More tedious nostalgia for the glorious "time before phones",this time with vinyl as a pretentious garnish. Can we please stop thinking this idea is new or interesting?
Perhaps a more interesting question then is why does this tedious nostalgia persist? If our new tools are not providing for our needs then we should change them to do so.
not necessarily. Most of the people commenting here seem to agree the relentless march of technology is good and desirable. It's probably just old people that don't.
I work part time at a drug store and people over 50 constantly make comments about "that new chip card" or "this computer age". I always pin it on lack of adaptability and then make a joke about it on r/lewronggeneration or something
There are a few cases where we really are giving things up in the digital world. I've yet to see a digital control that holds a candle to the good old analog volume knob in terms of speed and precision of setting, for example. E-books are better than paper ones in many ways, but paper still has the advantage for sharing and certain aspects of navigation.
On the other hand, one big "need" is simply for the familiar, and another is to be different from the crowd. Old timers will hold onto their vinyl because it brings back memories that cannot be replaced, while young hipsters will buy them because no one else their age is. Simply being modern prevents new audio technology from fulfilling either need.
I love my omni-devices a lot, but there is an anti-social angle to it that I wish I could get over.
Nobody knows what you're doing on your iPad. You could be reading your e-mails, scrolling through twitter, or buying something on Amazon. But in a more casual environment (living room, with friends), you lose opportunities for spontaneous interactions.
There's also a difficulty in sharing. You can't give the funny pages to someone. Hard to loan e-books sometimes.
I think some of this is solved by TV screens. Long term, I bet we'll be "casting" our phones to screens a lot more often in social environments.
But sometimes the limitation of physical goods is nice. Legos are funner than CAD software, most of the time.
Take a screenshot, paste it into your WhatsApp chat group. Now you've shared it with your friends all around the world, for them to read at their pleasure.
For this same reason modern cinematography often resorts to older tech or no tech. Dialling someone's number on the mobile is not as dramatic as doing it on older bulkier phones. Scrolling something on the iPad is not the same as paging a real book. Then there's writing a real letter, not knowing someone's whereabouts as opposed to just calling their mobile, etc. etc.
Tech is social in its own way but it seems to be bringing these massive anthropological changes. It will be interesting to see whether the come back of physical tech like vinyl is serious or it's just some of kind of a protest of the older generation.
I'll play the Bourdieu card and simply say that it's all about the symbolic gains you get in your tribe by possessing those artefacts. Nothing new under the sun (I combo the Ecclesiastes card).
Just noticed yesterday that vinyl records started being sold in my local supermarket, alongside a disappearing variety of CD/DVD/Blu-Ray discs. What an interesting twist of history.
Just walked along the beach and saw an elderly couple sit on a bench, talking. Neither of them held a smartphone. Perhaps they don't even own one. It struck me that short of a revolution in this area, the number of times I'll do that with my wife will be easily counted. Obviously I wasn't like this 10 years ago. Conversation has become too slow and unrewarding for me to even engage in. Hell, even my favorite tv sports or a good movie is too slow and has too little instant reward to not use Twitter at the same time.
I think a holiday island that banned all mobile broadband could actually use it as a selling point.
I just spent four weeks in Cuba, where the only Internet is (expensive, slow) public wifi hotspots in extremely select places, and I had zero cell service either as my carrier had no roaming agreement.
I got quite a bit of exploratory programming done, and read a lot of books (and explored Cuba itself of course! Made half a dozen friends, amazingly friendly people)
It has to be zero though, not "sparse" or "slow" as that just means I'll not see Cuba but instead see the inside of that lobby with WiFi :)
That's how bad thus illness is.
Unfortunately I think before I get a change to go the island will be blanketed in 4G (fortunately for them though... I think).
I'm one of the people that this article (and book) romanticizing The Analog should appeal to but my overall experience with the digital revolution has been a net positive. This applies to both digital photography and digital music.
I had a collection of vinyl records & cassettes growing up but I've gotten more enjoyment and revelations from listening to Foobar software accessing thousands of flac/mp3 files instantly on demand. I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media. Digital has allowed me to appreciate music even more.
The vast majority of articles of analog-vs-digital seem to favor analog and it downplays how digital can engage people in ways that analog can't replicate.
