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Analog vs Digital- Again
I was just watching "Wired Science" on PBS. They just did a "shoot-out"
between digital and analog sound. I'm not going to argue with the result, because they so screwed-up the way that they explained what they were doing to the TV audience as to make the entire thing worthless. First they introduced a recording engineer who's Chicago studio is all analog. He maintains that analog is better than digital (without defining WHAT he means by "digital"). Then they interviewed a recording engineer that thought that digital was better than analog (again without explaining WHAT kind of digital: 16/44.1, 24/96, DSD, MP3 whatever). Then they thoroughly confused the issue by interchangeably using the terms MP3 and digital recording- as if they were one and the same. Then they picked two other recording engineers and two musicians to listen to a cut from those same musicians' latest recording. Sometimes they were listening to analog, sometimes digital, and they held up paddles with the words "digital" and "analog" written on them, to show whenever they thought they heard a difference. The cut they played was contiguous with no breaks to indicate when or if the media had changed (how did they do THAT without editing the two together onto the same medium??!). In the end, the two musicians chose correctly 53% of the time, and the two recording engineers chose correctly 55% of the time. In other words, essentially, statistically, no better than blind chance. The conclusion that the TV show producers came to was that digital is indistinguishable from analog. This "test" basically just confuses the issue. They say that they were testing the widely held belief that analog sounds better than digital. But what they don't differentiate between is PCM digital CD vs MP3. The impression that I was left with is that they were saying that an analog master is statistically indistinguishable from an MP3 digital simply because they made no effort to differentiate between MP3 and RedBook PCM and never said what the listening "panel" was actually listening too, or the circumstances under which the "listening test" was conducted. "Wired Science"? Bogus science is more like it. |
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