View Full Version : Wall St. Journal: Why Analog is Often Better Than Digital
imokruok
02-26-2011, 07:37
I read a nice article in the Wall St. Journal this morning by a famous political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, who laments the loss of quality in society's analog-to-digital transition. (Photos and music specifically.) However, he ends noting that he has found some satisfying digital options.
Visual and audio reproduction have undergone massive changes as their underlying technologies shifted from analog to digital over the past two decades. It's clear that it is far more convenient to snap photos with a digital point-and-shoot or listen to music on an iPod. But whether the quality of images or music has improved is, however, a highly debatable proposition, one that is contested by legions of enthusiasts who have continued to cling to older technologies not out of Luddite resistance to change, but because they believe the shift to 1's and 0's is actually making things worse.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160300649048270.html#i xzz1F5FUVDYv
Pickett Wilson
02-26-2011, 07:47
I was a "Hi-Fi" nut when I was younger. But my 60 year old ears, nor my 60 year old eyes, can hear or see in Hi-Fi anymore. Digital photos and music are just fine for me. :)
Steve M.
02-26-2011, 08:00
Film is better. Vinyl is better than CD's. Film is better (MUCH better) than digital when making movies. It was true 10 years ago, it's still true today. But for convenience, digital is better.
I read a nice article in the Wall St. Journal this morning by a famous political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, who laments the loss of quality in society's analog-to-digital transition. (Photos and music specifically.) However, he ends noting that he has found some satisfying digital options.
Interesting, thanks!
One can't help noticing, however, that he makes the typical mistake of comparing yesterday's high-end product to today's low-end product (in his case, for example, >$10,000 turntables to mass-market CD players and iPods). This skews the comparison somewhat.
MCTuomey
02-26-2011, 08:29
It's nostalgia, an ache-tinged glance in a rearview mirror, however well authored. Choose film or digital. Vinyl or CD. Starbucks or homebrew. Do enjoy without pain. Life is so short.
Personal note re musical appreciation: why not get out of the rut of recorded music altogether - glue your ear to live performances for awhile, as we've done for the millenia prior to vinyl and digi ...
arunrajmohan
02-26-2011, 08:37
"Where are you going to buy new batteries and the media to store your photos in 2061?"
Like it.
-A
SolaresLarrave
02-26-2011, 08:43
Convenience is not necessarily a sign of progress. But then, we're talking about technologies that are mere accesories to life.
I don't know... I do prefer film, but I like listening to CDs in my car.
Film may be better, but convenience is winning out. The other day the WSJ had an interview with Roger Deakins who is nominated for Best Cinematography for True Grit. He said that he loves film and that the quality of film is better than digital, but that it is doubtful that any future projects that he works on will be shot on film. The cost savings and convenience of digital, in his opinion, will carry the day. IMHO, this is really bad news for film lovers, as all the money spent on improving film quality was probably driven more by the movie industry than by the consumer product industry.
"Where are you going to buy new batteries and the media to store your photos in 2061?"
Like it.
-A
In the cemetery. Where my ears and eyes are of no use.
Tim Gray
02-26-2011, 08:55
I do think the state of audio appreciation has gone down. I have no problems with MP3s or even CDs (it's mostly what I listen to), but I do think its true that most younger people consume their music through crappy ear buds. At best, their best audio system is in a car. Which is admittedly better than what it was 15-20 years ago, but still. Even an MP3 can sound great on a real pair of speakers.
The biggest problem with audio today is that the recordings suck. By this I mean mostly digital manipulation such as extreme levels of compression. It is sort of like HDR for audio -- provides a quick visual punch, seems to sell well among the riffraff, but it actually looks like total puke.
Other than that, digital sounds fantastic today if you spend some money on it. Of course, those old LPs also sound fantastic, but once again if you spend (even more) money on it. Took twenty five years to get here though. Claims that LPs sound better than CDs were valid in 1990, still valid but not so much in 2000, and not really relevant in 2011.
Likewise, I think most claims that film is "better" than digital, even 8x10, are no longer valid. Different, yes. Preferable to some people? Undoubtedly. However, a lot of 4x5 and 8x10 shooters have gone to digital MF rigs in recent years.