As an example, the first time I heard the Star Wars soundtrack was on a reel-to-reel tape machine.[1] Analog nostalgia. However, with digital technology, a skilled person with a computer workstation can use virtual instruments to recreate the orchestral arrangement one instrument at a time.[2] The listener can then hear the gradual build up of how all the various parts interact and appreciate the music even more than the old analog tape. That demonstration is not economically possible with analog. Sure, one could make a 24-track analog tape of isolated parts but typical listeners will not have the money to own a 24-track player at home. Also, David Das in the video is experimenting with various combinations of articulations, tempo, and volume and that combinatorial explosion exceeds the capacity of 24 tracks.
Yes it has! I used to listen to the entire 20-minute side of a vinyl or cassette. Now that I use software to play music (Foobar, and Winamp before that), I realized that I my old listening habit was a dictated by the physical analog format. That's actually not how I prefer to listen to music. I like to jump around from genre to genre and the convenience of digital technology revealed that preference to me. Reducing friction lets me listen to more music.
Put a different way, a real-life radio station has to constrain itself to one genre. Because of the economics of advertisers/demographics, a media conglomerate can't create a radio station that plays pop+classical+jazz. However, with digital (Spotify or desktop Foobar), I can create my own "multi-genre radio station" for my listening pleasure.
> I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media.
I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy. Whenever something new overtakes something old, that's going to happen. I'm excited about self-driving cars relieving me from having to drive while other people are still buying manual transmission cars because they love the direct manipulation of the machine. When I want a cup of tea, I dump hot water over a tea bag while other people go through an elaborate ritual.
I don't have a record player, but I do have fond memories of sitting in my room with headphones on while a record played, looking at the large format cover art and studying the sleeve. I'm not a collector of anything, but I think I understand the joy of artifacts.
One thing I am somewhat surprised is that the streaming music services haven't borrowed the idea of filters from Instagram to apply to music. Would anybody be interested in simulating playback through a tube amp? Through a suitcase record player? Through a high quality turntable? Or a low quality turntable that can't quite turn at 33-1/3 RPMs?
I agree. We're emotional creatures and our emotions are driven by perception. A wine that is thought to be expensive in a beautiful setting will be enjoyed more than that same wine thought to be inexpensive, drank out of a plastic cup in the back of MacDonald's. Same wine - different emotional experience.
Also, there is something to delaying gratification that can enhance the experience, and adding a certain kind of ceremony around the act will help too. In "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", it isn't just about the sushi. It's about the experience of knowing that you're being served by a craftsman who dedicated his life to perfecting his craft and being served in the way that he deems enhances the flavor. Rationally, it's silly, but we're emotional beings most of the time. Trump won largely because of emotion - it wasn't really a rational decision that the electorate took.
>I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy.
No, I'm not ignoring that aspect and I understand that physical touch of media can add enjoyment for some people.
What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes. That perspective presents a one-sided view favoring analog such as:
1) physical media you can touch is better than digital bits you can't touch
2) ownership is better than subscription (Spotify streaming)
3) listening in 20-minute side of 1 album is better than instantly jumping around a large music library
... ergo, analog is overall better than digital consumption. (As I stated before, I disagree as a person who straddles both the vinyl and digital eras. I've had extensive experience with both formats and the digital experience is better in my case. Many people besides me have come to this same conclusion.)
Yes, holding in your hand a vinyl album's cover art and reading its lyrics can add joy to music but there's also the opposite view that seems uncool to write about: there's also joy in not handling physical media. It's this second perspective I'm emphasizing and it doesn't take away from anyone who prefers their vinyl records.
You're overlooking the fact that we've already been here before and experienced the rush to digital as a world of perfect reproducibility and consistency without all the inconveniences of analog.
Digital is better if your priority is the things that are more easy with digital. If you ask me to mix your movie soundtrack, I'll head straight for the digital desk hooked up to the Pro Tools rig and it's be plugins for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you invite me to jam for musical pleasure, I'll switch on the 303 that I have wired into a shitty desk that I bought because it sounds so shitty and I enjoy the way it crunches a hot signal.
Multitracking, refining, polishing, can be enjoyable and deliver a sense of accomplishment when you deliver the end product, but it's work. The music I make and listen to for pleasure is typically done with cheaper, crappier gear, pushed beyond its design parameters, and recorded in one pass. I suppose you could cal it a techno-punk aesthetic; when you have sequencers and editing tools at your fingertips, the personal aspects are best expressed (for me) through performance rather than through perfection.
