Its pretty much official, the compact disc is dead. A young lady listening to music at my brother’s place asked him “who are you streaming this from?” The CD explanation just made things confusing. Oh, oh, Luddite alert.
Anyhow, to get with the program, I have decided to build a music server. I’m sidestepping the whole streaming scenario. Maybe i’m delusional but I believe high quality signals need to travel down wires. Don’t tell me about Sonos or Tidal, I’m not listening. So, it’s a computer music server for me and it hasn’t been much fun spending my free time ripping my entire CD library into a Mac Mini and figuring out the best way to make it work.
This whole process got me to thinking about analog versus digital and the holy grail of Resolution in audio and photography. In digital audio resolution is about bit rates and sampling depth. In digital photography its pixel size and number, and sensor size. I think the analog corollary in each case also has important implications in the recording or capture of music and images, and in the listening or viewing of the results. Analog and digital are so different. Recording through an analog preamp or mixing board an engineer can really push the levels. Slamming the VU meter into the red will produce a thicker more aggressive sound, without distortion. Recording to a digital deck or board the engineer must never let the signal go over or it will clip and produce a nasty sound. Same with photography, when shooting film the photographer can “push” the exposure if necessary. Shooting digital, if the exposure is too far to the left or to the right it will “clip” and the blacks and whites will be blocked.
My old hi-fi way of doing things was to pop a CD into a cheap Blu-ray player which acted as a CD transport. The digital out on the player then fed a good quality digital to analog converter. The new way is zeros and ones in a computer file feeding a s/pdif converter and then to the DA converter. After that of course we are in the analog domain, notwithstanding the time I overheard a salesperson at Future Shop up-selling “digital speakers” but then he also said that Harmon-Kardon watts were more powerful than Sony watts.
This resolution thing can be hard to get a handle on. I remember a series of articles an audiophile magazine ran a number of years ago. The idea was to visit famous musicians and check out their hi-fi systems. The series was a flop. Most musicians had crappy stereos. My favorite was the real estate maven of Bakersfield and a pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, Buck Owens. He used a cassette tape player feeding a tube guitar amp. Now, that’s low-res analog sound. Who's going to tell the artist how to properly play back his music? Not me. Actually, very few people have a revealing stereo. Les Paul used a radio transmitter so he could listen to his newfangled multi-track mixes on his car radio. That's how most people listened to music in the 50’s and even today using Spotify or some other streaming virtual radio feeding 3 inch speakers.
Today most people view photographs on LCD displays, so all that’s required is enough pixels to fill the screen. So do we need high resolution files? We do if we want to make prints from our digital files. Some people like to use film and make prints in the darkroom. Or scan the negative and make an inkjet print. Or use a digital file to make a digital negative and then hand make a platinum print. Some people like to play vinyl on a turntable, or play a digital music file through a single ended tube amp using NOS tubes made in 1943. Different horses for different courses as they say. The reason people like to do all these things is that it lets them really connect to the image or to the music, to respond to the art on a more intimate level.
So the compact disc is dead because digital has moved on to a higher plane. But Vinyl and turntables are still being made because of their analog sound. Digital cameras are transitioning to mirrorless full frame high megapixel sensors, but film is still available because of it’s analog look. It’s an analog/digital mashup and I think that is really great.