in the audiophile community I'm sure you've encountered people who insist that vinyl records
are the absolute be-all and end-all of sound quality because they are the purest form of analog
audio reproduction and they give you a warmth and realism that digital audio simply cannot match
"for a while now there's been certain audiophiles who claim that digital
anything digital is bad and they can they can spot digital from like a mile away"
"there have been a number of these people over the years who have talked about all
the damage that digital recording and playback does to musical enjoyment and
they need an all analog signal path from recording to playback"
"you know they're the ones with the hot stereo system
the special tonearm on their you know turntable that they got from Germany
and they're there to enlighten us like wine connoisseurs as to the majesty of analog"
well the truth is vinyl is digital if you listen
to almost any record made since the 1980s you are listening to a digital recording
even if the album didn't begin life as a digital recording chances are it was mixed and
mastered digitally or was made from a digitally remastered copy of the original analog recording
and as you can tell by these album covers
this is something that the record companies used to brag about
this one from 1987 says "digital: this digital disc utilizes the latest
advancements in computer sound technology for the listener this translates into a
remarkable state-of-the-art audio experience a brilliant display of sharply etched detail
spectacular dynamic range impressive clarity and freedom from distortion made
from digitally recorded master tapes this disc is compatible with all LP phonographs"
and digital record recording has been around a lot longer than most people think because here
I have a copy of the first album ever made using PCM digital recording it was recorded in Japan
in 1970 and released in January 1971 this is a vinyl re-release from 2022 it's called Something
because it contains a cover of the Beatles song which was only a year old when this was
recorded it's by Steve Marcus and the inside is all in Japanese but it mentions PCM recording
non-distortion cutting and they were using a 13-bit 32 kHz system developed by NHK in Japan
on the back they wrote "it's an important historical marker not only for Japanese
Jazz but also for recording in general since it was the first work recorded on PCM digital audio"
now you may be saying well so far I've only been showing fancy-pants classical, jazz,
and new age music what about the pop and rock music that ordinary people listen to?
the first digital recording by a rock artist is commonly cited to be this one Bop Till
You Drop by Ry Cooder but that's not true that honor actually goes to Steven Stills
he became the first digitally recorded rock artist on February 7th,
1979 in Los Angeles using the 32-track 3M digital recording system which cost
$115,000 it recorded 16-bit digital PCM audio at a sampling rate of 50 kHz onto
1-inch magnetic tape running at 45 inches per second using a cabinet full of circuit boards
using the recordings from that session which were also done simultaneously on analog tape
they pressed 100 copies of a promotional LP and distributed them to producers to
demonstrate the difference in quality between digital and analog recording
unfortunately his record company felt that the recording was not
the kind of music that would sell in the contemporary market so the master
tapes were shelved and the recording has never been commercially released
so Ry Cooder does get the credit of having the first digitally recorded rock album to
be commercially released in 1979 it was also recorded using the 3M system and Ry said "for
the first time we were hearing back exactly what we played instead of noise we heard each
sound perfectly" Ry also said the difference was like night and day and that analog recording was
flat and one-dimensional ironically the same thing that audiophiles say today about digital recording
Aerosmith producer Jack Douglas also began using digital recording that year he said "you would
think that digital would be more suited for classical and certainly classical recordings
show off digital but it does make a difference with screaming guitars and big heavy drums this
music has a lot of dynamics" and I like how that article misspells Aerosmith as Arrowsmith
and the first digitally recorded album to become a major pop hit is is this
one the 1979 self-titled debut album by Christopher Cross it was also recorded
using the 3M 32-track digital system and it won five Grammy awards including album
of the year song of the year for its number one hit single "Sailing" and best new artist
another number one hit from 1979 which was recorded using the 3M 32-track
digital system was Herb Albert's big instrumental disco hit "Rise"
but although it was digitally recorded it was transferred to analog tape for editing
but Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" was the opposite it was an analog recording that was transferred
to digital for mixing and mastering they employed the Soundstream system which used
16-bit digital audio with a sampling rate of 50 kHz just like the 3M system