Of course not, but for years there's been a 'digital can do anything analog can do so why even use analog' from the digital side of music engineering. To which I answer, because I don't want to have perfect consistency and predictability in every context. There are contexts in which I want imprecision, nonlinearity, and surprise so that I can select rather than design.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but it's a general problem in our technology culture. To me this is not that different from not wanting to write code all the time. You know what I hate about writing code? When I'm working with unfamiliar languages/frameworks/libraries I don't know what all the available options are, whereas when I'm working with more visual tools I can see all the options even if I don't understand what they do, and I can select and experiment and, well, play with the options until I find something useful or interesting. I can't play when I'm writing code because my experiments are just liable to result in syntax errors or suchlike.
Writing code appeals to people who like learning a bunch of things first and then recombining them. I find this kind of learning slow and tedious and I keep wonder why I'm doing all this syntax bullshit instead of letting the computer handle it for me so I can focus on my domain-specific ideas.
Likewise when I talk with DSP programmers about how I like the unpredictability and nonlinearities of analog signals, they say things like 'I could add a random noise generator to the oscillator algorithm' or so (I'm simplifying, but that's a design reality on many electronic musical instruments). This is often a self-defeatinmg strategy, at least in the short term - witness Roland corporation bending over backwards to do The! Most! Accurate! Component! simulation! Ever! in a recent line of digital devices featuring 'analog circuit behavior'. Meanwhile their smaller rival Korg has completely crushed them in the very important entry and mid-level market segments by simply producing what the market wanted - a wide variety of cheap analog gear, mixing both classic and new designs, and labeling the boards and publishing the schematics so people can mod them if they're handy with a soldering iron.
> What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes.
Do you want writers to start every sentence with "in my opinion" or "I think" or "it's my belief that"? From the context you can usually figure when a writer is expressing an opinion vs stating an objective fact.
If you are a fan of music, especially guitar-based music like classic rock, there is no substitute for a vinyl record created through a 100% analog mastering process. Analog captures harmonics that digital simply can't. Analog mastering also has much wider dynamic range than does digital mastering.
As for virtual instruments, those are like video game emulators: they give future generations some semblance of what the original was like, but it's just not the same as actual hardware.
The frequency response of microphones generally plummets at (or below) 20 kilohertz.
Digital sampling can capture 20 kilohertz just fine. An analog recording pathway isn't really going to capture much more information than a digital one.
Not only that, filtering above the audible range is a feature. Ultrasound can give audible artifacts, for example intermodulation between close tones. And all sorts of high frequency noise exists even from the equipment itself. (This is just one reason 96 kHz material doesn't make sense for the consumer. Any good playback chain would filter it out.)
> If you are a fan of music, especially guitar-based music like classic rock, there is no substitute for a vinyl record created through a 100% analog mastering process. Analog captures harmonics that digital simply can't. Analog mastering also has much wider dynamic range than does digital mastering.
Analog mastering doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range of digital; a CD with its paltry 16 bit has a noise floor below -90dB. There are staggeringly few analog mastering setups that can do that. Move to 20+ bits (i.e. all pro digital mastering setups) and you are getting to the point where an analog setup might be able to maintain the SNR, but would be astronomically expensive.
As far as the harmonics, there is little evidence that humans can detect 22kHz+ sound at safe listening levels, and once you talk about 96 samples/s most speakers can't reproduce anything like the original signal at 40kHz+. It might make a physical difference if you have a $20k electrostatic setup, but you won't be able to hear it.
What's the typical line-level input voltage for an audio signal? Something like two volts? Four, peak-to-peak? A 16-bit ADC quantizes that four volts into 65,536 distinct quantities which are reproduced as voltage levels and hence, sound by a DAC on playback. Okay, fine, whatever. BUT... in a 100% analog process, the line-level input max is much greater than two volts. I've heard of analog equipment being able to register signals in excess of 70 V. This gives the audio engineer practically infinite headroom in which to record and mix sound without losing detail.
Where analog generally falls down on the job is, you typically need actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual studio to lay down a track. None of this wave-table-synth, virtual instrument shit. And no Auto-Tune or other automatic correction either; if a musician flubs a track, generally they have to rerecord it. Pop producers consider this a bug; serious musicians consider it a feature.
And a 24 bit ADC that quantizes the lower 16 bits into 4Vpp would be capable of registering signals at 512Vpp. No analog devices have such a large headroom (granted they don't build such a device, but if you attenuate the signal at the entrance to the ADC, you get something similar).
This, btw. is why nobody masters at 16 bits; the insufficient headroom. 16 bits is plenty for playback though.
