i knew i was avoiding this thread for a reason-
a physics teacher i will never forget explained analog and digital to me as a ramp (analog) versus stairs (digital). So the stairs have gotten smaller but they still leave out the parts of the ramp in between the stair corners. digital recording has not become so close to a ramp that you can not hear the spaces yet. the best digital cameras are still not up to 35mm film, resolutionwise there are still parts of the ramp missing.
most of the cds extended range is on the high end. this gives you a lot of tinny sounding early recordings with engineers playing with their new high end. cd engineering has come a long way, and digital technology has improved. but the best digital recoding will always be leaving out some information that analog wouldnt leave out. it wont degrade- but then again i have 40 year old records that i take care of that sound a lot better than a four year old cd that i thought i took care of that skips. If CDs were durable then that would be an improvement, but they are so fragile. I use minidiscs for portable digital versions of my records, as well as archiving, because these are a durable digital format, not a disposable medium that prepares us for our inevitably digital future.
As for surround, I have a quadraphonic reciever and cartridge and they were doing some pretty amazing stuff with surrond on records. (night on bald mountain by fire ballet is crazy.) My quad speaker set up is also fine for movies. so long as there is sound in front of you and behind you most people feel immersed. and i would rather have "ghetto-surround" and not lose anything from the music, than digital representations of music and a more realistic surround sound experience. as for your CD record comparisons, DD, i dont know which ones you were comparing, but two that i know you havent (because the records are so much better than the CDs you wouldnt be able to pretend the CD is better) are Atomic Rooster's greatest hits on vinyl (assortment) and the greatest hits cd that came out in the nineties. this is the best expample and the one i sue to convince people who come over my house and laugh at me for listening to records still. The other is almost any motown cd, versus the record original. but this is because the original master tapes were lost.
What really makes me mad is that before the switch to DVD, analog tapes went down in quality- even professional grade tapes became lighter and less impressive. I found a copy of watership down on VHS last year at a goodwill. it was from the early period of VHS. it weighed about 10 lbs and looked better than a lot of DVDs i have seen. My point is that in order to make DVDs (disposable video discs) seem much more capable than VHS, they had to degrade the analog technology. They still use half inch tape at discovery channel and i bet you never noticed.
anolog will be the only way for true reproduction of sound, and the closest for reproduction of vision, until digital technology gets so advanced that the ones and zeros are so close to each other it sounds like or looks like its analog counterpart. and then we will have something, but why wait until then to sell the technology to an indiscriminating public.
sorry,
-KK
