> Saying that digital recordings require more space than analog
> is just plain
> wrong. The two are totally different. Comparing the two is
> like comparing
> a really nice cheese omlette and a Shelby Cobra GT350.
I see no reason why you cannot compare the bandwidth and/or space
requirements of digital and analogue recordings. Given that all recordings
are ultimately stored as an analogue form, someone must have compared the
possibilities for using that form to store the recording in an analogue
manner against adding the complexity of a digital system. Of course, the
advantage of digital audio is that it is more easily possible to remove the
noise introduced by the medium - albeit at the expense of adding redundancy
and the introduction of quantisation noise - and the ability to process,
e.g. compress, the sound allowing trade-offs between the different aspects
of the recording - signal-to-noise, non-harmonic distortions and various
psycho-acoustic aspects of the recording. The real issue is how you compare
the quality of a recording - as the quality needs to be the same to compare
the bandwidth requirements - but I am given to understand that, to achieve
recording of the same perceived quality, PCM - whether linear or non-linear
- will require a greater bandwidth than to record directly in analogue. It's
just a lot easier to improve the perceived quality of the digital recording
if you are able to throw more bandwidth at the problem or use a whizzy
compression algorithm. However, also as I understand it, even with the work
that has been done in the field of compression, it is only codecs that make
assumptions about the source, e.g. speech codecs, that can better the
bandwidth required by analogue. Given that both medium and sensor (our ears)
are analogue, I guess that this should not be a surprise.
Steve.
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