[Audio Empire]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:21:22 -0800, ScottW wrote
(in article ):

On Feb 14, 7:14=A0am, Audio Empire wrote:

That's been tried. Analog (ripples) recorders, even very high resolution
analog recorders (there was an analog optical recorder in the early eight=
ies)
suffer from problems that make digital better. For instance, an analog
recording is always going to suffer generational losses when copied (a co=
py
will always be at least 3 dB noisier and have increased distortion over t=
he
generation from which it is copied). Digital, can, OTOH, theoretically, b=
e
copied, serially, an infinite number of times with no generation loss. In
reality, of course, the added noise with each generation is THERE, it's j=
ust
that the noise is analog and the system is looking for ones and zeros.

No...it's not. A bit perfect recording of a digital recording is
relatively trivial.
There is no added analog noise with each generation of digital.
There is no cumulative analog noise passed from recording to another.

BUT,
eventually, it is conceivable that the background noise can get so high t=
hat
the digital intelligence cannot be read through the noise.

It may be conceivable but it simply isn't correct.

Of course, when
that happens, you don't really get an increase in noise in the digital
signal, in the digital recording, you get read errors and enough of those
will cause the file to not play at all, and that is the practical limit o=
f
serial copies of a digital file (although, that would indicate a very hig=
h
number of generations away from the oriiginal recording, and realisticall=
y
speaking, would never happen.

Nor does it happen in theory. The recording of digital music is just
copying bits.
There is nothing passed from a source to a recording except the bits.
There may be some "noise" in the system along the way but as long as
that noise doesn't change the value of a bit...it's irrelevant and
won't get passed along to the next stage. There is no cumulative
effect and it's very common to be able create bit identical
recreations of massive data files....digital music is no different.

So you're saying that there is no circumstance under which background noise
can get so high that it makes detection of the digital data difficult? Tell
that to people who deal in digital communications.