I have to say that I was bothered by the way digital, as a concept, was discussed here. The piece made it seem as though inherent to digital technologies was an intolerable level of latency. Yet the piece never goes into what causes latency in the digital world.

While some delay is inherent in converting from the analog signal of a microphone to digital, the most significant delays are due to phenomena that are not required by digital technologies. These are phenomena that are due to trade-offs that are made possible by the digital world. For example, those in television choose to trade off a noticeable delay in video for the ability to fit more channels over broadcast, cable, or satellite. Phone companies choose to trade off a noticeable delay for the ability to use a less reliable (i.e., less costly) channel, e.g., the packet-based VoIP, or to protect against weak signals, e.g., for mobile phones. You might choose to put up with some latency so you can use your $1,000 laptop to record rather than a rack with $100,000 of equipment. Such trade-offs aren’t the fault of digital, but of the people who made them.

A related problem with the piece is that it didn’t discuss what advantages digital had at all, leaving that a mystery. Most listeners probably know some, but few know all. Most can fall into three broad categories: Cost, convenience, and capability. Recording on your laptop falls in all three categories, but it should be emphasized that there were clear advantages to going this route, that it wasn’t just some technical fad.

Also, the piece make it seem as though audible latency were unique to digital. (Another commenter noted that latency has always existed, but latency undetectable by human ears is generally not a problem.) There is the latency inherent in both human hearing and the creation of sound originating by the movement of human muscles. Intolerable latency would be latency we could detect, so let’s assume that that takes that type of latency out of the equation. There’s still the inherent delay – sometimes a feature, sometimes not – of audio recording, whether you’re talking about the reaction time of an analog filter or the amount of time corresponding to the distance between a recording head and a playback head on a tape recorder. Latency isn’t new; what’s new is how we’re able to use (and perhaps abuse) it.

The piece also leaves out that digital allows more precise technologies for compensating for such latencies. There’s no inherent reason that television signals and radio stations can’t be synchronized, and no inherent reason that two tracks that are out of sync can’t be matched up. Digital should make both easy, though often – as in the case of television – it’s not deemed important enough to actually bother with.

Finally, there’s nothing special about digital when it comes to live recording. If you want to record just as in days of old, set up a few mics and hook them up to your recording equipment. Whether digital or analog, everything should be properly synced up.

Overall, these flaws made the introductory plea that this was not just nostalgia seem a little bit like “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” While there might be a subtle difference between “digital causes latency, which I hate” and “digital enables tradeoffs that often result in latency, which I hate,” it’s an important distinction to make.