From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas Newsgroups: net.audio Title: Re: Digital vs. analog Article-I.D.: utah-gr.488 Posted: Sun Jul 18 23:45:58 1982 Received: Sat Jul 24 01:36:47 1982 raeh My thanks to Jim Johnson for the comments on the 'rise time/sampling frequency' issue. I can flame for quite a while about people who think they can hear 50kHz (or even 100kHz), but I'll refrain. (I often wonder if all the AM radio signals pulsing through their ears drive them crazy.) I want to emphatically second the point that any analog recording stage in the process totally destroys the digital advantage (except its archival quality, more on this later). The Fleetwood Mac album "Tusk" (pre-released in platinum, as explained in net.records) was recorded analog (so they could play their 32-track mixdown games), then transferred to a digital form for editting and (I think) mastering. ON THE RECORD you could hear the tape hiss from the single analog stage. GROSS!!! Why then, you say, did they do the digital stage at all? The way I heard the story is that the analog MASTER tapes for "Rumours" (these are the originals, no way to recreate them) suffered during the process of producing the 10 million copies they sold that the high end was severely depressed in the later pressings! They wanted the 'never changes no matter how many times you play it or copy it' quality of the digital recording medium for this reason. To me, this is the overweening reason to go digital, even if there were no other differences. A copy of a digital recording is EXACTLY the same as the original, no added noise or distortion. Tom Stockham (a pioneer in digital recording technology) often puts it this way: "Digital recording is to analog recording as books are to oral tradition." Too much, I'll stop now. =Spencer Thomas