welcome to the digital world
Is it truly green to digitize all my audio tapes/VCRs? Sure, it would be an excellent backup option, but magnetic memory only lasts so long; digital is only temporary at best. Re-recording to analog is quite out of the question - it would take too long, and there would be twice as many audio tapes as before. Besides, who uses a cassette tape player anymore?
Unfortunately, the obsolescence of the cassette tape requires that we either convert (to digital) or stay stuck with a cassette tape player. Who among the consumerists of America would ever wish to keep a tape player? Aside from audiophiles? It's not streamlined (thanks Apple) - it's large and clunky. And to think, only seven years ago it was top of the line!
The way someone once explained to me the difference between analog and digital was this. Digital audio uses sampling, which encodes sound into binary (101010010101010010000010101010100001). As a result, the quality of that audio is directly proportional to its bitrate. (120kbps, 192kbps, 240kbps, et cetera). It means that there's a finite limit to the audio. It's similar to a computer drawing a circle. It can get pretty close, but in the end it's still using pixels (which are square in nature) and therefore a "digital circle" is nothing more than an extremely complex polygon that looks a LOT like a circle, but isn't. Because circles are round. And pixels are not. Analog audio (that is, LPs and cassette tapes), however, doesn't have that problem. In a sense, it is infinite in the amount of information it can capture - it's not limited to a certain bitrate (and yes, though the bitrate gets higher, it can never get to infinity).
So, is digital the best way to go?
I feel like the answer is the same as that of Social Security.
Unfortunately, the obsolescence of the cassette tape requires that we either convert (to digital) or stay stuck with a cassette tape player. Who among the consumerists of America would ever wish to keep a tape player? Aside from audiophiles? It's not streamlined (thanks Apple) - it's large and clunky. And to think, only seven years ago it was top of the line!
The way someone once explained to me the difference between analog and digital was this. Digital audio uses sampling, which encodes sound into binary (101010010101010010000010101010100001). As a result, the quality of that audio is directly proportional to its bitrate. (120kbps, 192kbps, 240kbps, et cetera). It means that there's a finite limit to the audio. It's similar to a computer drawing a circle. It can get pretty close, but in the end it's still using pixels (which are square in nature) and therefore a "digital circle" is nothing more than an extremely complex polygon that looks a LOT like a circle, but isn't. Because circles are round. And pixels are not. Analog audio (that is, LPs and cassette tapes), however, doesn't have that problem. In a sense, it is infinite in the amount of information it can capture - it's not limited to a certain bitrate (and yes, though the bitrate gets higher, it can never get to infinity).
So, is digital the best way to go?
I feel like the answer is the same as that of Social Security.
posted by Nathan at
6:33 AM
1 Comments
