We take digital audio for granted. It's a fact of life. It's the way audio is done and has been done for decades. From this distance, it's possible to overlook some of the practical day-to-day benefits that digital audio brings with it.

You've probably seen the cartoon below before. It's funny because it's true but, beyond the temptation to mock audiophiles, there is something worth focusing on in this cartoon. I've said before in other articles how difficult it is to appreciate what analogue was like when it was a current technology. I grew up in a time when if you wanted to record something for your own consumption you used a compact cassette. Growing up I lived opposite some pretty serious Hi Fi early adopters and I heard my first CD in around 1982. Even then I was pretty blown away. The thing which impressed me was the silence between tracks. The noise inherent to tape and vinyl was an unconscious giveaway that some music was playing, even in the gaps. I remember being fooled into believing that a thunderstorm had suddenly started when my neighbour put on Jean Michel Jarre’s Equinoxe Part 5 as a trick - I was 11…

This example shows just how significant the medium was to the reproduction. Google tells me that Equinoxe was recorded in a makeshift studio on an MCI tape machine. It wasn't noise-free, but compared to the records and cassettes I was used to it might as well have been.

Analogue recordings presented on digital CDs were one thing but all-digital recordings were rare at this time. Early compact discs carried information on exactly how much of the recording process was digital. Legacy analogue recordings carried the three letters AAD, meaning that only the last stage, the playback medium, was digital. DDD was rare and usually only found on classical recordings.

All-Digital Recording

The first commercially available digital recording device was 1975’s Soundstream system. While crude by today's standards, the thing which has to be remembered when looking at such systems from this distance, is that while digital brought with it a whole slew of new problems, at a stroke it solved some really intractable issues with analogue. These issues included noise, wow and flutter and the specific issues around frequency response which were inherent to magnetic tape. Noise was simply a fact of life in the pre-digital era. It still is a fact of life today, but the extent to which it's an issue differs by orders of magnitude. The same can be said about wow, and flutter. These issues decreased with the quality and setup of the tape machine, as did noise, but they were always there and represented a sonic fingerprint of the medium, particularly with compact cassette. But with these intractable analogue issues effectively solved by digital recording there were of course a whole new set of issues and limitations that came with digital recording: Quantisation errors, jitter and aliasing among them.

Analogue Is Better Than Digital - Right?

If you google ‘analogue versus digital’ or anything similar, you may well be struck by how somebody unfamiliar with the two mediums might quickly conclude that analogue is better than digital. It is almost stated as fact in many search results and it's interesting to consider how it is that this assumed truth is so well established online. Early iterations of digital audio were restricted by the technology available at the time, and like any technology, it improves and is refined over time. The conclusions drawn early on in the digital audio story still persist today, although the issues which caused them are largely resolved. Possibly part of the reason why digital is still misrepresented in some areas, is because the detail quickly gets rather difficult and technical compared to analogue, which, whilst very difficult to to do well, is conceptually rather simpler to understand.

Some well-known misrepresentations of digital persist such as the staircase of samples diagram, but each of the issues mentioned above have been addressed by some very clever fixes. Modern digital is unbelievably good.

Quantisation errors are easy to understand. The solution to quantisation errors is dither, which is not well understood. Jitter is a source of distortion, but the more accurate the sample clock the less jitter there is and a modern sample clock is very accurate indeed. Aliasing is a source of significant unpleasant distortion and the limitations of digital systems in the early days didn't address this as well as might have been expected. But oversampling converters push these aliasing artefacts out of the audio band and while creating effective anti-aliasing filters may have been a challenge in the late 70s, the capabilities of modern digital systems mean that filters can be implemented which are far more benign in nature.

Another source of poor performance from early digital systems is the fact that with such a large paradigm shift in technology, it was always going to take time for the engineers using it to catch up and adapt to the new systems. For example, the long learned necessity to work in a relatively narrow sweet spot between tape noise and clipping in analogue systems is still pervasive today, though we've been working with systems with linear performance and virtually unlimited dynamic range for decades. Misunderstandings about how digital systems work in practice still linger on. For example the role of a reconstruction filter - a component of a DAC which converts a digital stream back into an analogue signal. Or the difference between digital full-scale and true peak has long been a source of distortion and many people in the past have heard poor results and blamed digital for sounding harsh when actually it was a user error.

Check out this old, but unmissable, explainer from Monty Montgomery to see how deep the misunderstandings about digital run.

Whether or not digital or analogue sounds better isn't really what inspired this article. The to and fro of that particular debate feels more like a question of faith than a factual argument most of the time. The two are just different. So instead I’m going to offer five reasons why digital is better for somebody working with audio rather than consuming it. Whether that audio is consumed as a half speed cut to vinyl or through AirPods from YouTube is beyond the scope of these reasons. What I'm talking about here is how does digital help us do our jobs?

