Analog Music

[ladyapple27]

I read a newspaper article that said that the new premium vinyl is becoming trendy  among young music collectors. There was a discussion about the difference in sound quality between analog and digital. I agree that the analog has a warmer sound with more depth. I frequently hear old favorites of mine in digital form for the first time and am disappointed. Older singles were engineered to sound good on the record players of their era and something is lost in the transition to digital. Among others, Sun and Bluebird recordings really should be experienced on vinyl.

I love the easy storage and transportabilty of digital, but I'll always have some vinyl and not just because I'm a dinosaur. 

Comments

[wherrymotor.livejournal.com]

Somebody is almost certainly working on a "vinyl" sound out of digital. That part is, to my engineering mind, approachable, esp. if vinyl is still around to study.
What may be more obscure is replicating the mixing technique of the time when recording anew, for groups who never recorded on vinyl.
I know enough about signal processing to assert the former, but not enough about studio recording to be confident of the latter. Maybe it's not a problem at all.

[ladyapple27.livejournal.com]

I don't have enough engineering expertise to really say.

I think that the big issue for most of my music collection is transferring music recorded with old techniques to a modern format without loss of details or special effects like deliberate distortion.

[wherrymotor.livejournal.com]

Again, and in principle, you ought to be able to digitize waht you have, warts and all, so to speak. You'd want to use a prodigious bit rate and listen to a digitized sample. You'd need a circuit that stayed linear in the same way that your favorite listening environment does, so that nothing reaches the recording as an electronic signal that would not normally reach your ear as an acoustic one - and, of course, that you could hear. The task is exacting and nuanced, but, if signal processing is about where I suspect ti ought to be, then feasible.