many though. Sorry about the RUSH quip, but it sums most of us up I think.

 

If it had been available at reasonable production cost, we would have been digital kids.  In 1980, I designed a main board for a revolutionary 10 Megabyte 5 1/4" hard drive with built-in digital tape backup (Irwin), which was 4 times the capacity of a "state of the art" 2.5 Megabyte Seagate at the time. It's OEM cost was $2,500 to be sold to Olivetti in Europe for word processing (text only, no graphics). By 1986, the cost of RAM had dropped to $1,000/Megabyte after being almost that for 256 kilobytes for years. Now it's about $10/Gigabyte, which is 1,000 Megabytes. So the price of storage has come down 100,000 times cheaper in about 30 years, which is 1 cent per Megabyte and about 1/3 of a penny on a 3 Terabye Hard drive. A writeable CD is now 25 cents, vs. $20 when it first became available. We just keep chewing it up with more and more data, as represented by 4K HDTV video, which is an amazing 9 megapixels at 30 X per second, and a 50 Gigabyte Blue Ray Disc is too small for storing it.

 

So it's the cost of storage and computing horsepower on silicon that has made all things digital possible. You can copy forward all digital data to a different storage device without any losses. Try that with our analog stuff and build up some more noise why don't we.

 

 

 

Great info!   About 35 years ago, I was much younger....weren't we all?   Anyway, I had a friend across the street and his dad was an uppity for a big "computer" company at the time. They had a giant box about the size of an old Oldsmobile's trunk lid.  Inside it appeared to have to huge movie reels in it. At the time I didn't understand what is was for, but later on I learned this was the backup for a "little" information company that would ultimately become a huge, well known, public company. Man times have changed. I can remember back in the late 80's maybe early 90's and the Flagship Dell Tower being advertised on the back of a Computer shopper magazine had a whopping 750 meg hard drive. It was hard to fathom what someone would do with that much storage back then.

[ClaudeJ1]

Software apps always gobble up hardware. No one writes efficient code anymore because they don't have to.

[Shakeydeal]

I didn't think loudness has anything to do with compressed dynamic range ?

 

Oh, but it most certainly does.

 

When you compress dynamic range, there is little to no difference between loud and soft passages. So everything "seems" loud. Look no further than the Red Hot Chili Peppers "Californication" for a vivid example.

 

Shakey

[derrickdj1]

I am surprised so many people still buy CD's.  I can buy the digital track and port it to as many things as I wish.  This is convience, flexibility to find the tracks I like, and the ability to make playlist with ease.

[BigStewMan]

is Analog source material dead

No it’s just sleeping. 

[Shakeydeal]

I am surprised so many people still buy CD's.  I can buy the digital track and port it to as many things as I wish.  This is convience, flexibility to find the tracks I like, and the ability to make playlist with ease.

So where are  you finding releases in a lossless format for download. All I see is MP3s, and no one wants that.

 

Shakey

[thebes]

Unlike dragging a miniature rock on the end a small stick mounted to a large stick

 

I said goodbye to ticks and pops over 30 years ago

Now, now Claude, I'm thinking you are a bit confused.  Jitter, distortion, sterile compression are just another form of ticks and pops.

 

If you are playing cd's you are simply dragging a light over a spinning disk on an arm that's connected to a tangential arm. A hard drive is just another arm dragging across a platter.

 

So digital is so different from vinyls?  Let's compare the medium. Wax is made from oil and so is a plastic cd.  Yes a diamond is a stone, so what is silicone if not a rock? 

 

Find me someone here who has never lost a large amount of data, weather records, pictures, whatever on their foolproof digital devices such as hard drives, ram, or smartypants phones.  You can't because everyone had had a data dump of some kind or another.  Between Home Depot and Target over 130 billion private accounts have been hacked.  Someday soon there will be a virus that simply wipes hard drives. What then?  Wait until we have a real cyber-war, with whole governments involved, and you know that will happen sooner or later.  What's going to be left of your online experience then, not to mention the cloud?

 

To put it into digital terms.  When the  01110011011010000110100101110100 hits the fan you are going to be up a

01100110011101010110001101101011ing creek without a paddle.