Five Practical Reasons Digital Is Better For A Pro

Duplication Without Degradation

Being able to make an identical copy as many times as you want. We take this completely for granted today, but those of us with long enough memories will remember that it used to be just a fact of life that your original recording was the best version which would ever exist. A copy of that recording was slightly compromised. A copy of that copy was more compromised, et cetera ad infinitum. How many generations old your recording was was important. Of course with limited tape tracks and track bouncing even what was on the master tape wasn't necessarily first, or even second, generation and to squeeze extra elements onto a recording it was common practice to add instruments live at the mixdown stage. Many home studio owners coming back to old four or eight track recordings will recognise that realisation that an important element of the familiar mixed version of a project wasn't on the multi track at all, it was added at mixdown!

The status of an analogue master tape, that precious first generation version, might seem romantic to somebody experimenting with tape today. But back in the days when there was no alternative it was more a reminder of the inevitable series of compromises that were going to follow. Digital made all of that go away, at least until that lovingly prepared mix hits aggressive lossy compression codecs - Ah well, so close!

Signal Splitting

It doesn't seem very long ago to me that I remember having to deal with the difficulty and expense of splitting signals to feed multiple devices simultaneously. A simple Y split did an adequate job much of the time. These simple methods were the cheapest, but also the most fragile, but the alternative was expensive transformer-balanced splitters which isolated systems from each other. Live recording of concerts is where these issues presented themselves to me most frequently, and doing it properly was expensive. But doing it on the cheap was a gamble. A two-way split presented headaches, a three-way split was more expensive and more difficult and doing it properly frequently gave way to compromised workarounds. Submixing and using every available spare output on an analogue mixer, using any spare auxiliaries, risky half-plugging of insert points and begging and borrowing extra gear to make it all happen. There is a reason that an industry which could support the building and maintenance of mobile studios in trucks existed in those days in a way that it doesn't really today.

Once signals are digital, things get a lot easier. Add an audio over IP element and suddenly things get very simple indeed. These kinds of jobs are ones which suit robust, easily duplicated digital audio in a way which simply isn't the case for fragile analogue.

Faster Than Realtime Copies

This might sound trivial, but remember that in the early days of digital audio workstation? The fact that you didn't have to wait for the tape to rewind was listed prominently in the marketing materials as a feature. We forget just how natural it seemed in the pre-digital days that if you wanted to make a copy of a three minute pop song, it would take three minutes! Of course, commercial duplication happened faster than real time but in the studio today we are only reminded of the, previously normal, real-time nature of bouncing only by choice, though there are definitely workflow benefits to actually listening to your mix while printing it. So many of us are working exclusively in the box that it's amusing to me that one of the reasons I don't run what little hardware I still have as hardware inserts is because it would impose real-time bounces on me. How quickly we forget.

Easy Edits

I only recorded to analogue tape for about five years until first a hardware hard disk recorder, and then a DAW replaced my previously analogue recording experience. I can safely say that I made more edits in the first month of digital recording than I had in the previous five years on tape. Editing tape takes skill but it's also permanent. Because of this, you don't edit tape speculatively, the threshold for making an edit in the first place is so much higher than it is when you can try it see how it goes and easily back out of a wrong decision. Pro Tools has a Destructive Record mode. I'd be interested to see how many people choose to use that…

All The Stuff Plug-ins Can Do

Obviously this is a big one, but I had to be on the list. Once audio is digital it opens up so many options which just don't exist in the analogue domain. It's true that really exclusive high-end analogue equipment is glamorous and has a star quality to audio engineers which our plug-ins, however fiendishly clever, just won't ever have. But when it comes down to what you can actually do we really have to acknowledge the extraordinary things that can be achieved in software. Software which sometimes seems to ignore all of the rules which analogue engineers grew up with. We admire stories of meticulous detailed work, carried out at the bleeding edge of what was possible in the studios of years ago. People nudging drum hits with an AMS delay line or fixing pitch errors using the pitch wheel of a rackmount sampler (which ironically are both digital devices) but I still remember seeing the first demonstration of Melodyne DNA and having my head spin. We probably all have our own examples of impossible audio transformations achieved by plug-ins in our DAWs, ultimately only made possible because of digital audio. But the real kicker for the diehard analogue enthusiast is that not only can a DAW perform such audio pyrotechnics, but it can also do an extraordinarily good job of reproducing everything that our beloved analogue technology, from tape machine to console to outboard gear can do as well. That's quite a trick when you think about it.

Are You Pre-Digital Or A Digital Native?

Are you of a suitable vintage to remember the pre-digital days or are you a digital native who has experimented with actual rather than virtual analogue gear? Share your thoughts and experiences about those limitations of analogue. It's not an either/or choice between analogue and digital. How do you mix the two domains in your work?