this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Most musical instruments are analog. Digitizing them is inherently lossy. I mean, it doesn't matter, you can get both digital and analog recordings that are orders of magnitude more accurate than human hearing, but claiming that analog is more inherently lossy than digital is just factually incorrect, unless the music is produced purely digitally. Including no human voices, because those are analog.
Digitizing is only lossy once*. Analog is lossy every time you copy it and degrades over time.
*Assuming you use a lossless digital format
That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they're so easy to copy that it's not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn't trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it's not magically better in every way.
But if you lose the information how to turn those bits into music, it is gone forever. That Edison cylinder is pretty easy to play compared to that opus or mp3 file you found from the grave 40000 years from now.