Reality > Analog > Samples

Last week I went to see Massive Attack live at The Warfield in San Francisco. I bought the pi soundtrack in high school and would listen to Angel by Massive Attack over and over until I picked up Mezzanine and became a huge fan.

This was the last of my short list of bands that I really wanted to see live and hadn't.

They delivered the music. It was an amazing show.

Shortly before the concert, my Heligoland record (Massive Attack's latest album) arrived from Amazon.

I had purchased their EP a while back in mp3 format, but there are certain bands and albums that I get excited about and prefer to own on vinyl.

I read an interesting article about vinyl sales being the final killing blow to CD purchases (old and not exactly prophetic, but still interesting).

In short, it points out that CD's are no longer the more portable medium. Those of us that still do purchase music, would prefer to download it to our mp3 players, or buy the album on vinyl (which always comes with a download code for the digital format these days) and enjoy the artwork and physical ownership.

Brother-in-law helping me move my vinyl collection last month: "You know they have these things called mp3's now. They are weightless."

Me: "..."

There are also those that argue vinyl sounds better than other audio formats, CD and mp3 included. I generally consider these people elitist middle-aged audiophiles that spend more time looking at audio on an oscilloscope than they do listening to it with their Blondie-concert-damaged ears. Some 47-year-old dudes chasing the way their records sounded way back when they had a full range of hearing? Not very compelling.

However, their argument is sound...HAHA!

Whether it's a track on some wax or the organization of rust on some strips of plastic, vinyl and tape are called analog audio because they are just that, analogous to reality.

So a digital delivery of audio, as a collection of discrete samples, can never attain the same fidelity of vinyl.

As a simplified example, imagine this was the signal of some audio over 4 minutes:

Now let's say you use a sample rate of once per minute (extremely low to illustrate the point, CD quality audio has a sample rate of 44,100 times per second), the delivery now looks something like this:

At this sampling rate, it becomes a square (instead of sine-ish) wave, and you lose quality.

Increasing the sampling rate will smooth out the square wave and more closely approximate the actual sounds, but we cannot have an infinite sample rate, so the analog audio will always be a more accurate representation of the sound.

Don't buy it?

Alright, try this...

I like the tactile and active process of listening to vinyl.

Sitting down with a glass of bourbon, getting up to flip the record over every 4 or so songs, without a fancy digital player visualizer bouncing around, is active listening and I enjoy it.

Opening iTunes on shuffle and leaving the room, forgetting you have it on is passive.

I do both, but when I have the time, I drop the needle of the Audio Technica PL-120 (thanks Dad!).

Check out Massive Attack's performance of Angel

(apologies for the clipped digital audio - they don't make a Flip camera that prints to vinyl yet):