Audio Gadgets Never As Good As Analog Audio???

Not to get too personal or anything, but I remember thinking that my very first mp3 player, my Diamond Rio, represented the future of audio technology. My belief was that while the tech in the Rio wasn't not the end-all and be-all, mp3 audio technology would improve and become fairly close to perfect. Less than ten years later, we all listen to lossless digital audio, right? Well, Eliot Van Buskirk, over at Wired.com, says that digital audio will never and can never sound as good as old fashioned analog.

The deuce, you say, Eliot!

The point of his piece on Wired is that vinyl is slowly hammering the nails into the coffin of the compact disc. One of the reasons he says is the very thing we were told CDs were good for: sound quality. Eliot says:

Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.

Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary.

"The digital world will never get there," said Chris Ashworth, owner of United Record Pressing, the country's largest record pressing plant.

As a result, Eliot says, vinyl is making a comeback.

Well, this is one tech blogger who won't be trading in his iPod for a turntable any time soon--not until they invent oversampling technology for record players.

Of course, that would defeat the purpose of going analog in the first place... SIGH.

..OH, WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!!

Wired