[edit]
I do want to acknowledge the big weakness of a digital setup that you touch on here, which is the hard clipping. If you ever clip in digital, you have ruined the recording while many analog setups will have a soft rolloff (Tube amps v. BJT amps are similar; the soft clipping of a tube amp is much less unpleasant than the hard clipping of a BJT amp. You can "get away" with a lower wattage tube amp for this reason; a properly sized BJT amp is more accurate though). All this is moot for professional recordings though as a sound engineer who regularly clips by accident (rather than to intentionally get a particular sound) will get fired.
Precision is so boring though. It's like mapping the inside of a cathedral with lidar or something; yeah it's awesomely accurate but it's not substitute for just walking in and enjoying the spectacle. You won't have a better aesthetic experience from knowing the position of every individual block of stone with micrometer precision.
Perhaps a grainy photograph vs. the lidar is a more apt comparison. The former has character, but the latter is a much better approximation of the real thing. Also you can generate a grainy photograph from your accurate digital measurements if you so choose.
Why a grainy photograph and not a good quality one? I feel you're begging the question here by assuming your conclusion as your premise.
Maybe a better metaphor would be a laser pointed vs a flashlight - assuming they emit the name # of lumens, which one is more useful for exploring a dark room? This is why I think the pursuit of endless precision in calculating the value of irrational/transcendental numbers is an amusing hobby but ultimately a waste of time.
One cannot appreciate an orchestra one piece at a time. It is an interesting acedemic exercise but there are good reasons that such pieces are still recorded in one room, in one grand take. Digital cannot mimic the communication and timing between instruments playing in the same room.
I appreciate your argument of the whole vs sum, but might it also be more expensive? Even if each member played perfectly in a single take, you'd need lots more recording time; member*lengthOfPiece instead of just lengthOfPiece
But that is how it is done. One big room with potentially dozens of mics covering the orchestra. I ask this: if each records individually, why bother with a conductor? That job cannot be replaced by a blinking light.
I agree with you that digital has expanded my ability to enjoy music. When I read the line "Spotify shows people coming back to the same tunes over and over" I was surprised. I'm probably younger than you, I only had a few CD's before I started listening to all my music on an iPod Shuffle in Jr. High but I remember being elated to buy 20 new songs on iTunes and listen to them over and over.
After making the jump to Spotify and later Apple Music I've found the desire to seek out new music grow exponentially, in fact I almost never come back to the same music, I can't help but find new songs
The other side is that sites like Soundcloud are a godsend for bedroom producers. I've found an incredible diversity of sounds from there also
Music for playback is one thing. If you make music, analog and digital are worlds apart. Digital can do great things, but the one thing it can't do is fail gracefully. It's too consistent; because it's always perfectly accurate, it's never yours. Take two analog devices that came off the production line together; over time, they will end up sounding different from each other.
This is what musicians like. It's the individuality and texture of things that appeal to artists as much as the overarching form; that's why people still put paint on canvas with brushes or other tools despite the vast possibilities offered by graphics software.
I am very skeptical of your argument. Musicians like that their carefully-planned tracks are warped & distorted in unexpected ways by analog playback devices - as opposed to digital distribution, where the listener hears precisely what the musician intended each time and every time?
Even if I agreed with that notion, it still isn't an argument against digital distribution per se. Digitally, we can add (in software) distortion that is similar to that you'd encounter with vinyl. I have some digitally produced tracks that are done this way, actually: even end-to-end digital, the tracks sound as though they are coming off a vinyl record. The aesthetic is maintained and played back exactly as the artist intended.
Some folks even introduce distortion after the conversion back to analog, e.g. with "warm sounding" tube amps.
> What if Picasso had had Snapchat? What if Hemingway had spent half the afternoon writing Yelp reviews of his favorite bars?
Is the author suggesting that great art and writing can no longer happen, because of Snapchat and Yelp? Because I'd argue that we've never lived in a time when it's been easier to create art, of all kinds, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of great literature being published, either.
I find this endless bemoaning of the unrealness of "digital" quite tiresome.
Hemingway could have, if he wanted to, spent half the afternoon writing reviews of his favorite bars. You don't need Yelp for that. Just like Picasso could have spent his time taking pictures of food or whatever the author imagines people do with Snapchat.
This all seems more like an excuse. "I could be Hemingway if only that dastardly Yelp weren't distracting me all the time!". Yelp isn't the one to blame here.
