At the Celebrity Club in Milwaukee I liked the sound of the saxophone in the band playing there, and during a break I asked the sax player about it. I said words to the effect that “Your sax sounds mellow – not raspy and honking and sleazy.” He explained that typical saxophone mouthpieces are plastic, but he used one made of hard rubber.
This illustrates the way that with music, the quality of the sound is directly related to the suchness of the apparatus that produces it.
The reader can easily imagine where I am going with this. What does digital audio sound like? It sounds like a computer simulating music. Why? Because it is a computer simulating music.
I had at one point fallen in love with the Clash’s Combat Rock LP. I had had an all-analog copy on vinyl which I enjoyed on my component hi-fi system. Many years later I saw a copy of Combat Rock on CD at the library and, trying to be generous and open-minded toward digital audio, I brought it home.
I put it in the CD player and played it through the component system at home. My thoughts and reaction were approximately thus: “Absolutely no freaking way! There is simply nothing here! Nothing I loved about this record is reproduced here!”
A friend recently said that my preference for analog audio is “sentimental”. In trying to understand why some people stubbornly disagree with me on this issue, I theorize they have a quasi-religious reverence for the computer.
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