Digital Drive: Analog -> Digital -> Analog...Whats the point? by EdAInWestOC

Let me start this by first saying that I have been a programmer for 24 yrs (6 yrs in computer hardware prior to that). I have great respect for the digital medium and love the convienience it can bring, but we are approaching a problem.

The average consumer cares jack squat about what is covered here. A redbook CD sounds great to them. The comparatively limited demand for better sound and the need for more profits has forced alternatives that noone seems to agree on. The quest for more accurate reproduction has spawned CD, SACD, DVD-A, an assortment of recording techniques and sampling rates.

It seems to me we have reached an impass. If we want the recorded sound to be absolutely faithful then logic would dictate the highest possible sampling rate/bit length. The storage requirements are approaching and surpassing what a pure analog recording would require.

Have we lost our way? We are encoding a highly complex waveform, storing it on a digital medium and then attempting to decode it without any losses. Dam near impossible. Something will be lost. Something will be incorrrectly reassembled. From a purist point of view this does'nt make any sense.

Is the KISS principal better suited for this purpose? Do we need a new analog recording medium that is capable of the dynamic headroom and S/N ratio of the best of our digital players? We have spent 20+ yrs developing the current formats. What would the same effort resulted in if we scaled back our grand scheme and went back to analog?

Analog is, after all, the target of all of these exercises.

Perhaps one day they will get it. A perfect encoding/decoding scheme. I somehow doubt it. Even if they do achieve the perfect solution, simpler will always be better. Record the best you can and make copies of that recording for distribution...period.

Copies of the original are never as good as the original, but the more you mess with it...but thats enough about that.