Also, both Picasso and Hemingway spent lots of time socializing, especially with other artists. At the most distilled level, that's what people use all this new-fangled technology for.
Did you read the article? The author addresses and counters this notion that digital socializing brings us together.
See, you've put all of your spiritual and ethical eggs in to your technologic worship so you are completely closed off to the notion that smartphones might actually be really horrible. You're basically just defending your own thinly veiled insecurities about how you give your own life meaning.
Woah, calm down - I was just expanding on the single comment I replied to.
I'm an old fogey who isn't young or cool enough to have all my eggs in that basket. My eggs are far more in the sitting-around-reading-books-and-newspapers and hiking-in-the-mountains baskets.
But I do think this hysteria is pretty overblown, as your comment demonstrates.
The 1800s called and would like their willpower moralizing argument back.
Less snidely, ignoring the context in which actions take place is not reasonable. We are immensely shaped by the environment that we are a part of.
The trickier question of how to balance such realizations with the concept of individual responsibility? It seems the jury is still out on that one. My guess is that the most productive efforts will be those that produce better outcomes from a systemic perspective, through more harmonious alignment of underlying incentives and a developing understanding of human nature.
This article is about the increasing rejection of the flood of digital information.
You're clearly still addicted to your devices.
An increasing number of us are playing acoustic guitars, going camping, playing board games, listening to vinylr records and mainly enjoying each other's company without any intermediary consumer device.
This forum is filled with technocratic mutants who cling to some half-baked theology that the digital revolution will save our souls, so I'm not expecting to change any minds. Hell, this forum is basically designed to halt any notion of discourse and to amplify the pro-tech rhetoric.
Why must it be someone is either on the enlightened side with you or "addicted to devices?" I go camping and play board games with my friends, but on my last long flight (for a trip where we left our devices off entirely) my partner and I played civ v the whole time on my tablet. You're at least as guilty of an extreme rhetoric as this specifically tech-oriented forum, and while I certainly agree there are people who spend too much time in front of the TV I don't think your message will change their habits. I also don't necessarily believe they would have been super-productive contributors to society if only the lcd screen hadn't been invented.
we've never lived in a time when it's been easier to create art
And art that is created without effort tends to deliver only superficial pleasure and is accordingly treated as a disposable commodity rather than the product of a singular vision allied with patient craft.
You might enjoy reading Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. While this was written in the 1930 it remains very readable and its observations are easily synthesized with the distinguishing features of digital technology.
> The reason [for board games' popularity], Sax suggests, has only a little to do with the games themselves, and more with the desire to do something with other people
Sort of. One of the most important features of board games is that they're comfortable to play while drinking. Sax's example of Snakes and Lattes, after all, is actually a bar.
The digital gives us an alternative to typical entertainment, food, drugs and alcohol.
> Last year, in fact, the OECD reported that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”
There's no universe where having less information available to students improves learning.
Wikipedia for everyone is revolutionary! I doubt an OECD test can capture that.
The problem OLPC faced is that the iPod touch was a more compelling device for children. Its bill of materials today is less than $100. And children use touch devices religiously. OLPC had no hope of delivering a competitor to iPhone on technological and business grounds. But the theory is probably sound.
There's no universe where having less information available to students improves learning.
I think that's an oversimplification.
I highly recommend The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. A quicker read is the article that inspired the book: Is Google Making Us Stupid?[0]
He's not blindly or rapidly anti-tech. For example, he says: "The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes."
But he does recognize that there are drawbacks to how we engage with digital media: "When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."
I have read novels since before the internet. I'm more likely to interpret and make connections about an article I discuss on HN than I am for any book I read (which I consume like popcorn).
This is a good time to sell your records. The heavy marketing of kitsch to millennials has driven the price up on anything redolent of "authenticity." I got $3K for mine. Started by only mostly taking the ones I thought were nice, but then noticed how much they were paying for the ones that were crap I paid 25 cents for at a Salvation Army. The rest of them followed shortly.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.2 ms ] threadOn the other hand, one big "need" is simply for the familiar, and another is to be different from the crowd. Old timers will hold onto their vinyl because it brings back memories that cannot be replaced, while young hipsters will buy them because no one else their age is. Simply being modern prevents new audio technology from fulfilling either need.
Nobody knows what you're doing on your iPad. You could be reading your e-mails, scrolling through twitter, or buying something on Amazon. But in a more casual environment (living room, with friends), you lose opportunities for spontaneous interactions.