 

Plus vinyls sound better to analogue beings.  If you want digital become a robot.

 

Edited October 1, 2014 by thebes

[thebes]

 

Whistle while ye may, because after your zeros and ones all disappear, you'll have to entertain yourself by whistling, whilst I spin a platter.

 I'll be entertaining myself reading letters from you via carrier pigeon. 

 

I always send my letters via Passenger Pigeon.  Takes a bit longer but worth it.

[ClaudeJ1]

Now, now Claude, I'm thinking you are a bit confused.  Jitter, distortion, sterile compression are just another form of ticks and pops.   If you are playing cd's you are simply dragging a light over a spinning disk on an arm that's connected to a tangential arm. A hard drive is just another arm dragging across a platter.   So digital is so different from vinyls?  Let's compare the medium. Wax is made from oil and so is a plastic cd.  Yes a diamond is a stone, so what is silicone if not a rock? 

 

LOL. You are a piece of work. What if AC power gets wiped out while we are at it?

 

Jitter is measurable but inaudible since it occurs in the lower bits. Distortion? What distortion? From the Microphone's proximity overload perhaps, What's wrong with Flat from 4 Hz. (subwoofers were never an option with vinyl that could barely get to 35 hz. without himlayan warps and tonearm noises. There is ZERO friction with reading with a laser, unlike a diamond in a groove. The 100th time a CD is played, it sounds the same as the first time. Not true for vinyl. I knew a guy that taped all of his classical LP's and only playing them only once for this reason, then sold them to me cheap.

 

The only benefit of transfering LP's to digital is that it won't wear out beyond the original playback. 96/24 out-resolves any cartridge and has 75 db more dynamic range (135 db vs. 60). No tick no pops ever. Just batch copy on multiple media and your are good to go. The way Solid State memory is going the rotational mechanics of CD/DVD/Blue Ray will disappear. I know there's a limited number of read/write cycles with flash memory, but in read only form, it's not a factor. It will outlive both of us.

[Rhetor]

The thread title is . . . "Is . . . Analog Dead?"

Simple answer . . . "No!"

Not as long as there are people like me who love vinyl! Analog will not be dead so long as I am alive . . . and I doubt I will be the last "analog man standing."

Since this thread is a friendly debate, my answer to the thread question through the rhetorical vehicle of syllogism:

Analogue will be dead when all analog men (& women) are dead.

I am still alive.

Therefore, analog is not dead.

Argument proved in the negative.

We can now close the thread. ;-)

Edit for PS: I still use cassette tapes too; I have a r2r, but no tapes . . . on the hunt.

Edited October 2, 2014 by Rhetor

[muel]

Funny thing is that those vinyl records will still have music on them 100 years from now while every other format mentioned for storage will be long gone.  Digital storage, while convenient, sucks and is precarious.  Our digital's survival will depend on our continuous and uninterrupted archival to the next new medium through the years.  Even analog tape is better than CDs for long term storage.  This is not addressing degradation of analog tape over the years but try retrieving data from an old DIGITAL tape... 10 or 20 years from now it is a crap shoot and you might not get ANYTHING.  That stamped CD?? ...corrosion has destroyed more than one of my CD's including a Sheffield Lab CD (Side Note: It was really cool that Lincoln Mayorga himself sent me a replacement CD).

 

What do we do about it?  Well, not much you can do except keep all the backups you can and keep transferring to new mediums as they arrive.  Also, don't get rid of your old backups or originals.

[derrickdj1]

 

I am surprised so many people still buy CD's.  I can buy the digital track and port it to as many things as I wish.  This is convience, flexibility to find the tracks I like, and the ability to make playlist with ease.

So where are  you finding releases in a lossless format for download. All I see is MP3s, and no one wants that.

 

Shakey

 

I buy some FLAC files from HD Track and the rest from Amazon.  The amazon files are mp3 and I think the AC3 format which is very good sounding.  HD Tracks has a limited selection, the large FLAC files take up a lot of space, and are only marginally better at best to the AC 3 mp3 but, I don't consider myself an audiophile and love my music.