REACHING FOR THE BRASS RING
Great eras in technology do tend to overlap, and for our good.
But we don't like to think that way. We want things sharp and clear.
The horse yesterday, the gas buggy today. Trolley cars one evening, the bus the next morning. Analog, digital, is it any different? The new versus the old, as always, and the new is better, isn't it? Not necessarily; not on the instant, anyhow. It might even be worse, for a while.
How many of us really appreciate the shape of the digital future? I wonder. Our noses are still too close to the technology; we are still much too worried about whether it sounds better or, as some say, not as good. And everybody knows, unfortunately, that digital is new. New! Whereas that other word, analog, means old-fashioned.
You can't expect big-time publicity campaigns to tone down on that selling point, after all.
We could so easily point out--if we wanted to--that analog recording, like photography, is all-natural, a genuine facsimile of the information available "live." Whereas digital, like the moving picture, is a cut-up sampling of bits, static moments frozen into a code to deceive the ears and the eyes alike.
We can argue--we do argue--forever on such points, all on an either/or basis. Is digital audio "better," or is analog? It gets us nowhere! Even if we could add it all up for an overall judgment, we'd merely begin again in 10 minutes-things keep changing. What we have to do is look at the overlap.
What are the really useful differences, immediate and for the long future; what are the characteristics, the features, the exploitable aspects? Yes, there's a digital revolution.
There are always revolutions-that is, we are always talking about them. The Plate Tectonic Revolution (that one is strictly in our thinking). The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, maybe even the New Coke Revolution. Bang! Big explosion. Actually, even with an explosion there is plenty of overlap, every time. Revolutions, like volcanoes or earthquakes, take a long time to develop full pressure, and there are long periods of aftershock too. Opera, for instance, was not suddenly invented out of nothing in the year 1600, as we music students used to be told; nor did the Romantic movement begin with the clarinet solo in Weber's "Der Frei schotz" overture along about 1820. That's what I once heard. By golly, if we don't find a revolution at hand, we feel that we have to make one.
We seem to have a terrible distaste for the gradual and continuous change-with certain explosive high points-that is actual history. All we want is the Big Bang. BOOM! What was that? The Dawn of Digital, coming up like thunder.
Just to show you I'm still on the audio track, more or less, let me mention two items of recent audio news that fit into the pattern. On the one hand, London Records has been promoting an advanced digital system, ADRM ( London prefers four-letter trademarks, like ffrr), for the restoration, editing, and preservation of older analog recordings and their reissue on CD. There are already nearly 100 of these in the London catalog. Of course, London is not the only label doing digital restoration of its older tapes, much as ADRM publicity would like us to believe. But London's account of this system is very well presented and sums up the nature and advantages of digital recording as well as I've ever seen it done. It is easy to read between the lines; in London's view, the digital revolution is over and we must now settle into the digital age.
ADRM's publicity throws light where light should be thrown, on the two really important (and least publicized) digital advantages: Permanence and processing. Permanence, for a signal always ready and untarnished; processing, for safe and easy preparation. In the long run-in the long overlap these surely will be the vital digital elements, rather than mere sonic quality, which no doubt will change and improve as we move forward.
The digital message is permanent just because it is a code, which may be extracted from its carrier and copied with minimum or no loss, any number of times, through any number of generations. By the same token, the marvelous new subtleties of digital editing (however expensive at the moment) are nondestructive, as well as much more easily and accurately responsive to the dictates of the sound editor's ear than is the old cut-and-patch editing. All this London makes admirably clear in its account of ADRM, which you should be able to find at any record shop.
On the other hand, and also saying much concerning the useful overlap of analog and digital recording technology, is that familiar name, Dolby. Announcing still another Dolby system, perhaps the ultimate and most remark able of all: Dolby SR for professional analog recording. No--not digital recording. It works on any professional analog tape recorder that makes use of the original Dolby A, still the most enduring and universally used NR system after more than 20 years.
Dolby SR is, in effect, an extension of the traditional two-stage Dolby system of selective companding ( compressing, expanding). It goes into further and subtler regions, not only the signal at various levels (Dolby A began with four separate bands operating in dependently) but now also in what the consumer might best think of as tone color. The system responds in incredible detail to the entire sense of the sound, tailoring each aspect for optimum recorded accuracy as well as minimum noise. All this, as you may guess, is in the traditional Dolby manner-that is, the signal is untouched in areas where processing isn't useful, and the whole shebang, the entire processed signal, is "decoded" for play back precisely in reverse, restoring the original as in the other Dolby systems.
