Word: analogy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...easily relegated to obsolescence, and lately its defenders have been striking back at the shiny aluminum-and-plastic CDs. "Metallic, gritty, grainy and unnatural," declares Harry Pearson, editor and publisher of the Absolute Sound, a journal devoted to the glories of old- fashioned analog recording. Claims for the superiority of CDs, say LP partisans, are hype. "Many of the people who were initially impressed by compact discs have been disappointed," asserts Gene Rubin, a Los Angeles-area audio retailer. "There is no way that LPs are going to vanish...
...debate over compact discs goes to the heart of the new medium. In analog recording, sound waves are transcribed as grooves onto a vinyl disc. The grooves are then traced by a diamond-tipped stylus in the tone arm of the turntable to re-create the sound. In digital recording, the music is sampled by a microchip at the rate of 44,100 times a second and expressed as a series of ones and zeros. Encoded in invisible "pits," the numbers are read by a player equipped with a laser beam, which relays the information to a microcomputer that converts...
...narrow sense, analog does also contain more information than digital. The sweep of the second hand defines every possible infinitesimal unit of time. But for most of us that is not the appeal of analog. After all, the extra information is of no use. It whizzes by too fast for the human eye to apprehend. When you ask someone for the time and he answers, "Four fifty-six and thirty-seven seconds," you know he's wearing a digital watch. If the fellow next to you has an analog watch, you might not even have to ask him. You simply...
That is the beauty of analog. Because -- like its linguistic companion, the analogy -- it tries to reproduce the contour of reality. It lives in context. There is a before and an after. The digital watch gives you precision, but leaves you wondering where you are. Analog is a return to a certain harmony that the digital world chops away. Thus analog is able to capture qualities that digital never will. Only the LP, concludes Rothstein after truly heroic experimentation, can convey, say, the piano's quality of "attack and decay...
...another way: analog is to digital as rhyme is to reason. Try putting that in digital form...