Is there more information in Analog or Digital music?

Question

Is there more information in Analog or Digital music?

Answer 1

Analog has more information than digital.

Answer 2

Overall analog is still the king, but digital has come along way and has gotten much better. You have to of course start by comparing it at the studio level on down to what consumers actually are able to playback onto there systems.



Very few studios still use analog recording processes as its much easier to edit in the digital domain, for ease of recording, editing, and mastering digital is now the mainstream in the studios.



The big issue with digital is people have gotten away from cd's in favor of mp3 digital downloads which have significantly less quality of sound. For those that really care about sound quality is the high bit rate music downloads from sites like HD Tracks which can be downloaded to your computer with the right music software and a high quality digital to analog converter and get sample rates up to 196k 24 bit which comes much closer to the original master recording and analog. Still not analog in my opinion but the gap is closing.



You also have to look at new recording verse older recordings. Of course old recordings are analog, so they must be converted to digital to be transferred to CD, or low quality mp3's.



There is limitations with digital both in the recording process, and playback chain, and 98% of people never hear how good higher quality digital music can sound.



Analog captures all the harmonic overtones and nuances in the music I feel digital cannot.



The other side is the amount of information that can be pulled from a analog record. A good analog playback system is not cheap, and its almost endless how much information can be pulled from a record. For those looking at cheap analog playback systems your not getting even a glimpse of how good records can sound. In fact a if you compare a cheap analog system to a cheap digital system, digital is going to win. but as soon as you get to a certain level or price of music system analog becomes the clear winner.



Digital is getting close, some say better, I still say analog sounds more like real music, not a simulation of the original performance.



Kevin

40 years high end audio video specialist

Answer 3

It depends on what digital and what analog signal your talking about its kind of hard to explain but theoretically analog should be able to transmit more information than digital' but analog is limited also by the quality of the equipment involved both the skill on the recorder and the play back equipment, take a CD for example the frequency response is limited to 20 hz to 20 Khz while an analog recording may be able to go as low as 10hz and as high as 30 KHz how ever how many people have equipment that can play back signals as low as 10 hz and as high as 30 Khz ...there is more to it also that is easily explained in a small paragraph also the theories on both sides are vast and endless going on and on for pages and pages....also as digital becomes more refined and the abilities of digital become more and more refined due to finer more rqapid bit rates available it can exceed analog in a lot of areas at least theoretically it can....now what your actually getting and whats possable are also too different things...both in analog and digital....