We're left with the mirror image, more polished than ever.
No more should be said, lest I get into technical hot water. But the significance is plain enough. Dolby SR, used with existing analog recorders, can match or in some areas even exceed the parameters of digital sound—the 'characteristics that we still find so awe some! So again the old catches up with the new, in its own way. Enough, surely, to give professional analog re cording a further burst of life, for longer than you may think. A very useful over lap, especially since, in its usual fashion, Dolby has shaped its SR equipment with a maximum of compatibility to match older Dolby systems (of which it is indeed an extension), even to the rack size and the familiar controls. Conversion is thus uncomplicated, both for record and for playback.
So this is the way things go. Comes the revolution! The new is always sensational but often for a lot of wrong reasons. Meanwhile, the old reaches its elegant apogee of maturity-and is stimulated to move even further on ward and upward by sheer competition. So it has also been with the LP, which has never sounded better than now, as I keep on saying. Indeed, it has moved far beyond what we might have imagined possible maybe 10 years ago. So also with TV, which drifted along for a whole generation with its amiably dreadful audio until digital and home video and the rest stuck sharp pins into its complacency. Suddenly, video sound is superb (the newly made part of it) and you'll need the best hi-fi equipment to reproduce it for what it has.
And FM. That once-miracle of radio silence was in many ways comparable to today's digital; it bypassed sonic interference via special coding. FM also coasted along for a generation, after the disastrous stereo compromises of the 1960s, without, shall I say, more than incremental improvements, including Bob Carver's. Now, suddenly, comes a more dramatic attempt, not unrelated to Dolby SR in the use of sophisticated and selective two-stage companding-both in the FM station and, inversely, in the FM receiver. The FMX system, recently announced by CBS and on trial in Connecticut (see feature article in Audio, May 1986), would much reduce the hiss in FM stereo with relatively little effect on the stereo itself, thereby increasing the practical stereo listening area to an extent that ought to impress the station owners (who'd get increased business) even more than us listeners. That being the case, I suspect that FMX may move along nicely and give us, at last, some quiet reception in stereo, to match Dolby, digital, and all the rest of our gear. It's in the cards.
The only technical objection to FMX that I have heard comes from that persistent surround-sound gadfly, Larry Clinton in Virginia, who points out that FMX would preclude any further moves into multi-channel surround-sound FM.
No room; FMX uses up the possible extra channels. To which I can only say, at this point, 'tis better to have a widened useful coverage for two-channel FM stereo, minus hiss, than any type of surround sound. First things first, you might say. Besides, you can always create your own surround, and very effectively, by any one of numerous types of surround synthesis from SQ all the way to Dolby Surround. Not to mention the fancy digital chip-based hall-reproducers on the way.
Here again, you see, the new has stimulated the old in a time of coexistence. When you come down to it, this isn't really more than the old capitalist principle of competition that keeps everybody on his or her toes. Some aspects of competition really do work, even if we tend to slide into evil at the flip of a $50 bill. That's merely human nature, which we all can control if we really want to. I think I like the way competition works in audio, generally speaking-with a few exceptions.
After all this, then, you can see how the digital revolution is shaping up, not with a boom but slowly and systematically. This will go on. You can under stand, too, why I find the various discussions of "digital sound" pretty vacuous. In the long run they are unimportant-we'll fix things up. I do not believe that there is an inherent unpleasantness in the digitalization of the musical signal, at least for listening to recorded content. Not at the fine combed rate at which we are now doing the sampling.
Please note in this connection that the entire body of moving-picture art since the turn of the century, along with all TV entertainment from the beginning, has depended on a coarser "digitalization" of the stream of visible, live motion into discrete, nonmoving bits, one picture after another with blanks between. A series of jerks. Tiring for the eyes? Definitely, even now, and more so with the original, slower, 16-frame movies when they are projected at correct speed. (We speed them up and think it's funny; I think it is a desecration.) Since we have never had analog movies-continuous motion minus breaks--there is no argument. But the parallel to digital sound is strong, just the same. Indeed, the ears are very choosy in the wee small frequencies, and there may be small disturbances going on there as we listen to chopped-up music via digital. But they're not really vital. Not enough to stop the digital revolution and the age to follow.
(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY ; adapted from Audio magazine, Aug. 1986)
= = = =