Analog vs digital

In this corner, weighing in at zero, an MP3, digitized music compressed so you can fit zillions of songs on your iPod. And in this corner, weighing maybe a few pounds too much and wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt, audio engineers, convinced that compressed digital sound is murdering the music they love. Tonight, the audio files take on the audio files. It's 2007 and breakout band great northern is rehearsing their new album. The music will be digitally mastered electronically enhanced and ready to download to your iPod with a click of a mouse. But has the ease with which we produce and devour our music led to diminished audio quality? For almost a century, sound was recorded using only analog technology, reproducing sound as close as possible to the original. In the past 20 years, digital technology has almost white analog recording off the map, and not everyone is happy about it. Steve albini is one of the world's top recording engineers having worked with bands like Nirvana, Joanna Newsom, and the pixies. Steve Chicago studio is one of the last that is totally and proudly analog. A well made LP record, a good pressing of a good recording on an LP is unarguably going to sound better than a compressed MP3 downloaded from some bogus website. Can Andrews is another world class engineer. He's worked with Beck, tenacious D, and black rebel motorcycle club. For Ken, there's a reason digital recording has become the industry standard. To my ear, it's more accurate right off the floor. Sound is vibrating changes in air pressure, which travel in a continuous wave and cause similar vibrations in our eardrums. Analog recording, mechanically duplicates those continuous vibrations using the grooves of a record or the flux of a magnetic tape passing through a tape recorder. Almost every home music lover is in search of the same thing. The truest, most lifelike reproduction of the original music possible. In digital recording, computer chips slice up those continuous soundwaves into separate bits of information called samples. The faster the sampling, the more the recorded sound resembles the original. But to the audio file, the sampling is nothing more than a cheap imitation of the original sound. So why do you think there's been this huge debate in the music world? In the beginnings of the digital audio recording technology, digital recording didn't sound particularly good. It was sort of brushed into existence as a cutting edge technology, but before it was really wrung out on a technical level, the early digital formats weren't very reliable, CDs, for example, didn't generally sound as good as good vinyl records, digital audio recording had limitations in frequency response. For Ken Andrews, modern digital recording has long overcome those early weaknesses. What would you say that digital can do that analog can't? That's a long list. Editing, I think, is the number one thing. Most digital recording is straight to the computer. And you can do a lot of that kind of editing on tape, but it's way more tedious and it's actually a lot more dangerous too because if you make the wrong cut, you can actually end up ruining your master. Whereas with digital, everything is non destructive, every edit you make can be undone. All of your original performances are kept. You can record a whole song and decide, you know what? What would happen if we put the bridge before the second chorus instead of after the second chorus? You can hear that right away. But Steve albini claims he can achieve the same result with a razor blade. Yeah, editing in the analog domain is exactly the same as everything in the digital domain you're taking different sections that you want to keep and sticking them together. But you're working with something physical. But here you're physically sticking them together with physically sticky tape. Can points out that analog recordings have durability issues. One of the things that is a problem with analog was, as you continue to play back that tape and add overdubs, every time that tape hits the play head, you're losing a little bit of the oxide that is on the tape. You're continually degrading the tape, and there's been some pretty serious horror stories about people when they finally are finished with their mix. They look at the tape that they're playing back and then they can see through it. But Steve is worried that fast changing digital technology may not hold up to the test of time. The digital data is much, much more fragile than analog recordings are. I mean, magnetic recordings have been around for close to a century. And they still, you know, they're all still playable. You can find virtually any magnetic recording ever made. And string it up on a machine and play it one way or another. But for us listeners, do analog and digital really sound that different? To find out, we joined great northern at firehouse studios. The band has recorded on both analog tape and digital computer. But when we first started recording on tape, it sounded definitely sounds richer and deeper and more Gritty, and there's little blips that you can hear in the tape that you never hear when it's clean on the computer, but on the computer it's a lot easier because you can do a million takes and you know, you don't have to splice and go back to the tape and it's not this whole ordeal where you better get it right the first time. To settle the analog versus digital debate, digi design, the makers of the recording software pro tools helped us devise a simple test. We brought in two unbiased recording engineers known for their golden ears. When we put our heads together, we make one big ear. There you go. These are the best years of our lives. These gentlemen have worked with some heavy hitters. Justin Beyoncé. Michael Jackson, I think we can hear Nats from 10,000 miles away, but truthfully, it's just to see, you know, if we can hear and depict tones and different tonalities. In one corner, we have our recording engineers. And in the other corner, great northern. I'm excited to see if I can tell the difference. I mean, I think I can with maybe I'm totally wrong. Yeah, I don't know. One song will be played. Some verses were created using an analog console and others are digital. The randomly arranged within the song. The question, who's got the real golden ears? Who can recognize the difference between analog and digital? If you want to cheat, the correct answer is at the bottom of the screen. What if I could believe that from dreaming about this falling to what if I could write your story. Right in like you always want after 20 verses the test is finished. We were exactly the opposite the whole time. I felt like I was guessing. I got a cookie. No cookies will be awarded. In fact, no real decisive winners emerged. Final score, the golden years got it right 55% of the time. Great northern, 53%. So maybe there is no great difference in the sound quality between analog and digital. Even though digital recording has become the norm, software is now able to imitate the warm and fat tones of analog in the console. What, you know, everyone I know is talking about right now is that the differences are almost indistinguishable because of the software that is coming out that emulates analog consoles specifically. You can basically create a mix inside completely inside the computer that sounds like it was done on an analog console. While digital may be emulating the analog sound, analog recordings eventually end up in the digital domain. So what's the point of keeping analog alive? What you're recording ends up on CD, ultimately doesn't end up being digital anyway. Yeah. But by the same token, if you make a fantastic motion picture, you know, if you make an incredible film and someone ends up watching it on his iPod that doesn't mean that there's no point in making the film high quality to start with. So what does the future hold? Do you think people are going to mourn the loss of the CD to the MP3 just like they mourned the loss of the record to the CD? I think that some are mourning it now already. But I don't know. I'm in a subset of people who are kind of maybe ahead of the curve. So we've already left CDs behind a while ago. I think the idea of getting music in a file format is definitely on the rise and probably going to completely take over here really quick. For wired science, I'm ziya Tong.