Talk:Digital call quality

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Is is a natural fact of evolution of technology, that when things are replaced by new, the new is often of reduced functionality or effectiveness compared to the 'old' that which had been replaced. Analogue technolgy is wasteful of resources and media and relies heavly on each stage of the signal processing to faithfully preserve the shape of the waveform.

A term used to be called 'Hi Fi', a Nakamichi cassette tape machine performance apporached the dynamic range, noise floor and frequency reponse of the very expensive studio mastering 24 track 2" tape equipment sound source. Now this can be surpassed by an audio CD.

The CD had to compete with the highest performing equipment of the day. Had MP3 been released in 1982 it would had flopped because of the inferior sound quality. Now people have transferred their entire vinyl collection to DVD as MP3 and am now just starting to notice the tonal distortion of MP3 when recorded at too high a compression.

The public at large are very easily blinded by science and beleive digital is always better than analogue, in the wake that the impact Audio CD made.

An audio CD is in fact very 'analogue', compared to mp3, sony minidisc, GSM etc. An audio CD uses no digital data compression, in fact the only thing digital about an audio CD is the way the sequentially-sampled analogue waveform is stored as numerical values simply representing the shape of the sound wave. Apart from the D to A and error-correction it is virtually as analogue as a vinyl record.

Using the audio cd as a benchmark to identify the potential of digital sound quality is as absurd as using a Rolls-Royce car to represent the difference between cycling and driving!.

--Markrbarker 15 Jun 2006