A Guide to Analog VS. Digital Audio Listening

The long raging debate of digital vs analog audio in sound production and listening is one that will continue on. But like many subjects that are debated, the information provided in this debate is often full of fallacies and other misinformation. This guide will fill you in on the facts and throw those myths out of the window.

First, vinyl does not provide the highest sound quality. Is vinyl cool? Absolutely. Does it score you retro points? Of course. Is it the best sounding audio possible? No. Vinyl is nothing more than listening to the source material with boosted low mids and soft static. If you prefer to listening to music like this, that's fine. However, audio quality is based upon how closely it reproduces the original source material, not how good it actually sounds. The best audio quality you'll get is listening to the master tracks in a treated room with flat frequency response monitors. Since only a couple people will ever be able to do that, the best you'll be able to do is CD.

People often rage about how much better music sounds on vinyl, in spite of the above facts. What many don't realize, however, is that they are actually listening to digital audio on an analog medium. This is because of one cold, hard fact in audio: You cannot reproduce a sound that is not there. I'll give you an example. Engineer One takes a piece of audio and slices off both the bass and the treble. He sends it to Engineer Two. Engineer Two boosts both the bass and the treble on that slice of audio, but it doesn't sound anything like the original. Why? Because since bass and treble frequencies were totally cut out from the master, audio data was completely lost. All Engineer Two can do at that point is boost the absent bass and treble frequencies, but he'll never recover the original audio data without the original slice of audio. So, how does this factor into what we were discussing?

All audio at one point, especially in these times, is put into digital format. At that point, all analog waveforms are put into digital waveforms. An analog waveform is defined by it's non-symmetry and random variables. All of this is lost the second it's converted into digital audio, which is symmetrical binary data. You cannot reproduce what's already there, thus listening to digital data on analog medium is merely listening to digital audio with the slight EQ alteration that analog provides.

Thanks for reading this guide, I hope the information is useful to you sometime in the future. Good luck!