The comments above that Hollywood is sliding toward digital are interesting. Hollywood budgets are so big, you wouldn't think that film costs would move the needle much. Just let directors shoot what they like. Of course, we are probably approaching to the point now that younger directors, who started off on low-budget digital projects, don't actually have any experience with film. If Hollywood abandons film completely, that could have some real consequences for what remains of the film industry.
I've found this interesting, with regards to audio:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/160791/ipod_generation_prefers_mp3_fidelity_study_says.ht ml
Bike Tourist
02-26-2011, 10:02
To be philosophical, reality is digital. Particle physics, quantum mechanics, even multiple universes — existence is all 1s and 0s. Enjoy your analog film, but know that it ultimately reduces to digital.
KoNickon
02-26-2011, 10:05
"The comments above that Hollywood is sliding toward digital are interesting. Hollywood budgets are so big, you wouldn't think that film costs would move the needle much. Just let directors shoot what they like. Of course, we are probably approaching to the point now that younger directors, who started off on low-budget digital projects, don't actually have any experience with film. If Hollywood abandons film completely, that could have some real consequences for what remains of the film industry."
I think this is dead on. How much of a percentage of the cost of the making of a movie can film possibly be? But I'm sure the convenience of digital wins out -- and the directors/DPs who grew up with digital find it easier to use those same workflows rather than learning the characteristics of different film stocks. Too bad. Someone needs to sit them down and show them "Lawrence of Arabia."
Actually, an advantage of digital may not be the cost of film so much as the convenience. I bet it is nice to be able to look at what you shoot immediately, rather than developing and digitizing film at the end of the day. When you're spending multiple $100K-per-day on a crew, actors, and sets, I can imagine that it wouldn't go so well for some old-fashioned directors if their shooting times drag out for extra days and weeks due to film issues.
The second tipping point is likely to be the money people. Producers and studio execs. When the generation of "yeah, I love film too" guys passes on, to be replaced by "why are we wasting time with this ancient nonsense and the people who cling to it," people, directors will have to drop film for career reasons. If you tried to show a money person the difference between film and digital in a test case, they probably couldn't tell the difference. They are money people, not artistic people. If the jokes are funny, the explosions are big, and the girl's tits attention-grabbing, it is the same to them.
The Standard Deviant
02-26-2011, 11:09
I think we'll see more films being shot on black and white stock, as digital colour takes over the mainstream. In Hollywood and independent productions.
misc. quotes from Niel Young:
Neil Young on digital:
"The mind is fooled, but the heart is sad."
"Digital is a Huge Rip-Off" by Neil Young
(from Guitar Player, May '92, p.14)
Digital, CDs - I hate them. Digital is a disaster. This is the darkest age of musical sound. ... Digital is a huge rip-off. It's completely premature and completely wrong. It's a farce.
Digital has to be taken three or four levels higher. Sampling rates have to quadruple - at least - to get to where analog was. And digital music has a very limited therapeutic effect, if any, whereas real music has an incredible effect for the calming of nerves. Any therapeutic application of sound HAS to be analog, or it won't get results. You can search around, but the sound isn't there.
Let me use a window as an illustration. When you look thru the glass, imagine that's sound out there. And then look out thru the screen. See all the little squares in the screen? If you get right up on them, all different kinds of colors come thru the screen holes. Well, that has to be averaged out to only one color per hole for digital. That's all you get, the dominant one.
They've got sampling enough now so that when you 1st start listening, you say, "Hey, that's music." But your brain and your heart are *starved* for a challenge. There's no challenge, there's no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're hearing a simulated music. Your brain is capable of taking on an incredible amount of information....
That's why these records have got to be remastered from the *analog* originals every time there's an improvement..... technology is just not there for that kind of sampling rate. It's a real shame, because music is not being captured. It's an insult to the brain & heart & feelings to have to listen to this and think it's music.
I've been making records for 26 years, working in the studio... and I'm telling you: From the early '80s up till now and probably for another 10 to 15 years is the darkest time for recorded music ever. We'll come out the other end and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go, "Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what it really sounded like? They were so carried away that they didn't really record it. They just made digital records of it." That's what people will say - MARK MY WORDS.
Roger Hicks
02-26-2011, 12:36
Although I care passionately about photography, and about the written or spoken word, recorded music just ain't that important to me. Sure, I can hear differences as the kit gets more expensive, but beyond a certain (quite low) level, I just don't care very much. Most people feel the same about photography, i.e. not enough to make the extra efford or pay the extra money. That's the important bit, as applied to photography: most people don't care about most things.
