Analog or Digital Music – Which is it better?

If there’s one topic that surely splits music fans into two sides, is the debate between digital-versus-analog music. Some audiophiles still believe that their vinyl records and audio tapes provided sound quality which cannot be matched to music on online music sites.

So, what’s the truth and how to settle this debate? Let’s begin by understanding the technicalities behind analog and digital sounds. 

Analog and Digital Signal

Analog signal is a continuous signal which is present at all instance of time. Digital sounds are not continuous. They are small collections of correct sound pitch and volume clubbed together.

The best way to understand the difference between analog and digital is to take the example of an old clock. The old clocks at your home contain all numbers 1 to 12. Unlike the digital clock on your mobile phone, the wall clock covers every second and move forward.

Take another example of Radio. Remember those old radio sets of your dad or granddad? Those used to have a manual frequency tuner that had to be rotated in order to catch a particular FM or AM radio wave. However, today’s radio in your car or smart phone automatically jumps and sets different radio stations. So, in this case, the former is analog and latter is digital.

Converting Analog to Digital

Many recording studios today follow a particular method of converting analog sounds to digital sounds by a process.They have ‘’A to D convertors’’ that do this job. This is important to restore the music from very early cinema as well since the magnetic tapes and records are prone to corrosion.

But before understanding any further, we need to know the ‘Digital Systems’. The most common digital system is the Decimal System; 0,1,2……9 = 10 level digits. So, in the digital system, the binary is used as there isan advantage of 2.

For converting analog to digital signal, the value of every second of Analog Signal is taken. This is known as ‘SAMPLING’.

The rate at which it is converted is called the Sampling Rate. CD Quality Sample Rate is written as 44.1KHz

Pros and Cons

Let’s take a look now at some of the pros and cons that analog and digital have over each other –

• Analog sound represents physical phenomena in the best way. Although analog music carries the highest information it is quite susceptible or prone to Noise. Every READ/WRITE introduces more Noise to it. The digital music that you hear on online mp3 sites is immune to Noise. You can also add error correction methods to it.

[note: NOISE is also a type of sound. They are fluctuations in a signal which are not part of it and have meaningless data]

• Analog sounds cannot be processed easily by computers/processors whereas transmission is faster in digital and noise processing can be easily be applied to it.

• Editing, production, and post-production of digital audio are simple. It is non-linear that means you can access part of a recording at any time.

• Finally, in analog, when you make copies of the signal then the quality deteriorates. But due to the use of the Binary System in digital, the quality remains intact.

CONCLUSION

Although old vinyl records of your favorite Bollywood music or the cassettes of your favorite tunes had great sound, still the world has moved to digital due to the fact that one encounters fewer errors in it and it is very robust. Bur if you were to play latest songs online on a substandard audio system, then that too will sound bad. But on high bitrate, it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the two.

So in the end, whether you hear music on the best Indian social networking sites or on an old cassette player, it will be very personal and subjective on your part to say which audio is better.

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Source : https://sabakuch.com/blog/2017/05/23/analog-or-digital-music-which-is-it-better/