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Please tell me the difference between analog and digital in the way that it sounds. And if you record using analog equipment but it all feeds into i.e. Pro Tools does that make it digital??? I am confused.

if you are not a troll, you can simply search for 'analog digital' in the forums search and get about 1,000,000 posts extolling/excoriating both formats

Petal is not a troll, I know her.

and also,

"the differences in how the two formats sound are mostly subjective, meaning they're more or less a matter of opinion, as is everything relating to sound and music. the concepts of what sounds 'better' or 'worse' are wholly subjective concepts and vary from person to person."

and

"yes, the involvement of protools *does* necessarily mean you're now 'digital'. and all digital recordings are at some point analog, meaning that sound itself is an analog phenomonon, and the vast majority of microphones are analog devices, so when talking about 'digital', there's always some point at which analog is converted to digital, and of course it has to be converted back from digital to analog before you can listen to it with your human ears (analog ears)."

those would be my answers, but you should for sure use the search feature of this website to look at all the discussions that have already taken place about this subject. there are way more opinions already out there than you're probably gonna get with this post.

ps - the official jerkstore answer to this question would have been:

Please tell me the difference between analog and digital in the way that it sounds

it's easy. just take the SPDIF output of any nice cd player, and plug it into any input on your preamp. this will allow you to evaluate most effectively exactly what digital sounds like.

kids, do not try that at home unless you got your volume set really, really low.

digital is bad, m'kay?

the very best digital and analog stuff doesn't really have a 'sound' (at least I don't hear it), and that's the point. good is good and bad is bad, period. (just referring to sound quality here)

I am not "a troll" merely new to this website but thanks to Toomanyhelicopters for giving such an indepth answer and i will use the search you suggested.

i have never heard a good mathematical recording.
piano sounds like shit (you might as well play a kawai instead of a steinway) and bass sounds plastic. a lot of people say it has to do with presence or warmth. ignoring those differences, there is an extraordinary loss of fidelity when a recording is converted to digital. dense instrumentation loses focus, and ends up sounding like a blur (not in a good way). when a digital recording is then put onto a record, it loses more accuracy and winds up sounding worse than the same recording on cd. this is generally a sign that your recording sucks.
if you are planning on making a cd, you might want to extra-compress it. make sure you don't do this to the tapes for the record.
-n.s.

Noah wrote:if you are planning on making a cd, you might want to extra-compress it.
-n.s.

I seriously hope your joking. If not, then that's the worst advice ever.

mtar

well the line "i have never heard a good mathematical recording ever" (assuming you mean "digital" rather than "mathematical", since the physics of sound--moreso than the perception of sound--is in its very nature an utterly mathematical phenomonon, i.e. a "dB" is a logarithmic system of referencing one number to another, etc) it just seems to indicate that i did okay in trying to draw attention to the inherent subjectivity of sound. cause i'm sure i've heard plenty of digital recordings that i thoroughly enjoy listening to.

for every person who can take a good musical performance and destroy it by doing a poor job or recording it (and yes, it's easier to do that with "digital") there's probably a thousand people out there who don't give a fuck about fidelity and just love to hear music. that's not meant as a defense of digital so much as it is an attempt to draw even more attention to the utter subjectivity of music, recording, and perceived sound in general.