Cheers,
R.
River Dog
02-26-2011, 12:39
Personal note re musical appreciation: why not get out of the rut of recorded music altogether - glue your ear to live performances for awhile, as we've done for the millenia prior to vinyl and digi ...
Bravo! Likewise one could just look at stuff rather than take photos of it - sorry, couldn't resist :-)
The discovery of these very intact plates from the 1914-1918 conflict has historians abuzz here. Many of these young men would have simply gone missing in action. Of course I post this and think would we have them if the war had been shot digitaly?
Sorry I can't upload link but here it is:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/rescued-from-ruin-a-rare-glimpse-of-our-boys-at-war-and-at-play-20110226-1b9bf.html
Whoops- I think I have uploaded it.
chris00nj
02-26-2011, 19:06
Thomas Sowell, a popular author and columnist, is an avid photographer and laments the decline of film
The Passing of E-6 (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/08/31/the_passing_of_e-6_106945.html)
tom.w.bn
02-27-2011, 01:59
Vinyl is better than CD's.
There are enough hifi nuts paying thousands of EUR for hifi equipment who tell the opposite story. So another useless discussion about taste.
decades ago (i was there) we turned a fork in the road, and there is no going back at this point.
i lamented the loss of analog computers (look it up on google or whatever) and the switch to the convenience of digital (not to be denied - extremely convenient and productive). . . mostly because analog keeps you close to the physics of stuff and digital reinterprets the physical world for you and then decodes it in a simulation of what the real (analog world ) was in the first place.
i guess that you had to be there to really understand what happened.
doesn't matter . . . there is no going back.
decades ago (i was there) we turned a fork in the road, and there is no going back at this point.
i lamented the loss of analog computers (look it up on google or whatever) and the switch to the convenience of digital (not to be denied - extremely convenient and productive). . . mostly because analog keeps you close to the physics of stuff and digital reinterprets the physical world for you and then decodes it in a simulation of what the real (analog world ) was in the first place.
Have you ever looked at a B&W negative and asked yourself where all the grayscales are? In the sense that you mean it, analog photography hasn't really existed since the 19th century. A negative is the equivalent of a CD recording.
And as far as physics goes, at some point being analog actually takes you away from reality.
Brian Sweeney
03-04-2011, 10:02
I prefer Digital Computers over Analog Computers.
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=171&pictureid=2548
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=171&pictureid=2558
As you can see, the number of grey levels on an analog computer is quantized.
Digital Computers are easier to Program.
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=190&pictureid=1795
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=190&pictureid=1810
we are probably approaching to the point now that younger directors, who started off on low-budget digital projects, don't actually have any experience with film. If Hollywood abandons film completely, that could have some real consequences for what remains of the film industry.
That is exactly what's happening. Lower expectations = lower skills. As one commenter to the Fukuyama article in the WSJ, Scott Smith, put it:
I witness the same lack of care and attention on film sets, where the attitude is "just keep rolling, we can always do it over again". While this may provide a certain amount of freedom for the actors, it also engenders the attitude of "why try my hardest, we can always do it over", instead of "I better do my best, because we may not have another chance".
The old digital machine gun.
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01000010 01110010 01101001 01100001 01101110 00001101 00001010
yeh . . . you're right, digital is better.
.................................................. ......................................
now let me add my non-sarcastic commentary . . .
Digital computers are easier to program because that's we have been evolving for the last 40 years ! We abandoned analog technology (in computers) a lifetime ago because digital was more generic. A person doesn't need to understand the physics of a problem in order to run a canned, generic digital program. But she/he has to understand the physics to assemble an analog model. Digital made engineering monkey-proof!
Sim to comparing manual film cameras with "select-a-dial" digital cameras. Pretty much anybody now can record a nice picture having not the slightest idea of what they did photographically.
Like I said . . . you can't go home again . . the fork in the road is way way back there.
Brian Sweeney
03-04-2011, 19:07
01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01000010 01110010 01101001 01100001 01101110 00001101 00001010
yeh . . . you're right, digital is better.