There's also a difficulty in sharing. You can't give the funny pages to someone. Hard to loan e-books sometimes.
I think some of this is solved by TV screens. Long term, I bet we'll be "casting" our phones to screens a lot more often in social environments.
But sometimes the limitation of physical goods is nice. Legos are funner than CAD software, most of the time.
Take a screenshot, paste it into your WhatsApp chat group. Now you've shared it with your friends all around the world, for them to read at their pleasure.
I agree with you on the ebooks, though.
Tech is social in its own way but it seems to be bringing these massive anthropological changes. It will be interesting to see whether the come back of physical tech like vinyl is serious or it's just some of kind of a protest of the older generation.
Nobody prints giant newspaper headlines anymore. Nobody holds a map upside-down.
My bet is many more movies will be based in the 80s.
I think a holiday island that banned all mobile broadband could actually use it as a selling point.
http://www.docastaway.com/pages/adventuremode
Sounds real rough ;)
I got quite a bit of exploratory programming done, and read a lot of books (and explored Cuba itself of course! Made half a dozen friends, amazingly friendly people)
Unfortunately I think before I get a change to go the island will be blanketed in 4G (fortunately for them though... I think).
I had a collection of vinyl records & cassettes growing up but I've gotten more enjoyment and revelations from listening to Foobar software accessing thousands of flac/mp3 files instantly on demand. I can jump from pop to classical to jazz without the tediousness of manipulating analog media. Digital has allowed me to appreciate music even more.
The vast majority of articles of analog-vs-digital seem to favor analog and it downplays how digital can engage people in ways that analog can't replicate.
As an example, the first time I heard the Star Wars soundtrack was on a reel-to-reel tape machine.[1] Analog nostalgia. However, with digital technology, a skilled person with a computer workstation can use virtual instruments to recreate the orchestral arrangement one instrument at a time.[2] The listener can then hear the gradual build up of how all the various parts interact and appreciate the music even more than the old analog tape. That demonstration is not economically possible with analog. Sure, one could make a 24-track analog tape of isolated parts but typical listeners will not have the money to own a 24-track player at home. Also, David Das in the video is experimenting with various combinations of articulations, tempo, and volume and that combinatorial explosion exceeds the capacity of 24 tracks.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=star+wars+soundtrack+reel+re...
[2] deep link showing adding an instrument and then a playback payoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfbm3qHRLI&feature=youtu.be...
Has it? You're jumping from one thing to another rather than just playing one thing, sitting back, and enjoying.
Put a different way, a real-life radio station has to constrain itself to one genre. Because of the economics of advertisers/demographics, a media conglomerate can't create a radio station that plays pop+classical+jazz. However, with digital (Spotify or desktop Foobar), I can create my own "multi-genre radio station" for my listening pleasure.
I think you are ignoring the fact that for some people, the manipulation of the analog media is part of the joy. Whenever something new overtakes something old, that's going to happen. I'm excited about self-driving cars relieving me from having to drive while other people are still buying manual transmission cars because they love the direct manipulation of the machine. When I want a cup of tea, I dump hot water over a tea bag while other people go through an elaborate ritual.
I don't have a record player, but I do have fond memories of sitting in my room with headphones on while a record played, looking at the large format cover art and studying the sleeve. I'm not a collector of anything, but I think I understand the joy of artifacts.
One thing I am somewhat surprised is that the streaming music services haven't borrowed the idea of filters from Instagram to apply to music. Would anybody be interested in simulating playback through a tube amp? Through a suitcase record player? Through a high quality turntable? Or a low quality turntable that can't quite turn at 33-1/3 RPMs?
Also, there is something to delaying gratification that can enhance the experience, and adding a certain kind of ceremony around the act will help too. In "Jiro Dreams of Sushi", it isn't just about the sushi. It's about the experience of knowing that you're being served by a craftsman who dedicated his life to perfecting his craft and being served in the way that he deems enhances the flavor. Rationally, it's silly, but we're emotional beings most of the time. Trump won largely because of emotion - it wasn't really a rational decision that the electorate took.
No, I'm not ignoring that aspect and I understand that physical touch of media can add enjoyment for some people.
What I disagree with is the constant biased narrative from writers that emphasizes analog media's attributes. That perspective presents a one-sided view favoring analog such as:
1) physical media you can touch is better than digital bits you can't touch
2) ownership is better than subscription (Spotify streaming)
3) listening in 20-minute side of 1 album is better than instantly jumping around a large music library
... ergo, analog is overall better than digital consumption. (As I stated before, I disagree as a person who straddles both the vinyl and digital eras. I've had extensive experience with both formats and the digital experience is better in my case. Many people besides me have come to this same conclusion.)