other digitally recorded albums in 1979 from major
artists included Giorgio Moroder's E=Mc² which also used the Soundstream system
and Stevie Wonder's Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants which was recorded
using the Sony PCM-1600 system that had 16-bit digital audio
with the same 44.1 kHz sampling rate that was later used on CDs
and at the Audio Engineering Society convention in May 1979 Ampex introduced a new mastering
system including the ADD-1 16-bit digital delay for the cutting lathe allowing records
to be digitally mastered regardless if they were analog or digital recordings
the New York Times summed it up in November 1979 when they published an
article titled "digital recording techniques are already being widely used in pop music"
they quoted Herb Alpert who in case you don't know is the A in A&M records as
saying "for me the sound of digital is just amazing it enables you to do things
you normally couldn't do I really can't say enough for the purity of the sound"
by the early 1980s the artists using digital recording or digital mixing and
mastering are too many to mention in 1980 alone the list includes Barbra Streisand
and Barry Gibb Billy Joel Bruce Springsteen Carlos Santana Chicago Dave Grusin Fleetwood
Mac again George Benson Heart Kenny Loggins The Outlaws and Stevie Wonder again actually all of
Stevie Wonder's albums from 1979 onwards were digital recordings made using Sony equipment
and over on the classical music side in December 1980 PolyGram reported
than estimated 70% of their sessions were using digital recording and in June 1982
this article said that "digital has now become the normal technology for nearly
all new major recordings fewer and fewer new catalog editions will appear in the analog
mode" in October 1982 Billboard reported that "most classical recordings produced
in the UK are now being cut on digital equipment and many major rock artists are
reportedly insisting that their record labels put them into digital studios in the future"
that includes Steely Dan member Donald Fagen's 1982 album The Nightfly which audiophiles often
use to demonstrate how good vinyl can sound not realizing that it's actually a digital recording
I guess because it shows a turntable on the cover they think it must be analog
so if digitally recorded albums were already common over 40 years ago why
do some audiophiles still insist that analog sounds better? well part of it
is that some early CDs did sound a bit cold and shrill and if that was your
first impression with hearing CDs that's still going to stick with you all these years later
as this 1985 review of a compact disc player says "CD isn't perfect or rather it is and
that's a problem early discs did sound harsh a characteristic of pressing LPs
is that they drop off from 5 to 10,000 Hz so recording engineers tend to boost
those frequencies when they mix master recordings a few slight cuts with an
equalizer bring the first discs back to super smooth sound the laser disc has a
perfectly flat response so whatever is on the master won't be masked when you play it back"
and then about 15 years later in the late 1990s many digital recordings started to sound bad again
due to the loudness war that's where mastering engineers kept increasing the loudness of the
recordings until the sound got distorted lacking in dynamics and tiring to listen to while the
mechanical nature of a phonograph record imposes a limitation to how loud you can cut the audio in
the groove and have the turntable be able to play it without skipping so if you compare a
modern album on vinyl versus how it sounds on a CD or digital download it can sound better
on vinyl but not because vinyl is analog it's just because the vinyl version is mastered better
but the real solution for bad digital audio is not to go back to analog it's to go back
to good digital audio like this digitally mixed and mastered album from 1983 by
Terry Adams which sounds excellent despite being pressed on wafer-thin 92 gram vinyl
I've also heard audiophiles claim that digital audio is fine but only if it's kept purely digital
all the way through the process they insist that converting an analog recording to digital or vice
versa causes a significant loss of quality but I think these excellent sounding recordings that
are a combination of analog and digital made using 1970s technology debunk that myth as Herb Albert
said back in 1979 "I think digital to analog to digital is still better than just analog"
going back to the 1985 CD player review it says "most sound quality is lost in
pressing records and copying cassettes a CD from an analog master isn't quite as good is
from a digital master but its superiority over an LP is still like day and night"
I'm not anti-vinyl all the records I have in my collection prove otherwise
what I'm against is the mistaken belief that if you connect your turntable to
a Bluetooth speaker or a digital soundbar you're defeating the purpose of listening
to vinyl because it's supposed to be a purely analog format well the purpose of listening
to vinyl is to listen to music regardless if it was analog recorded digital recorded or a
combination of both and if it sounds good to you then it's serving that purpose perfectly