48 65 6C 6C 6F 20 42 72 69 61 6E 0D 0A
Hello Brian <cr><lf>
> Digital computers are easier to program because that's we have been evolving for the last 40 years !
I prefer coding in RISC assembly language. I forgot to evolve.
I miss the FORK instruction on the old Supercomputers, where you had to manually schedule processing through the parallel pipelines. Spin off two FORKs in the assembly language, and then use a JOIN instruction to sync up the results.
yes, after reading your last reply, I realized that I should have said "Digital computers are easier to use." (Like modern digital cameras with "scene modes".) Writing the computer code is, and always has been, not easy work. The same must be true for the folks who code the chips in our cameras . . . they are the guys doing all the thinking for us !
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=190&pictureid=1795
Am I mistaken, or is that Grace Hopper's Manual of Operations for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator?
If so, I envy you for having that around. The book is the pride of any engineer's library.
Brian Sweeney
03-05-2011, 06:57
That is Grace Hopper's AUTOGRAPHED Manual of Operations for the IBM Mark I.
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=190&pictureid=1797
http://www.ziforums.com/picture.php?albumid=190&pictureid=1794
Looking at the serial number, looks like the 16th copy of an edition of 258. When I presented the book to then Captain Hopper for her autograph, she asked "Where the hell did you get his."
I need to get this book appraised.
Brian Sweeney
03-05-2011, 07:40
As far as the Analog Computer discussion- one of the optical engineers that worked for me developed the optics for the "Optical Broadband Correlator", designed and built at NRL. Essentially it was an optical computer that attached to a VAX, and was used for performing Fourier Transforms optically. This was over 20 years ago. The system used fast D/A's to get data in, and A/D's to get it back out. Probably one of the more recent developments of an analog computer tied to a digital computer. In the end- parallel digital computers were faster, the bottleneck for the optical computer being the conversions.
tom.w.bn
03-07-2011, 02:54
yes, after reading your last reply, I realized that I should have said "Digital computers are easier to use." (Like modern digital cameras with "scene modes".) Writing the computer code is, and always has been, not easy work. The same must be true for the folks who code the chips in our cameras . . . they are the guys doing all the thinking for us !
Many things are easier to program too nowadays. Look at the programming of Apps for iPhone etc. Sometimes it's really good to abstract away all the technical stuff from the programmers.
Morca007
03-07-2011, 11:53
When you value the medium over the content it may be time to examine just what it is you are really interested in.
Many things are easier to program too nowadays. Look at the programming of Apps for iPhone etc. Sometimes it's really good to abstract away all the technical stuff from the programmers.
The flip side of that coin is the processing power of a modern Mac or PC is orders of magnitude higher than that of two decades ago, but it takes just as long to display a print preview. And yet, there isn't really much more that needs to take place. It's just done sloppier and with more needless overhead.
You want a faster computer, a bigger hard drive. But at the end of the day, tasks take just as long and drives are just as full, everything is just less efficient.
An iPhone is a glorified Palm Pilot 1000. Neither can really multi-task. Not because of hardware but because of the software.
Chris101
04-17-2011, 21:43
When you value the medium over the content it may be time to examine just what it is you are really interested in.
Sometimes, the medium is the content. Since 1964 anyway.
...
An iPhone is a glorified Palm Pilot 1000. Neither can really multi-task. Not because of hardware but because of the software.
I don't know about you but MY palm pilot couldn't play music nor view video, nor run 3d games or make phone calls :)
tom.w.bn
04-18-2011, 01:21
The flip side of that coin is the processing power of a modern Mac or PC is orders of magnitude higher than that of two decades ago, but it takes just as long to display a print preview. And yet, there isn't really much more that needs to take place. It's just done sloppier and with more needless overhead.
You want a faster computer, a bigger hard drive. But at the end of the day, tasks take just as long and drives are just as full, everything is just less efficient.
You forget that most people want more and more features in software. So the software grows in it's complexity and it's simply not economically feasible to optimize everything for speed. And why should it be faster? As a software producer you know exactly that most people buy a new pc every 2-4 years, so users solve the problem of the software with hardware. When I have a fixed timeframe and can choose between offering new features for my software or optimize the software for users with old equipment, I know in which direction to go.
>>And yet, there isn't really much more that needs to take place.
>>It's just done sloppier and with more needless overhead.
Think about this again seriously.
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