Yes, holding in your hand a vinyl album's cover art and reading its lyrics can add joy to music but there's also the opposite view that seems uncool to write about: there's also joy in not handling physical media. It's this second perspective I'm emphasizing and it doesn't take away from anyone who prefers their vinyl records.
Digital is better if your priority is the things that are more easy with digital. If you ask me to mix your movie soundtrack, I'll head straight for the digital desk hooked up to the Pro Tools rig and it's be plugins for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you invite me to jam for musical pleasure, I'll switch on the 303 that I have wired into a shitty desk that I bought because it sounds so shitty and I enjoy the way it crunches a hot signal.
Multitracking, refining, polishing, can be enjoyable and deliver a sense of accomplishment when you deliver the end product, but it's work. The music I make and listen to for pleasure is typically done with cheaper, crappier gear, pushed beyond its design parameters, and recorded in one pass. I suppose you could cal it a techno-punk aesthetic; when you have sequencers and editing tools at your fingertips, the personal aspects are best expressed (for me) through performance rather than through perfection.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but it's a general problem in our technology culture. To me this is not that different from not wanting to write code all the time. You know what I hate about writing code? When I'm working with unfamiliar languages/frameworks/libraries I don't know what all the available options are, whereas when I'm working with more visual tools I can see all the options even if I don't understand what they do, and I can select and experiment and, well, play with the options until I find something useful or interesting. I can't play when I'm writing code because my experiments are just liable to result in syntax errors or suchlike.
Writing code appeals to people who like learning a bunch of things first and then recombining them. I find this kind of learning slow and tedious and I keep wonder why I'm doing all this syntax bullshit instead of letting the computer handle it for me so I can focus on my domain-specific ideas.
Likewise when I talk with DSP programmers about how I like the unpredictability and nonlinearities of analog signals, they say things like 'I could add a random noise generator to the oscillator algorithm' or so (I'm simplifying, but that's a design reality on many electronic musical instruments). This is often a self-defeatinmg strategy, at least in the short term - witness Roland corporation bending over backwards to do The! Most! Accurate! Component! simulation! Ever! in a recent line of digital devices featuring 'analog circuit behavior'. Meanwhile their smaller rival Korg has completely crushed them in the very important entry and mid-level market segments by simply producing what the market wanted - a wide variety of cheap analog gear, mixing both classic and new designs, and labeling the boards and publishing the schematics so people can mod them if they're handy with a soldering iron.
Do you want writers to start every sentence with "in my opinion" or "I think" or "it's my belief that"? From the context you can usually figure when a writer is expressing an opinion vs stating an objective fact.
As for virtual instruments, those are like video game emulators: they give future generations some semblance of what the original was like, but it's just not the same as actual hardware.
Digital sampling can capture 20 kilohertz just fine. An analog recording pathway isn't really going to capture much more information than a digital one.
Analog mastering doesn't have anywhere near the dynamic range of digital; a CD with its paltry 16 bit has a noise floor below -90dB. There are staggeringly few analog mastering setups that can do that. Move to 20+ bits (i.e. all pro digital mastering setups) and you are getting to the point where an analog setup might be able to maintain the SNR, but would be astronomically expensive.
As far as the harmonics, there is little evidence that humans can detect 22kHz+ sound at safe listening levels, and once you talk about 96 samples/s most speakers can't reproduce anything like the original signal at 40kHz+. It might make a physical difference if you have a $20k electrostatic setup, but you won't be able to hear it.
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/h...
This tends to be true in practice due to "loudness war" problems - many CDs are mastered not for accuracy but for popularity.
Where analog generally falls down on the job is, you typically need actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual studio to lay down a track. None of this wave-table-synth, virtual instrument shit. And no Auto-Tune or other automatic correction either; if a musician flubs a track, generally they have to rerecord it. Pop producers consider this a bug; serious musicians consider it a feature.
This, btw. is why nobody masters at 16 bits; the insufficient headroom. 16 bits is plenty for playback though.
