In this day and age, the word "digital" doesn't strike the fear in the hearts of men as it used to. As with most anything new, there was a backlash and a lack of understanding when it was first introduced, but digital technology has since affected every aspect of life in a most profound way - I could fill this column listing the ways we've been changed in the past 20 years. In fact, this discussion will continue for a few columns to come... we'll concentrate on the recording of audio in digital and analog mediums for a bit.

The concept of an analog representation of sound was by no surprise the first method developed by scientists and engineers. Specifically, it means that some other physical form, whether it's magnetic particles, grooves on wax, or electrical potential, is *analagous* to the original sound waves. It moves back and forth in the same way that a sound wave would. Each of these methods is also subject to interference from outside forces - magnets, scratched or inferior wax, electromagnetic forces in the earth itself - that will modify (a.k.a. distort) the sound in a (usually) undesirable way. Literally, it's the nature of the medium - there are engineering techniques and methods that are used to reduce the noise and distortion, but they will always exist in some form.

Digital technology removes itself from nature and the distortions that come with it by using a technique called sampling. At certain intervals (usually very quickly - on the order of thousands of times a second), a computer chip looks at the level of the sound signal and assigns it a number - something that cannot be changed by magnets, electromagnetic fields, etc. - and stores the number in a safe, efficient manner. Distortions to the digitally-stored sound come not in the form of a natural phenomenon, but with mathematics that are very easily and carefully controlled.

Digital storage of sound also brings with it new challenges - instead of "slamming the tape" (meaning you record the signal to an analog tape machine as loud as it can possibly go) as you would in the analog world, doing that in the digital world means nasty clicks and pops. If digital equipment isn't aligned together to a master "clock", more mysterious clicks and pops can also happen. And unlike analog sound that travels through wires very quickly, digital audio travels through computer interfaces that can actually introduce delays in the signal - also known as latency. You'll hear your lead vocal a few milliseconds after you perform it, for example; an effect that's quite off-putting when you hear it.

There were many criticisms of the digital medium when it was widely introduced in the early 1980s. Many critical listeners believed it was "harsh", very bright sounding, and removed the "warmth" of analog recordings. They also blamed the sampling rate (the thousands of samples per second mentioned above) for removing some of the subtle qualities of the sound. In the next column, we will discuss how these issues have been addressed - you may be surprised to find out what the culprits were discovered or theorized to be!!