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I do want to acknowledge the big weakness of a digital setup that you touch on here, which is the hard clipping. If you ever clip in digital, you have ruined the recording while many analog setups will have a soft rolloff (Tube amps v. BJT amps are similar; the soft clipping of a tube amp is much less unpleasant than the hard clipping of a BJT amp. You can "get away" with a lower wattage tube amp for this reason; a properly sized BJT amp is more accurate though). All this is moot for professional recordings though as a sound engineer who regularly clips by accident (rather than to intentionally get a particular sound) will get fired.
Obviously you've never mastered a Disaster Area album. :)
Perhaps a grainy photograph vs. the lidar is a more apt comparison. The former has character, but the latter is a much better approximation of the real thing. Also you can generate a grainy photograph from your accurate digital measurements if you so choose.
Maybe a better metaphor would be a laser pointed vs a flashlight - assuming they emit the name # of lumens, which one is more useful for exploring a dark room? This is why I think the pursuit of endless precision in calculating the value of irrational/transcendental numbers is an amusing hobby but ultimately a waste of time.
The other side is that sites like Soundcloud are a godsend for bedroom producers. I've found an incredible diversity of sounds from there also
This is what musicians like. It's the individuality and texture of things that appeal to artists as much as the overarching form; that's why people still put paint on canvas with brushes or other tools despite the vast possibilities offered by graphics software.
Even if I agreed with that notion, it still isn't an argument against digital distribution per se. Digitally, we can add (in software) distortion that is similar to that you'd encounter with vinyl. I have some digitally produced tracks that are done this way, actually: even end-to-end digital, the tracks sound as though they are coming off a vinyl record. The aesthetic is maintained and played back exactly as the artist intended.
Some folks even introduce distortion after the conversion back to analog, e.g. with "warm sounding" tube amps.
Is the author suggesting that great art and writing can no longer happen, because of Snapchat and Yelp? Because I'd argue that we've never lived in a time when it's been easier to create art, of all kinds, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of great literature being published, either.
I find this endless bemoaning of the unrealness of "digital" quite tiresome.
This all seems more like an excuse. "I could be Hemingway if only that dastardly Yelp weren't distracting me all the time!". Yelp isn't the one to blame here.
See, you've put all of your spiritual and ethical eggs in to your technologic worship so you are completely closed off to the notion that smartphones might actually be really horrible. You're basically just defending your own thinly veiled insecurities about how you give your own life meaning.
I'm an old fogey who isn't young or cool enough to have all my eggs in that basket. My eggs are far more in the sitting-around-reading-books-and-newspapers and hiking-in-the-mountains baskets.
But I do think this hysteria is pretty overblown, as your comment demonstrates.
Less snidely, ignoring the context in which actions take place is not reasonable. We are immensely shaped by the environment that we are a part of.
The trickier question of how to balance such realizations with the concept of individual responsibility? It seems the jury is still out on that one. My guess is that the most productive efforts will be those that produce better outcomes from a systemic perspective, through more harmonious alignment of underlying incentives and a developing understanding of human nature.
This article is about the increasing rejection of the flood of digital information.
You're clearly still addicted to your devices.
An increasing number of us are playing acoustic guitars, going camping, playing board games, listening to vinylr records and mainly enjoying each other's company without any intermediary consumer device.
This forum is filled with technocratic mutants who cling to some half-baked theology that the digital revolution will save our souls, so I'm not expecting to change any minds. Hell, this forum is basically designed to halt any notion of discourse and to amplify the pro-tech rhetoric.
Best of luck!
And art that is created without effort tends to deliver only superficial pleasure and is accordingly treated as a disposable commodity rather than the product of a singular vision allied with patient craft.
You might enjoy reading Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction. While this was written in the 1930 it remains very readable and its observations are easily synthesized with the distinguishing features of digital technology.
Sort of. One of the most important features of board games is that they're comfortable to play while drinking. Sax's example of Snakes and Lattes, after all, is actually a bar.
The digital gives us an alternative to typical entertainment, food, drugs and alcohol.
There's no universe where having less information available to students improves learning.
Wikipedia for everyone is revolutionary! I doubt an OECD test can capture that.
The problem OLPC faced is that the iPod touch was a more compelling device for children. Its bill of materials today is less than $100. And children use touch devices religiously. OLPC had no hope of delivering a competitor to iPhone on technological and business grounds. But the theory is probably sound.
I think that's an oversimplification.
I highly recommend The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. A quicker read is the article that inspired the book: Is Google Making Us Stupid?[0]
He's not blindly or rapidly anti-tech. For example, he says: "The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes."
But he does recognize that there are drawbacks to how we engage with digital media: "When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...